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In the interest of being a good professor, if you want to read the pertinent sections of Magnifica Humanitas on slavery, the "apology" and the implications for AI, skip to sections 172-181 of the Encyclical.
"Their tone may be deferential, even sycophantic, but they never fly off the handle. They also never sleep. Their edge comes from persistence and scale."
Anthropic employs at least four philosophers. Google DeepMind employs at least TEN. When journalism fully implodes, at least my B.A. in philosophy will be put to good use. (Love this story from @joelkhalili.bsky.social about the murky motives of AI companies and their Aristotles)
I guess big websites still let you do stuff, it's just a lot less fun futurism.com/artificial-i...
Funny because Massachusetts quite famously has a tax on high earners — MA taxes income, not wealth like California would, but still www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Cognition is a promising startup, but it's wild to me that new AI companies are RAISING a billion dollars in a single round. That's a whole Instagram purchase price! www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
I've never been this excited for an encyclical before www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...
Software development is a weird oral tradition. We have an ambivalent relationship with documentation, but high turnover in the industry means that the info is always on the verge of dying out. AI is making those dysfunctions worse, and I wrote about that for Fast Company.
Eric Rodenbeck on AI as a Design Medium. “In my class, the first principle is simple: Do not take what comes back from prompts at face value. Interrogate it. Iterate on it. Stay with it longer than feels efficient.” [harvarddesignmagazine.org]
I was going to say "well that's that" but who knows, Trump could decide the OpenAI boys owe Elon billions and we'll all just be asked to pretend that's legitimate www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-ne...
“I'd like to believe that engaging seriously with a new technology—including being willing to be wrong about it—is itself a humanistic act” - @foundhistory.bsky.social on the defensive stance many humanists are forced into for believing that AI is something they cannot ignore.
I wonder what the temperature around AI would look like if we’d had a few more warm-up years where companies emphasized smaller gains rather than deeply transformative ones. Eg, it makes OCR better. Remember mail merges? They’re easier now. Instant audio and visual translation. But the thing is…
I miss when Amazon let you download copies of your own Kindle books and — if you were clever — you could edit or convert them and use them however you wished I wonder if locking down was a response to other AI companies buying and training on books or if it was a fuck-you to their customers or both
One theory about why AI writing is so cloying and full of typographical idiosyncrasies: At least some of it is not tuned to be read on the page, but aloud in a text-to-audio application. Em-dashes get read as pauses (not grammatical constructs), the style gets looser and chattier. A formal mismatch.
If you’re making an analogy between AI and other computer technologies, remember not to act like ChatGPT invented AI in 2022. If it were the PC, ChatGPT was Windows 95; if it were the web, ChatGPT was the debut of Facebook. Ending a long process of research and experiments with corporate enclosure.