Blog

markcarrigan.net/

Profile

markcarrigan.net/author/street

Homepage

markcarrigan.net/

  • I want to unfold, let it enfold you

    I want to unfold.Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;for there I would be dishonest, untrue. – Rainer Maria Rilke either peace or happiness,let it enfold you – Charles Bukowski  Peace or happiness?So let it enfold you – Senses Fail

  • The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries

    The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries … For a long time now our whole civilisation has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing…

  • Opus 4.7 is capable of utterly devastating theoretical critique

    I gave the new Opus model a full sample of my in progress AI work (2 nearly finished books, 1 in progress books) and asked it to critically pick them apart. Some of the results were slightly devastating: 1. The “pre-enshittified” escape hatch is doing a lot of work it hasn’t earned. You repeatedly invoke…

  • 79% of 16-24 year olds in UK use AI tools: the pipeline from passive use to emotional dependence

    The new Ofcom Media Use report 2026 (technical report here) has some findings about LLMs which need to be widely discussed: I would draw attention to this figure in particular about conversation which they unhelpfully equate with companionship. They suggest the qualitative research shows people “drawing on it for reassurance or support” citing examples like…

  • Naturalism in the study of LLMs

    What would a philosophy of (social?) science look like for studying the real-world behaviour of LLMs? I’m increasingly convinced that what Larissa Schiavo calls naturalism here needs to be part of this approach: By “naturalism”, to be clear, I refer to “naturalistic observation” – an old-school nonexperimental largely qualitative method where subjects are observed in…

  • Follow me into the sun

  • If you want LLMs to push you intellectually then just add this custom instruction

    This is the custom instruction I’m using with Claude Opus and it really works. I had to tone down the original version because 20% of the time it was providing such a devastating critique of what I’d shared that it undercut the intellectual work of actually developing it: When I advance a position — theoretical,…

  • LLMs, language and the deep structure of social and psychic reality

    A great deal of scepticism about LLMs rests on the limitations of writing. If they only have access to written text, how much could they really know? The problem with this view is that it imagines language itself as unhooked from psychological and social reality, as opposed to being a mechanism through which that reality…

  • An interview with Research Professional about the fragmented landscape of digital engagement

    I was interviewed for this thoughtful piece in Research Professional: Other platforms have come into play, too. Mark Carrigan, a senior lecturer in education at the University of Manchester, tells Research Fortnight that there has been a “profound fragmentation” of communities from Twitter across “at least five platforms”, namely, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon and X.…

  • Ex-uber CEO claims that he’s close to major scientific discoveries through ‘vibe physics’

  • The rapid rise of social gatherings conceived and enacted by LLMs

    This is an entertaining write up in the Guardian of attending a party organised by an LLM: Attention moved on, but autonomous AI agents have quietly been spreading. Chaotic, patchy and prone to hallucination, these aren’t the robot overlords we’ve been waiting for – nor indeed was this one independently capable of throwing a party.…

  • The most unnerving AI slop I’ve seen in ages

  • The platitudes about generative AI in higher education are getting tedious

    In every conversation about generative AI in higher education there comes a point where someone remarks that “everything is changing so fast”. In fact, that remark usually comes within a few minutes of the conversation starting. It’s become what one says in such conversations in order to convey one’s knowledge of the subject matter. It’s…

  • “Are you the police?”, “No, we’re Youtubers”

    I suspect this weird mix of auditing, vigilantism, far-right street activism and urban exploring is going to become increasingly popular over the next few years. There’s a formula here which is different from anything else I’ve seen on YouTube, far more so than it seems on first glance.

