That concrete box off the freeway wasn’t designed for storage so much as capture — of markets, workers, and, now, people detained by immigration agents, as the federal government turns warehouses into million-square-foot concentration camps.
It is a disappearing machine. We need to see it clearly.
Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.
I genuinely think the president and many of his advisers, scammers, hustlers, and keyboard gangsters, don’t understand this concept at all and you can see it in the pattern of their mistakes from Minneapolis to Tehran www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o...
“The workers in Kenya say that it feels uncomfortable to go to work. They tell us about deeply private video clips, which appear to come straight out of Western homes, from people who use the glasses in their everyday lives.
Several describe video material showing bathroom visits, sex…”
And formally provably so because to drive you need theory of mind. You can indeed show with maths the limits of maths since it's a formal engineered system with knowable limits, see Gödel etc. We created trains which ban humans from tracks so the system can be safely automated, not so for roads. 1/n
“Insisting on technical precision when it matters can help us resist the easy idea that AI is a helper, ready to assist. Instead we must keep our focus on the uncomfortable thought that these systems partly and covertly structure what we say, think and learn.”
"Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men.
This isn’t a guess. It’s the finding of a Harvard Business School meta-analysis examining eighteen studies, over 140,000 participants, across multiple countries."
"Every AI Company Is Building a Different Wife"
abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built...
OK! I collected much of what I @spookyachu.bsky.social @andreaeyleen.bsky.social (and other collaborators not on here) have said on the Turing test (from critical, gendered, etc. angles) as it keeps being relevant: olivia.science/turing — hope it's useful for others too. Happy Sunday! 🤖💭
they’re talking about the decision to add facial recognition to the camera glasses. this company needs to be shut down.
Well of course there's nothing to worry about anyone being able to deploy facial recognition anywhere. Yikes.
I remember this because a FB exec came after me on Twitter when I said FB would do no such thing, re: “very public discussion.”
1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken.
Hundreds of kids are still detained.
We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵
wild to advertise a massive surveillance network, but since it can find a lost dog it’s good now
In this conversation on the #NoSuchThingpod, I got to talk about how the ongoing dialogue between bodies and technologies might shape learning and education - really, some of the most urgent questions of our time.
Listen here: shows.acast.com/nosuchthing/...
Enjoyed taking a pause and reflecting on #thedigitalbody, what is gained and what is lost with tech, and a more thoughtful future with AI in this interview with bsky.app/profile/anne... on #CultureStudy
Read it here:
www.patreon.com/posts/much-m...
data4democracy.substack.com/p/the-wall-l...
"There is another America inside this one, visible in the statistics of nations that made different choices. Call it Latent America: the nation that would exist if our democracy functioned to serve the public rather than protect the already powerful."
“i want back my rocking chairs, / solipsist sunsets, / & coastal jungle sounds...”
A poem by Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered by ICE earlier today.
lithub.com/renee-nicole...
Just discovered an insane new form of co-intelligence where you briefly share the mind of a great thinker in history and then a portion of their mind travels in yours for the rest of your life. Calling it a "book."
The Psychological Impact of Digital Isolation: How AI-Driven Social Interactions Shape Human Behavior and Mental Well-Being Felix Eling 3697-3705 Apr 30, 2025 Education The Psychological Impact of Digital Isolation: How AI-Driven Social Interactions Shape Human Behavior and Mental Well-Being Felix Eling Faculty of Health Sciences, Department of Pharmacy, Gulu College of Health Sciences, Gulu City, Northern Uganda DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.90400265 Received: 13 March 2025; Revised: 22 March 2025; Accepted: 25 March 2025; Published: 30 April 2025 ABSTRACT The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in social interactions has transformed how humans experience companionship, communication, and mental well-being. This review examines the psychological impact of AI-driven social interactions, focusing on virtual assistants, AI chatbots, and digital companions. It explores the benefits, risks, and ethical concerns associated with AI companionship. A systematic review methodology was employed, detailing inclusion criteria, databases searched, and analysis techniques. Findings suggest that while AI can offer emotional relief and support, over-reliance may disrupt real-world social bonding. Ethical concerns such as data privacy, emotional manipulation, and regulatory gaps are highlighted. The study underscores the need for balanced AI integration in human socialization. The study also addresses gaps in previous literature by examining AI’s influence on different demographic groups and cultural contexts.
Let me tell you a story. Perhaps you can guess where this is going... though it does have a bit of a twist.
I was poking around Google Scholar for publications about the relationship between chatbots and wellness. Oh how useful: a systematic literature review! Let's dig into the findings. 🧵
Latest post live on Substack... a companion piece to my book review in Science Magazine of @vxchang.bsky.social's 'The Body Digital.'
apothek.substack.com
Excited to see my book reviewed in @science.org
It means a great deal to see the book's ideas about embodiment, technology, and humanity resonating across disciplines and communities. Thank you to @amitchandramd.bsky.social for engaging so thoughtfully with my work!
ChatGPT is 3 years old this week — what was the world like in late 2022, and how did that shape what ChatGPT has become? I wrote about ChatGPT as a pandemic technology, centered on expectations of social isolation in ways that continue to define it. mail.cyberneticforests.com/what-was-cha...
Sharing my book review of @vxchang.bsky.social's book, The Body Digital, published yesterday in @science.org: 🧪
From phonographs to AI, Chang traces the impact of technology on the human experience. A poetic meditation on the machines that make us human.
This study show that using poems to jailbreak LLMs is... super effective? What the heck.
@vxchang.bsky.social examines intimacy in the age of chatbots: “If the myth of Pygmalion imagines love perfected, distilled from the body, digital platforms deploy that ideal as a design principle.”
lithub.com/pygmalions-c...
From player pianos to ChatGPT, every generation fears its machines will colonize human experience. Yet we always find ways to reclaim them. I talked with Andrew Keen about why our bodies have always been technological—and who gets to design that change.
🎧 keenon.substack.com/p/why-our-fe...
My debut book The Body Digital launches next week!
Join me Nov 4 at 7 PM at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, Berkeley for a conversation with NPR's Kara Platoni about how our bodies and technologies shape each other—from Walkmans to AI.
📚 Free + open to all!
#TheBodyDigital #BookLaunch #BerkeleyEvents
