Sunil Manghani

Forthcoming double special issue of #JournalofVisualArtPractice: 'Between Hawaiki Nui and the Liquid Continent' (forthcoming, Vol. 24, 1-2). Find out more... www.linkedin.com/pulse/spring...

Where has the left’s technological audacity gone? | Leigh Phillips The belief that technology will usher in a golden age for humanity is in vogue once more with billionaires. But can the left offer its own vision for the future?

Where has the left’s technological audacity gone? | Leigh Phillips @theguardian.com: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre... (Consider Postcapitalism @paulmason.bsky.social)

The big idea: should we abolish art? Down with expensive trophies at art fairs: it’s time to reclaim a more radical vision of creativity

‘The big idea’ @theguardian.com: ‘Should we abolish #art?’ by Morgan Falconer (…not as bad as it sounds!) | www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

The left needs its own version of techno-optimism | Amana Fontanella-Khan We live in dark, depressing and – frankly – terrifying times. Will technology push us over the edge or help us exit our many crises?

New series @theguardian.com, opening with ‘The left needs its own version of techno-optimism’ by Amana Fontanella-Khan | www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

YouTube video by The Water Studio 🌍 World Leaders Sing 'We Are the World' (AI-Generated) 🎶 | Powerful Message of Unity & Hope

(Obviously) Deepfake as satire: World Leaders Sing 'We Are the World': youtu.be/knDb9VfYdHw - but like most satire it’s mere entertainment.

Trump’s attacks on South Africa are a punishment for independence | Achille Mbembe and Ruth Wilson Gilmore The US president’s cuts to health funding could lead to half a million deaths. They’re part of a strategy to condemn and isolate the country

Achille Mbembe and Ruth Wilson Gilmore write @theguardian.com ‘Trump’s attacks on South Africa are a punishment for independence’: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Sunil Manghani on LinkedIn: Quantum Life, but not as we know it While AI seems to be the big story in tech, arguably it’s not. Rather it is #Quantum #Computing. The Wall Street Journal’s headline captures the problem:…

While AI seems to be the big story in tech, arguably it’s not. Rather it is #Quantum #Computing: www.linkedin.com/posts/mangha...

AI systems could be ‘caused to suffer’ if consciousness achieved, says research Experts and thinkers signed open letter expressing concern over irresponsible development of technology

Possibly getting ahead of ourselves... 'Artificial intelligence systems capable of feelings or self-awareness are at risk of being harmed' @theguardian.com | www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Visited O.P. Jindal Global University s Constitution Museum; established as part of the 75th-anniversary celebrations of India’s foundational document. One exhibit allows your own image to be seamlessly incorporated into a historical photograph…

Everyone is talking about DeepSeek's impact on industry. But another huge impact is the leveling of playing field between academia and industry: if these efficiency numbers bear out, then academia can both use LLMs and study/research them at scale!

Paris friends, next Monday (Jan 27), you can catch me and Théo Lepage-Richer talking about neural networks at the Social History of Informatics Seminar organized by , drawing upon our book, 'Neural Networks' (@uminnpress.bsky.social and meson press, 2024), co-authored with Lucy Suchman.

Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague There are some good histories of the Linguistic Circle of Prague, which met in the years before the Second World War, and which included Russian scholars as well as ones from Czechoslovakia. J…

A short piece on Emile Benveniste and the Linguistic Circle of Prague, his relation with Nicolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, and including a brief report of his 1937 lecture to the Circle, translated from the Czech by @johnraimo.bsky.social
progressivegeographies.com/2025/01/19/b...

‘What people like Elon Musk want,’ @garyseconomics.bsky.social, ‘is for you guys all to be in this squid game … you need to change the game.’ Further sense of a shift to feudalism and of a broken global as well as local system…

Thinking of using AI to solve a problem? Here are eight questions you need to ask first A guide for decision-makers looking to procure AI tools in government or business

Thinking of using AI to solve a problem? A publication from The Alan Turing Institute sets out 8 questions you need to ask: www.turing.ac.uk/blog/thinkin...