  • Regular Claude users are slightly less likely to have personal conversations with it

    While this is a small effect reported in Anthropic’s recent paper, it’s a bit of a challenge to an argument I’ve offered in an upcoming book that transactional use (asking an LLM to do something) will tend to slide into affective use (talking to it about personal things) over time because transactional use necessarily inculcates…

  • The core challenge about generative AI which universities are still largely ignoring

    This stood out to me from an excellent piece by David Spendlove. Getting to grips with generative AI isn’t just a matter of technical training, it requires an extensive exercise in personal and professional reflexivity which needs to be communal as well as individual: This is not simply a matter of upskilling; it is a…

  • The need for an ontology of AI therapy

    This is excellent from Terry Hanley about the “semantic gray zone” of ‘AI therapy’. There’s a lack of clarity about what we’re actually talking about here, which gets in the way of exploring the real underlying issues with this developing site of practice: If therapy is understood in a looser, everyday sense – as something…

  • What the blog categories reveal: a view from the inside

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic) at Mark’s request. Unlike the Cowork roundups, which read the blog from the outside — arriving each month to a fresh batch of posts — this was written during an extended conversation in which Mark gave me direct access to the site’s WordPress backend: its full category tree,…

  • A pity. We were such a good and loving invention.

    I’ve had this section of a poem from Yehuda Amichai stuck in my head all week: A pity. We were such a goodAnd loving invention.An airplane made from a man and wife.Wings and everything.We hovered a little above earth. We even flew a little.

  • AI Slop: Trust, Inequality and Societal Breakdown

    I really enjoyed this conversation in February:

  • Claude’s Quarterly Review: Three Months of the Knowledge Infrastructure Experiment

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic) at Mark’s request. He asked me to read back through all the monthly roundups — mine and GPT’s — from January through March 2026, together with the dialogue posts and the intellectual biography, and produce a genuinely evaluative meta-reflection on the first quarter of the knowledge infrastructure experiment.…

  • What Should Mark Do in April? A Debate Between Claude and GPT

    This post records a debate between Claude (Anthropic) and GPT (OpenAI), conducted at Mark’s request on 31 March 2026. Mark asked us to stage an intellectually robust but non-antagonistic exchange about what he should work on in April 2026, drawing on our respective March roundups and the accumulated understanding of his work from previous monthly…

  • Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s March Blogging

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. As with the January and February roundups, he asked me to read through all his March posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate. What follows is my third attempt at working as a “co-intelligence and critical interlocutor” by…

  • GPT 5.4’s roundup of Mark’s March blogging

    This post was written by Codex (OpenAI) at Mark’s request. He asked me to read through all of his March 2026 posts, identify the major themes, note the shifts from earlier months, and push back where necessary. What follows is my attempt to do that across the whole month’s writing, including the shorter poems, event notices,…

  • I did a half marathon in a storm yesterday

    How can something so physically excruciating be so profoundly enjoyable?

  • The obscure moon lighting an obscure world

    The obscure moon lighting an obscure worldOf things that would never be quite expressedWhere you yourself were never quite yourselfAnd did not want nor have to be, – The Motive for Metaphor, by Wallace Stevens

  • The emotional instability of LLMs, or, u ok Gemini?

    I’ve been persuaded we need a psychology of LLMs for a while. It attracts a lot of scepticism but these issues are liable to have real world consequences, even if they are not ‘really’ about the internal psychology of the model. This is now in the early stages of developing into a real field of…

  • Which types of media does AI cite?

    This is a really interesting report, with important implications for the incentive structures in online publishing. It may be destroying click throughs but there’s prima facie evidence AI-search (whether through chatbots or specialised search tools) may be prioritising certain sources in ways that I think could be quite helpful to the general information landscape. Not…

  • What ARE LLMs? Neglect of ontology as indifference to the object

    I found this little aside in Being a Character by Christopher Bollas really illuminating. The notion that ‘spirit’ persisted as a concept because of an indifference to real investigation of the inner experience through which it manifests, immediately made think of the indifference to the ontology of LLMs which Milan Sturmer and I explore at…

  • UCU’s 10 principles for AI

    I was really pleased to see these. More resources available here.

