“Control is exercised not only through explicit prohibitions, but also through the architecture of visibility: what is amplified or rendered invisible, what is rewarded or penalized, ultimately shapes opinions and choices, fostering conformity and self-censorship” www.vatican.…
Who's Who of AI
Frank Pasquale
Law professor; author (The Black Box Society; New Laws of Robotics).
Interested in law & technology, AI, political economy, art, and social theory.
What they're sharing
Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Leo XIV Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) vatican.va
ft.com
The Black Box Myth: What the Industry Pretends Not to Know About AI | TechPolicy.Press techpolicy.press
programmablemutter.com
thefarce.org
newyorker.com
techpolicy.press
royalsocietypublishing.org
nytimes.com
View on Bluesky →
cambridge.org
owenmcgrann.com
marianamazzucato.substack.com
Articles & links
“All systems used in a war setting must guarantee the possibility of retracing and reconstructing decision-making processes, so that accountability and blame are not collapsed into ‘the machine’” www.ft.com/content/1231...
“Those of us outside of the AI industry don’t know what rules they are following. That’s not a black box. It’s just a policy decision.” techpolicy.press/the-black-bo... Or: it’s a remediable black box.
“Drucker views management as a specific mode of realizing human potential. This is sweeping, romantic and occasionally a little corny. It also makes Drucker an enormously attractive writer and thinker in ways that many of his epigones are not” www.programmablemutter.com/p/ai-i…
On AI as a “machine that produces capital, anonymously concentrates it, and feeds it upward or laterally to politicians who need some encouragement, while methodically eliminating the worker power that might check it” www.thefarce.org/how-ai-plans...
“A.I. has made super-high-resolution images so standard, he added, that they have lost all currency as signals of quality. Distinguishing oneself aesthetically requires letting conspicuous human effort show.” www.newyorker.com/culture/infi...
“Across these cases, the central allegation is that the platforms recognized signs that a user was in crisis and chose, by design or omission, not to act.” techpolicy.press/lawsuits-exp...
“While LLMs can generate fluent linguistic output and perform well on benchmark tasks, such performance does not entail human-like linguistic competence, and many evaluation standards incorrectly equate task success with understanding.” royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...
Frank Pasquale reposted
The incomparable @kashhill.bsky.social on the AI addiction cases, talking to my brilliant friend & colleague @alahav.bsky.social (among others) on how litigation has become the preferred tool du jour. The 1A claims the companies have may not prevail given bad facts... www.nyti…
“AI companions, precisely because they always obey and validate, may encourage narcissistic or dependent dynamics, a person effectively loving an echo of their own desires” www.cambridge.org/core/element...
Many firms are “using AI to kill jobs without generating significantly lower production costs, while imposing substantial social costs. The technology, in many applications, isn’t good enough to justify the displacement it causes.” www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-e...
“AI can enhance our lives in many ways - from improving food production to bolstering resilience against natural disasters - but without effective governance, it risks creating new inequalities and amplifying existing ones.” marianamazzucato.substack.com/p/ai-for-what