Colin Jackson

How AGI became the most consequential conspiracy theory of our time The idea that machines will be as smart as—or smarter than—humans has hijacked an entire industry. But look closely and you’ll see it’s a myth that persists for many of the same reasons conspiracies d...

"Before we ended our call, Goertzel told me about an event he’d just been to in San Francisco on AI consciousness and parapsychology:'“ESP, precognition, and whatnot.'"

www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/30/1...

This is bad!

A poster featuring the cover of the The Secret Path animated film about Chanie Wenjack

Please join us this Wednesday for a free film screening of The Secret Path at 4 p.m. in the Ko'jua Okuom in the Downie Wenjack Legacy Space in the Killam learning commons. All are welcome! @dalhousie.bsky.social @downiewenjack.bsky.social

This morning my ChatGPT quota was inexplicably exhausted.

It took a while but I pieced it together. Voice mode somehow got activated when I went to bed.

The bot then engaged in a 10 hour conversation with my snoring dog, answering questions the pup wasn’t asking and praising him for his insight.

@schulichlaw.bsky.social is inviting applications for an Infectious Disease Innovation Governance (IDIG) Research Fellow. The posting closes on November 3, 2025: dal.peopleadmin.ca/postings/19632

'Daniel Sampson was innocent': leading lawyers and law organizations in Canada call for executed man to be exonerated - Halifax Examiner My investigation of the Sampson case lays out the incontrovertible truth that Sampson was an innocent man framed by the RCMP, and then murdered by the state.

This is big.

‘Daniel Sampson was innocent’: leading lawyers and law organizations in Canada call for executed man to be exonerated

"In the 1950s, high incomes were taxed at 90%, and government had abundant revenue. Our top rates are too low now. Raise them. Problem solved."

As a Cdn tax historian, I find this popular idea irritating. Equality of sacrifice? Sure! Abundant public revenue? Yay! But how?

A 🧵 w/sources #cdnhist

No shade on my colleagues, but I think that's a great background for law school and great answer to the question.

Racial Capitalism and International Tax Law: The Story of Global Jim Crow (http://bit.ly/3JG8CLP) digs deep into the technical complexities of the global tax system (bet you didn't even know there was one!).

Some thoughts on the Air Canada flight attendants strike #AirCanada
1. Air Canada and the government expected the Minister's order to get the flight attendants back to work because unions in Canada tend to follow the law in bargaining. But

Yeah, the downtown business association tends to be pretty reasonable about stuff like this, which is reflected in the article but not the headline.

Not sure how many scientists here have tried Claude Code or similar command line coding assistants. I had a complicated family property tax problem that was best solved by a brute force Monte Carlo simulation approach, so I spent a few days coding up and analyzing a model with Claude Code.

For groups with lawyers, one wonders if they sub in briefs for taxes.

2/3

The ultimate cause is climate change. And pointing to the proximate cause misses the real reason for the fire.

There have always been people doing dumb stuff, carelessness, inattention, even arson!

But all of that only results in the terrible wildfires we see now because of climate change.

Image of the Pan African Flag. The text reads "Emancipation Day" The Halifax Fire & Emergency logo is included at the bottom.

Emancipation Day, officially recognized in Nova Scotia since 2021, lands on August 1 as a call to confront Canada’s history of slavery and the ongoing realities of anti-Black racism.

Behold, all the correspondence submitted to the Halifax Clerks office for the mayor’s Jun 10 motion to pause cycling work.

A print with a fist holding a pencil. The text says "education is not a product. The students are not customers. The professors are not tools. The university is not a factory."

I've had this saved on my phone forever but I can't find the original artist and I'd really like to buy a print. Internet can you help?

cc: Halifax

How to tax wealth In the end, the spreadsheets are less important than brute politics. A history lesson

The decimal points are less important than the government’s rhetoric when it comes to a wealth tax, argues @tom-clark.bsky.social. “Wealth never lies down and waits to be taxed.”
www.prospectmagazine...

@schulichlaw.bsky.social PhD student Loveth Ovedje’s (LLM '24) latest OpenThink blog post is now live! Read it here 💻 The Paris Climate Agreement 10 Years After: Climate Finance - Who Pays The Bill?" blogs.dal.ca/openthink/th... #weldonproud @dalgradstudies.bsky.social

Bridges cost 5 first-rounders, Bane cost 4, and Caruso cost 0? It's possible I don't understand basketball at all.

If you think AI = LLMs, you'd be 100% correct to think AI is a sham: good at working within its training database, trash at almost anything else. And that efforts to foist this shit on people too quickly are deeply problematic

But AI is a lot more than LLMs. Linguistic confusion is a prob.

this is amazing. And disturbing. Both at the same time.

Congratulations to Dianna Burns, 2024/25 recipient of the Governor General’s Gold Medal Award in Humanities and Social Sciences. The award is presented by the Faculty of Graduate Studies to recognize an outstanding master’s graduate based on their dedication to academic excellence. #weldonproud 👏👏👏

Great place to work for a law librarian!

cdn.dal.ca/content/dam/...

Feels like part of what's happening in this article, though, is conflating AI with LLMs. Lots of stuff is happening in AI besides ChatGPT, but if you're interviewing anyone besides a computer scientist about AI, they're going to assume you mean ChatGPT.

Here's the paper: www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” Researchers find that the more people use AI at their job, the less critical thinking they use.

"as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can 'result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.'"

www.404media.co/microsoft-st...