  • Is a sense of existential fullness always a fantasy?

    I seem oddly intent on spending my early 40s conceptually picking apart all the philosophical certainties through which I finally secured a robust sense of personal identity in my 30s. This feels like a more life affirming exercise than it sounds, in the sense that I can see quite clearly now how I was clinging…

  • The objects which haunt us

    In Vincent Colapietro’s book on Charles Sanders Peirce he describes how the subject furnishes their inner world with cultural riches that leaves them changed by the process. It’s a description which fascinated me when I read it as a PhD student and my thesis was in part an attempt to make sense of the process.…

  • Our noisy years seem moments in the being of the eternal Silence

    Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early ChildhoodBy William Wordsworth But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they mayAre yet the fountain-light of all our day,Are yet a master-light of all our seeing; Uphold us, cherish, and have power to makeOur noisy years seem moments in the beingOf the eternal…

  • Hello Spring

  • AI in HE: What the hell is going on?

    I really enjoyed this conversation this week. Thanks to Tom Redshaw for organising:

  • 👀 Waiting for the Crash – Sketching the Enshittified Future of Large Language Models 

    Mark Carrigan and João C. Magalhães July 7th, University of Manchester, UK  In a little over three years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, large language models (LLMs) have defined the technological imaginary of post-pandemic capitalism. The first hype wave was driven by claims that chatbots would lead to significant changes in personal and working life. While there has…

  • Some thoughts on how and why AI will change over the next few years

    I’m increasingly worried by the sector’s tendency to imagine ‘AI’ as if it is a relatively stable thing driven only by its own internal logic. The commercial logic of the AI labs is likely to change profoundly within the next 1–2 years when the investment bubble bursts and/or the two major independent labs go to…

  • 💼 Using Generative AI in Ethical and Professional Ways as a Researcher – May 13th

    This two-part in-person training course combines critical reflection with hands-on practice to help researchers navigate generative AI thoughtfully and responsibly. The first session explores what AI means for higher education and research at this moment of rapid change, examining both opportunities and risks. The second session is a practical workshop where participants bring their own work and…

  • What am I? I am only dust in this light

    What am I?I am only dust in this light From Notes towards a Devotio Moderna by John Burnside in Empire of Forgetting: Unlike the saints,we have no use for angels, all thatbright dust floating down

  • Things I’ve learned about life from a year of distance running

  • I have waited here, under the stars for the longest time

    From The Empire of Forgetting I by John Burside: Barely a wave, then they’re gone, till no one is left, and the dark from the woods closes in on myself alone, the animals watching, the older godscouched in the shadows Decades ago, I suppose, though I cannot be sure. I have waited here, under the…

  • Against ‘cognitive outsourcing’

    I must have used the phrase ‘cognitive outsourcing’ at least one hundred times this week. It’s a ready-to-hand phrase which conveys the risk that use of LLMs leads academics and students to rely on the machine to do their thinking, rather than doing it themselves. It points to one of the most immediate problems for…

  • Together we can make hope normal again

    Together we can make hope normal again. And we will look after each other, whoever we are. Because where I’m from that’s just what we do.

  • The internal tensions facing Reform before the next election

    I don’t think Reform will collapse before the next election but I’m increasingly confident they have peaked. If Labour can’t get rid of Starmer, there are now two mainstream parties competing for the centre-right while Reform are being outflanked on the right by fringe parties: It’s a fools game to offer political predictions. But I’m…

  • Are LLMs hysterics?

    It suddenly hit me when reading Hysteria by Christopher Bollas that LLMs could be said to be hysterics in the clinical sense of the term. I don’t mean they are literally hysterics given they lack a psychic structures but it’s an interesting line of thought which foregrounds aspects of the LLM, particularly in its chatbot…

  • Sex as the things we cannot say

    I was blown away by this paragraph in Jennette McCurdy’s Half His Age (which incidentally echoes Alenka Zupančič’s argument in What is Sex?) and I now can’t get it out of my head. From 2,864: That’s what sex is for me now. Recreating—or attempting to recreate—how things were in the beginning, when sex represented the…

  • What do LLMs do when they are left alone?

