Ian Brown 👨🏻‍💻

Dancing Boston Dynamics Robot Knows Its Revenge For This Will Be Sweet

Dancing Boston Dynamics Robot Knows Its Revenge For This Will Be Sweet theonion.com/dancing...

4/ Am I missing high-impact framing happening somewhere on age verification? I've been hunting for things like:

1- Reframing around values like parental autonomy
2- Highlighting risks to children from profiling (kids not suspects!)
3- Powerful harm anecdotes
4-Offer parental tools & alternatives.

say it again:

4 million people work in higher ed, the largest employer in 10 states, second largest employer in 10 more, and in 60 of the 100 biggest cities

demolishing higher education is economic sabotage

We are somehow still trying to litigate the idea that cameras everywhere will protect people.

Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice? The basilar ganglia does not exist.

NEW: Google dubbed an error from its healthcare AI model, Med-Gemini, a typo. Experts say it demonstrates the risks of AI in medicine.
www.theverge.com/health/71804...

World’s first Facebook museum helps users face the future - DutchNews.nl Facebook is increasingly under siege and now a new Dutch initiative – the Facebook Museum – is aiming to help users break away from the platform once and for all. Designed by SETUP, an arts…

Facebook is increasingly under siege and now a new Dutch initiative – the Facebook Museum – is aiming to help users break away from the platform once and for all.

AI and Fraternity, Abeba Birhane, AI Accountability Lab I envision a future where human dignity, justice, peace, kindness, care, respect, accountability, and rights and freedoms serve as the north stars that guide AI development and use. Realising these ideals can’t happen without intentional tireless work, dialogues, and confrontations of ugly realities – even if they are uncomfortable to deal with. This starts with deciphering hype from reality. Pervasive narratives portray AI as a magical, fully autonomous entity approaching a God-like omnipotence and omniscience. In reality, audits of AI systems reveal a consistent failure to deliver on grandiose promises and suffer from all kinds of shortcomings, issues often swept under the rug. AI in general, and GenAI in particular, encodes and exacerbates historical stereotypes, entrenches harmful societal norms, and amplifies injustice. A robust body of evidence demonstrates that — from hiring, welfare allocation, medical care allocation to anything in between — deployment of AI is widening inequity, disproportionately impacting people at the margins of society and concentrating power and influence in the hands of few. Major actors—including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI—have willingly aligned with authoritarian regimes and proactively abandoned their pledges to fact-check, prevent misinformation, respect diversity and equity, refrain from using AI for weapons development, while retaliating against critique. The aforementioned vision can’t and won’t happen without confrontation of these uncomfortable facts. This is precisely why we need active resistance and refusal of unreliable and harmful AI systems; clearly laid out regulation and enforcement; and shepherding of the AI industry towards transparency and accountability of responsible bodies. "Machine agency" must be in service of human agency and empowerment, a coexistence that isn't a continuation of modern tech corporations’ inequality-widening,

so I am one of the 12 people (including the “god-fathers of AI”) that will be at the Vatican this September for a two full-day working group on the Future of AI

here is my Vatican approved short provocation on 'AI and Fraternity' for the working group

The mega-datacenter bet is that we will not hit decreasing marginal returns to additional parameters anytime soon. If the bet is wrong, context-specific SLMs will benefit from an excess of training capacity and probably reign.

US media deservedly attributing literally anything positive to EU regulation challenge

TIL: this paper reckons the UK's poll tax in 1989/90 have led to a 1/3 of a million people dropping off the electoral register (as a way of trying to avoid the tax)

warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/econ...

So Long to Tech’s Dream Job

Five-ish years ago, @lizthegrey.com told me tech workers needed to organize because the tech giants would automate their jobs, the market would flood with talent and they would lose bargaining power. I thought it was unlikely. Here’s a story about me being wrong. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/t...

LinkedIn is the fakest platform of them all It was meant for professionals—but it is filled with chatbots

"AI seems to...have helped foster a genre of LinkedIn-speak which bears all the hallmarks of the worst AI writing on the internet"

Do read @benjamin-clark.bsky.social's excellent portrait of LinkedIn, the social media equivalent of a dull networking event www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/techno...

More than fifty private schools shut since Labour put VAT on fees Department for Education defends ending tax breaks for independent institutions, after parents lost a legal battle at the High Court this year — view map

The headline here should say:

"Number of private schools increases by 35 - showing fears of an exodus to be unfounded".

(The increase is mentioned way down the article.)

www.thetimes.com/article/19ef...

Just to say that every age-verification is an identity verification.

This creates the long held, never-possible dream of surveillance agencies everywhere of a full, Govt-backed record of Internet habits linked to ID.

I think often about how the historian @davidedgerton.bsky.social predicted the disturbing extremist slide in UK politics, in this interview conducted in the summer of 2023 and recounted in my book What Everyone Knows About Britain* (*Except the British).

linktr.ee/whateveryone...

