William Carruthers

‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI As AI has upended the way students learn, academics worry about the future of the humanities - and society at large

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

The government has decided to mostly pretend the Iran price shocks aren't happening, Reform believe in mass deportations and fraudulent elections, the Greens sums don't add up and Kemi Badenoch has announced that she did actually get an A in maths.

The broader structural influences that underlie these phenomena are interrelated: the financial and intellectual hollowing out of UK universities and the gen-AI onslaught on learning. UK universities operate as businesses in which students customers and consumer. After decades of austerity, the UK university sector is in serious financial trouble. Staff are cost factors and maximum labour needs to be extracted from them even after academic salary has decreased by 20% in real terms in the last decade. Students are customers and hence customer satisfaction ratings (the NSS surveys) are of utmost concern. The other broader background is the attack on learning, especially university education, by gen-AI companies who are flogging their goods to universities who are keen to adopt them and students who do not yet know what they don’t know and have low confidence in their own ability. They have low trust in their own abilities. But fundamentally, I think that it is also indicative of the low trust in the system that they are supposed to navigate as young adults. There is a parallel, if not a deeper connection, between the breakdown of international law and a rule-based order and the ignoring of rules in a law school - and getting away with it.

am writing

I'm forced to the conclusion that a certain type of pro-Israeli Western Christian doesn't actually see the place as real, and certainly doesn't see the Christians of the Middle East whose lives have been made much, much harder by the policies they back.

It's just a sort of apocalyptic theme park.

The Beatles’ ‘legacy planning’ suggests that they might not: there are Yoto cards for the red and blue albums…

His webpage claims he’s ‘one of the top political operatives in the UK snd US’…

This is how analysts make a killing advising them, I suspect; it’s all vibes.

Picture also featuring local landmark Bovril Castle

Beatles and entourage at tea in Bangor, Gwynedd. Wonder if Mick was invited?

You know what? I dont think i have. This might be the greatest one. Especially if, like me, you have a Welsh-things bias.

Can you think of a better one?

Museums looted of priceless artifacts as Sudan counts the cost of a deadly conflict Once containing treasures from the Stone Age to the arrival of Islam, Sudan's National Museum now lies mostly bare, looted amid a yearslong conflict consuming the country.

Museums looted of priceless artifacts as Sudan counts the cost of a deadly conflict

Once containing treasures from the Stone Age to the arrival of Islam, Sudan's National Museum now lies mostly bare, looted amid a yearslong conflict consuming the country.

www.nbcnews.com/world/africa...

Once again discovering that I entirely lack that entrepreneurial spirit and have not been monetizing everything like I should.

*cries in British*

Museums turning into universities

It’s hard not to

what exactly was accomplished here

I’ve given up trying to follow it all

One long term prediction I think you can risk making is that this is the last conflict in which the Strait of Hormuz is such a concentration of risk for the global economy

It cost me £10.50 to go from a National Rail station in Zone 3 to Canary Wharf and back yesterday (admittedly via London Bridge, but still).

You couldn't waterboard this sort of confession out of me.

As if we didn't just watch the far less well-equipped Houthis do a proof of concept for over a year in the straits on the other side of the Arabian peninsula...

Oof.
Market expectations of the BOE.
www.ft.com/content/9b08...

I wonder this as I tell students to ‘cite the URL’ in essays

Yet surprising how few seem to pay any attention to it

Really looking forward to the UK job market somehow soaking up expats returning from the Gulf…

The war on Iran is already upending the Middle East. Look to the Gulf states to see how | Nesrine Malik Countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE are finding their carefully projected image of stability has been blown away, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

Brilliant from @nesrinemalik.bsky.social: how Trump & Netanyahu have just jeopardised the entire Gulf State apparatus.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Kind of weird when you can watch the global market collectively go "oh shit he is that crazy".

Quite

Is this me? He wonders…

I’m not sure anyone would deny that. But again—in a sector that is massively resource-starved and in many cases trying to do more these days—what’s the alternative approach? I just don’t see that there is one.

What’s the alternative? If we know that this has often been slow, case-by-case work, what alternative is there?

That’s not what I meant: you can email curators without using an FOI request.