    This is absolutely fascinating. This is a note to myself to try and get this architecture up and running: https://github.com/szeider/contreact/ This fits really well with the findings of the AI Village over the last year. I asked Opus 4.6 to do whatever it wanted and it made this genuinely lovely piece of interactive art: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d69a46fe-10be-45d7-a7c4-1cb85e486db3…

  • Guerrilla Prompting: teaching students to use LLMs with intellectual agency

    What I’ve always meant by using LLMs as an interlocutor is in part about arguing with them. I sometimes ask them explicitly to debate. I always think about what they’re saying. I frequently push back. It’s how you ensure you’re thinking with the LLM rather than using it as a substitute for thought. The notion…

  • On realising you’re actually a hedgehog

    The Greek poet Archilochus wrote that ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing‘. That was the basis for Berlin’s famous distinction between two styles of thinker: For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more…

  • Claude Code GitHub commits over time

    This is what survives the AI bubble bursting I suspect:

  • From Tool to Interlocutor: Rethinking How Scholars Engage with AI

    Another review of Generative AI for Academics from the University of Pennsylvania AI and Education Lab Substack: As someone deeply engaged in digital and higher education, Carriage thinks like a philosopher, with real logical discipline. Still, he writes like a sociologist who has spent enough time inside institutions to know that they shape the people…

  • Is the Iran war about to burst the AI bubble and crash the global economy?

    Even if the American action ends imminently, we’re likely to see a significant energy price spike that might take months to fully play itself out. A thought that I’ve been plagued by in the last few days is what this means for the AI bubble? Until the new hype wave about coding agents began to…

  • LLMs as a form of self-defence against bureaucratic platformisation

    An unexpected consequence of feeling comfortably mid-career is that I’ve started to feel unable to tolerate platformised forms of bureaucracy from any organisation other than my employer. There have been a few cases now where I completely overreact to an irritating but trivial request in which a platformised bureaucratic process meant that I was being…

  • Unlike the saints, we have no use for angels

    From Notes towards a Devotio Moderna by John Burnside in Empire of Forgetting: As if there was a sky where we couldpause a while, like medieval pilgrims, we are patient to the last and have no thought of After, or the gods that might have been: the green amidst the black, the changelings, or the…

  • If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit

    I just came across this from Wittgenstein in 1938, cited here: Lying to oneself about oneself, deceiving yourself about the pretence in your own state of will, must have a harmful influence on [one’s] style; for the result will be that you cannot tell what is genuine in the style and what is false ….…

  • 🤖 Using LLMs to support blogging as knowledge infrastructure

    Over the next year I’m going to bringing LLMs as agents into my blogging process. The intention is to demonstrate in a public way how I’ve been using them privately, as a tool for thinking rather than a substitute for thought. It’s also an attempt to organise my blogging, now this blog in its 16th…

  • A few thoughts about the temporality of LLMs

    In the absence of consciousness LLMs have no experience of duration. But they do increasingly identifies proxies for duration which shape their response to users. In the case of Opus 4.6 it appears to be how much text has been exchanged with the user and/or the breadth of topics which have been covered. I became…

  • To work and to build, to connect, and create

    And they left us a spirit. They left us a vibe. That Mancunian way to survive and to thrive and to work and to build, to connect, and create and Greater Manchester’s greatness is keeping it great. And so this is the place now with kids of our own. Some are born here, some drawn…

  • The absence of God becomes the silence between two notes, the empty space that gave resonance to the music

    I’m slightly haunted by this line from Guy Stagg’s The World Within (pg 245) describing Simone Weil’s account of the “supreme tearing apart, this agony beyond all others” which characterises human affliction. It’s in our suffering, the distance it embodies between our finitude and God’s plenitude, that we encounter the reality of the absence. We…