Foucault’s 1972 visit to Cornell University For his initial trips to the United States, Michel Foucault was often invited by French departments. His visits to SUNY Buffalo in 1970 and 1972, and the first of his multiple visits to the Univers…

A short post on what we know, and what we don’t know, about Michel Foucault’s 1972 visit to Cornell University progressivegeographies.com/2025/01/12/f...

The cover of feminist AI: critical perspectives on data, algorithms, and intelligent machines, edited by jude browne, stephen cave, eleanor drage, and kerry mcinerney. It is a black cover with white letters, and a data visualization that looks like a cloud of green, white, and purple dots is spilling over from the right to the left side of the cover.

shameless plug: I've got a chapter in this edited volume on feminist AI, with oxford university press: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

‘The AI-Copyright Trap’: Carys J. Craig argues copyright overreach ‘will satisfy the wants of a small group of powerful stakeholders [… while] poised to harm the interests of the more vulnerable actors who are, perhaps, most naturally drawn to it’. | papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Books received – Grant, Littleton, François, Bold & Clayton, Nobus, Ariès, Linear B and the Prague Linguistic Circle Some books received in recompense for review work… … and some second-hand ones – a couple by Philippe Ariès, some about the decipherment of Linear B, and about the Prague Linguist…

Books received from Routledge in recompense for review work; and some second-hand ones by Philippe Ariès, and about Linear B and the Prague Linguistic Circle. Most of these relate to my Mapping Indo-European thought in twentieth-century France project.
progressivegeographies.com/2025/01/04/b...

New article: ‘Quantum Life, but not as we know it’: do we have the imagination for it? Inspired by report in yesterday’s @newscientist.bsky.social on quantum sensor built from a glowing protein found in bioluminescent jellyfish. | medium.com/electronic-l...

Happy New Year! Hopes For 2025 With Mustafa Suleyman, Audrey Tang, Albert Gu, Hanno Basse, and more... The Batch AI News and Insights: Despite having worked on AI since I was a teenager, I’m now more excited than ever about what we can do with it...

What's possible when AI understands what you're seeing, not just what you're saying? If voice was the breakout feature of 2024, I'm predicting it will be vision that takes center stage in 2025. More predictions from me & some great company: www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/is...

Crow in Tokyo. Winter sign of something more? Barthes no longer here.

Happy New Year

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Online First: Mike Featherstone introduces and contextualizes a set of papers exploring the connections between the public sphere, the post-university and the scholarly apparatus. (Open Access) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Danger, Crime and Rights: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon - Michel Foucault, Jonathan Simon, Stuart Elden, 2017 This article is a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been publish...

ICYMI: Michel Foucault, Jonathan Simon and Stuart Elden, 'Danger, Crime and Rights: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon' - discusses Foucault’s 1977 lecture ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry’. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Coffe & Garage Night?

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ICYMI: Walter D. Mignolo, 'The Logic of the In-Visible: Decolonial Reflections on the Change of Epoch' - argues that the lived experience we, the human species, went through in 2020 is no longer an epoch of changes but a change of epoch. (Free Access) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

2024 HIGHLIGHT: Grateful to work with all involved @barthesstudies.bsky.social special issue, #Preparations | sites.cardiff.ac.uk/barthes/volu...

The Lévi-Strauss (Les plus vastes horizons du monde) sounds wonderful. Not only photographs, early texts and film transcripts, but intriguing the book ‘gives you access to the films themselves’.

Decolonising the Earth: Anticolonial Environmentalism... Carreira da Silva explores how anticolonial theorists conceptualized humanity's relationship with soil amid growing interest in theorizing human-nature interactions. | @theoryculturesociety | journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Nice! I listened as an audiobook recently. Enjoy! (…I never fail to hear the tones of Alec Guinness’ Smiley). According to Barthes’ schedule, he’d approve, regularly reading a detective novel of an evening.