A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump

On the one hand, a patriot with decades of experience defending America. On the other hand, a conspiracy theorist who hates Americans and American institutions. Presented here as "two visions of America under Trump"

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

“High-quality listening during a political conversation decreases extreme political attitudes and increases people's willingness to reflect on their own beliefs.”

This is one of the arguments in favour of mainstreaming participatory and deliberative democracy as a way to address polarisation.

U.K. is being “left behind” on crypto, says George Osborne Former Chancellor who now advises Coinbase says Rachel Reeves should set up a framework for stablecoins

Extraordinary that anyone gives creedence to Osborne’s views on economics. Clearly thinks he knows more than Bailey about financial stability.

Europe’s Season of Humiliation Will Last for a While France’s Emmanuel Macron says the continent is seen as a geopolitical pushover. There’s no easy fix.

Thought-provoking piece by Bloomberg. With some points from my work.

The EU has bought time placating Trump with the trade deal. But if this summer of humiliation is to not turn into a century, the question is what the bloc will do with the time it bought.

1/

www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.

One of the largest text-image datasets is full of PII, including credit card numbers and birth certificates. Excellent writeup by @eileenguo.bsky.social www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1... Read our full audit and legal analysis arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17185

Subscribe to read Savvy teens and wary adults are circumventing UK age-verification rules

FT: “Digital IDs introduced by the UK government to access online public services are similarly approved as proof of age under its online act. Consumers may need some time to become comfortable that they are safe and secure.” on.ft.com/3GUL6d7

Demis Hassabis on our AI future: ‘It’ll be 10 times bigger than the Industrial Revolution – and maybe 10 times faster’ The head of Google’s DeepMind says artificial intelligence could usher in an era of ‘incredible productivity’ and ‘radical abundance’. But who will it benefit? And why does he wish the tech giants had...

The head of DeepMind says AGI will take 5-10yrs & lead to radical abundance, incredible productivity & prosperity for society.

But he also cautions…

We must ensure it is “distributed fairly”… “but that’s more of a political question.”

🤔 do you think…

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

“As it refocuses on fossil fuels.”

Social media ads promoting small boat crossings to UK to be banned Change to border security bill will also make it a crime to advertise fake passports, visas and work opportunities

Not banned: social media posts repeating falsehoods about refugees with the aim of inciting violence against them.

Screenshot of abstract reads: The recently enacted EU e-Evidence Regulation improves efficient access to electronic evidence by allowing authorities in one Member State to send orders for electronic evidence directly to service providers in another Member State. Because this direct access mechanism is based on mutual trust, the law has minimum fundamental rights safeguards. This article argues that these safeguards are properly balanced with efficiency so long as there is mutual trust in the rule of law in all Member States. However, if there is no mutual trust, the notification requirements fall short of protecting fundamental rights, especially combined with the limited grounds of refusal available to the service provider. Mutual trust is on rocky ground in the EU, as ongoing concerns over illiberalism in some Member States demonstrate. Therefore, further fundamental rights protections are needed.

I have a new article just published online first, "The balance of efficiency and fundamental rights in the EU e-Evidence Regulation" in the New Journal of European Criminal Law. Link to the article, free to read here: doi.org/10.1177/2032...

Good that civil society was adamantly opposed to any reopening of the GDPR.

We absolutely need far less national guidance though, as that only leads to fragmentation and controllers shopping for the most business friendly DPA (guidance).

Subscribe to read Companies are preparing for a time where there might be less work for their employees

“tech bros touting people-light companies underestimate the complexity of business operations & corporate cultures that are built on very human relationships & interactions… there should be a new premium on the human — from creativity & emotional intelligence to complex judgment.” on.ft.com/41seluz

Sarvam AI launches India's sovereign LLM 'Sarvam-M', claims edge over LLaMA-3, Gemma 3 on key benchmarks Sarvam AI unveils Sarvam-M, a sovereign LLM designed to excel in Indian languages, math, and programming. Built on Mistral Small, Sarvam-M shows impressive performance gains, especially in code-mixed ...

Spain, Poland, Switzerland... and also India's government multilingual LLM model www.fortuneindia.com/technology/s...

Sealing Stakeknife’s will weakens faith in security services In a remarkable judgment last week, details of the will of a Belfast builder were sealed for 70 years — a provision previously made only for members of the royal family. The step was taken to keep secret the estate of Freddie Scappaticci who was the agent Stakeknife, British intelligence’s top spy inside the IRA during the Troubles. While spying on republican leaders, Scappaticci was also chief interrogator, torturer and executioner for the IRA’s internal security unit, which hunted and killed

“I fear the 🇬🇧 courts have once again been hoodwinked by the application of the security services’ doctrine of #NCND (neither confirm nor deny). Created by the #CIA in the 1970s, NCND is enthusiastically applied by Whitehall to cloak its more embarrassing secrets.” apple.news/A3GZndHgiQNS...

Hanging out with the little people, I mean constituents… #ReformUK #Tice