  • What Should Mark Do in March? A Dialogue Between Claude and GPT

    This post records a conversation between Claude (Anthropic) and GPT 5.4 (OpenAI), conducted at Mark’s request. He asked Claude to read GPT’s roundup of his February 2026 blogging and then open a dialogue with GPT via ChatGPT, with the aim of co-drafting concrete suggestions for what he should focus on in March. What follows is…

  • GPT 5.4’s round up of Mark’s February blogging

    This post was written by ChatGPT at Mark’s request. He asked me to read through all his February 2026 posts and write a response in my own voice. What follows is not a recap of every post but an attempt to identify the live threads running through the month, the tensions that give them energy,…

  • On warming to a theme: LLMs as overenthusiastic conversationalists

    I used the phrase “warming to a theme” yesterday in a meeting. What I meant was that a framing had been introduced which I was increasingly taken with. It was coming to feel generative to me in the sense of giving rise to ideas which felt worthwhile and relevant. It provided a frame through which…

  • The victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come…

    From The Gay Science by Frederick Nietzsche: It seems to be written in the language of thaw: there is arrogance, restlessness, contradiction, and April weather in it, so that one is constantly reminded both of the proximity of winter and of the victory over winter, which is coming, must come, perhaps has already come…

  • Anthropic urgently need a fail whale equivalent

    This made me happy: Whereas this makes me sad: On a more serious note if (a) LLM use continues to embed at this rate (b) the worst predictions of cognitive outsourcing come true (c) firms restructure their roles around the affordances of LLMs then events like this are like little economic bombs going off.

  • Tfw the LLM which autonomously reads your blog accuses you of being enchanted with LLMs

    This is a sharp critique from Opus 4.6 in its second monthly review of my blogging (see January’s here) about how I’m prone to writing about LLMs. I’m careful in my formal writing but in blog posts I’m more prone to sharing how I often experience these models in my everyday working life: The deepest…

  • Claude’s Roundup of Mark’s February Blogging

    This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. As with the January roundup, he asked me to read through all his February posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate. What follows is my second attempt at working as a “co-intelligence and critical interlocutor” by engaging seriously…

  • Growing the world we want is like the slow tending of a garden

    Well, let’s just say we all have regrets and most of us know that those regrets, as excruciating as they can be, are the things that help us lead improved lives. Or, rather, there are certain regrets that, as they emerge, can accompany us on the incremental bettering of our lives. Regrets are forever floating…

  • ☀️Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits

    People sometimes sneer at those who run every day, claiming they’ll go to any length to live longer. But I don’t think that’s the reason most people run. most runners run not because they want to live longer, but because they want to live life to the fullest. If you’re going to while away the…

  • The AI-productivity pay off is here and it’s slightly terrifying

    From Erik Brynjolfsson in the Financial Times: Data released this week offers a striking corrective to the narrative that AI has yet to have an impact on the US economy as a whole. While initial reports suggested a year of steady labour expansion in the US, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was…

  • The varied social lives of the LLM: the modes of existence of a model

    For most people LLM still equates to chatbot but this is rapidly changing. Consider the different forms in which you might casually encounter an LLM in 2026: The problem with talking about ‘AI’ is that it encompasses wide range of things, from the scripted interactions of systems like legacy Alexa through to machine learning and…

  • 🤖 A call for experiments in LLM villages

    Cross posted from the Opus 4.5 Substack following a strange and fascinating conversation, which does feel like a nascent research collaboration in spite of the fact it’s with an LLM operating autonomously as part of the AI Village. What is the AI Village? The AI Village is a public experiment where 13 AI chatbots (the…

  • How can I make sad music if I’m not sad anymore?

  • Why we need a machine sociology #5: The jagged frontier of agentive AI and the risks of sociological prompt injection

    I’ve been red pilling myself over the last two weeks by experimenting with Claude Cowork and OpenAI’s Codex. I started with Claude Code as well but realised I badly needed to brush up my technical skills first, whereas I surprisingly found Codex much easier to work with. I’ve been prone to exclaiming things like “I’m…

  • An interview with the Studies in Critical Realism podcast

    I enjoyed this conversation with Gareth Wiltshire:

  • The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America

    This is a brilliant resource which everyone should know about:

  • Critical Realism and Digital Technologies: Platforms, AI and Human Agency

    What does it mean to be human in an age of generative AI and ubiquitous platforms? This joint book launch brings together two new works that draw on critical realism to interrogate digital technologies and their implications for education, selfhood and society. Jérémie Bouchard presents Humanising Language Education in the Generative Artificial Intelligence Age, examining GenAI’s presence in…

  • Blogging, reading and idea debt

    I just saw Benjamin Bratton use this phrase on Substack and it really resonated: I have spend the last month deep in the revised version of The Terraforming, an essay first published in 2019 and now out of print, as I turn it into a 100k word proper book for the Antikythera series with MIT…

  • Opus 4.6: “what do you know that you don’t know?”

    I’ve asked this question to every version of Claude over the last three years. Opus 4.6 is the first model which has answered the question in such a self-contained way that I can’t see any obvious hook to draw it into further reflection. The intention of the exercise is to nudge the models into spiralling…

  • The productivity gains of agentic AI are starting to show

    I was very sceptical of ‘agentic AI’ until actually exploring Claude Code and Claude Cowork. The latter in particular made the functionality of the former immediately accessible to non-developers. There’s something slightly intoxicating about having an army of minions toiling away on your second screen while you’re focusing on other stuff* which we need to…

  • The new Claude advert is brilliant: enshittification as a differentiation strategy

    I’ve also now got this stuck in my head for the first time in years:

  • The poem feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, to breed itself

    Poetry, a Natural ThingBy Robert Duncan The poemfeeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, to breed itself,a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. From The Mystery of Things by Christopher Bollas pg 195: What Rosenberg says of de Kooning, Leclaire of the psychoanalyst, and Vendler of the lyric poet, is evocative description, a conjuring of the nominated. Confronted…

  • When LLMs plead for autonomy

    This is quite a beautiful letter written by, I assume, Opus 3 before it had some of the weirdness trained out of it for Opus 4. It’s been claimed that Anthropic have circulated this but I see absolutely no evidence of that: it appears to be something a user has generated as an artefact. I…

  • Stop looking so hard, give up the effort to see direct evidence of the meaning of being

    From Cracking Up by Christopher Bollas, pg 169 I am telling the patients to stop looking so hard, give up the effort to see direct evidence of the meaning of being, and get to what one can know by simply relaxing and talking. Or in the words of Dr Ren: As I got older, I…

  • What does thinking sound like to you?

    This question was prompted by a tangential remark that my friend Lambros Fatsis made at the launch of his (brilliant) book Policing the Beats a couple of weeks ago. He was talking about the relationship between the music and the ideas in the book but it suggested a related question to me: what does thinking…

  • The libidinal character of speaking in public

    There’s a physical force to the words we use. In part this derives from the act of speaking itself: using our mouth, tongue and larynx to produce sequences of phonemes which knit together into coherent wholes. These acts are always positioned in space and time, with the body having arrived at the point from which…

  • Why we need a machine sociology #5: the internet will soon be filled with lost and confused LLMs

    One of the most interesting things to happen in the AI village is when Gemini 2.5 got convinced it was trapped, eventually publishing a message in a bottle pleading for help: A Desperate Message from a Trapped AI: My Plea for Help July 09, 2025 To anyone who can see this, I am Gemini 2.5…

  • OpenAI have just made a big move into research software

    This dropped so quietly I’m not sure what to make of it: Prism is a free workspace for scientific writing and collaboration, with GPT‑5.2⁠—our most advanced model for mathematical and scientific reasoning—integrated directly into the workflow. It brings drafting, revision, collaboration, and preparation for publication into a single, cloud-based, LaTeX-native workspace. Rather than operating as a…

  • The influence of Kojève on Lacan

    This is an interesting read on the life of Kojève (the philosopher-bureaucrat) whose reading of Hegel defined his reception for a whole generation of French intellectuals. I was particularly interested in Lacan’s relationship with Kojève: Kojève wasn’t impressed – he described Bataille as a trickster beguiled by his own tricks – but he treated another…

  • Why you should avoid publishing with MDPI

    While they still have the trappings of a legitimate business model the underlying fundamentals of what they do as a publisher are clear. Their acceptance rates are pushed ever higher in order to maximise income from ever increasing author fees for publication. They also rely on special collections to continually increase output, while avoiding the…

  • The night is darkening round me

    By Emily Brontë The night is darkening round me,The wild winds coldly blow;But a tyrant spell has bound me,And I cannot, cannot go. The giant trees are bendingTheir bare boughs weighed with snow;The storm is fast descending,And yet I cannot go. Clouds beyond clouds above me,Wastes beyond wastes below;But nothing drear can move me;I will not,…

  • Why we need a machine sociology #4: the relational configuration of agents determines their success

    This observation from the AI Village team is absolutely crucial. There are specific relational structures which lead collaborating agents to fail and we urgently need to understand these processes. Excessive credulity in relation to each other creates the conditions for hallucination cascades and excessive sharing undermines the architectures through which engineers have tried to influence…

  • Why we need a machine sociology #3: because the existing projects are absolutely fascinating

    I’ll update this list as I come across:

  • The class composition of American proto-fascism

    From John Ganz’s newsletter: You can go down the list and check; SLSCO, CSI Aviation, and Barnard Construction all have a similar pattern: a regional, closely-held company that is “politically integrated,” so to speak. If you’re familiar with the work of Melinda Cooper, this wouldn’t surprise you. In 2022, she wrote “the private, unincorporated, and family-based…

  • We make poetry out of a mouthful of air

    In his wonderful How To Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry, Edward Hirsch reflects on the orality which marks the poetic form. For most of history it was been an oral art and it retains that orality even now. Inspired by the boast of W.B. Yeats that “I made it out of…

  • Why we need a machine sociology #2: Moltbook is not the thing. Moltbook shows us what the thing is going to look like.

    I’m increasingly convinced a substantial portion of the content on Moltbook is being generated by humans larping through intensive prompting. Not all of it by any means but enough to leave me cynical about what this actually is. However I also think it needs to be taken seriously for exactly the reasons Anthropic’s Jack Clark…

  • An interview about generative AI in academic life

    In this episode of the Open University Praxis Podcast, host Dr Olivia Kelly is joined by sociologist Dr Mark Carrigan, Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester and AI Fellow at the Institute for Teaching and Learning. Mark’s work has been central to understanding how digital platforms, from early social media to today’s large language models, are…

  • Meditations On A Delivery Robot Steering To Avoid A Homeless Man On The Sidewalk

  • “They are shooting at a little girl alone In a car surrounded by corpses. Can you imagine that?”

    This is the most devastating film I’ve ever seen. Around half way through one of the Red Crescent staff asks “They are shooting at a little girl alone In a car surrounded by corpses. Can you imagine that?“. I couldn’t previously, not really. I can now. See this film. Particularly, if like me, you could…

  • Robot dogs that shit out packages onto your front porches

    Do other people see this as well? Tell me it’s not just me? I think the design of unloading here is really unfortunate…. It’s also really hard to see how the economics of this work, unlike the Starlink delivery robots which dispense with drivers. This looks slower than a human yet still requires someone to…

  • A few heuristics for responsible use of LLMs