Category: Current Affairs
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Tech Bros as ‘Benefit Queens’
Very interesting piece here that’s resurfaced from 2022. In short – Elon and his super-wealthy tech bros are very often critical of federal government giving too many handouts – and employing too many in government roles – but are actually the biggest ‘benefit queens’ going, benefiting to the tune of billions support for their companies:…
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The Future of Work and Wellbeing
It’s been quiet around here, mostly because my energies have almost exclusively been focused delivering a conference and 180 page report for the closing of the Pissarides Review into the Future of Work and Wellbeing. This is a major, 3-year research project completed with multi-million funding from the Nuffield Foundation exploring how AI and automation…
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14 hallmarks of fascism
Excellent piece from back in 1996 in the New York Review of Books that came across my timeline this week – Umberto Eco on 14 hallmarks of fascism. Highly recommended read. They really are extraordinarily prescient. In summary: The question I’ve been asking myself is this: how does fascism end? Is war required? Or does…
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God-Like on BBC Talkback
Lovely to be invited onto William Crawley’s Talkback show on BBC Radio today. William has a PhD in philosophy, and was ordained too, and is an excellent presenter. The show was digging into the issues presented by the government’s announcement yesterday of the AI Action Plan. What I’ve been concerned about is that this plan…
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Apple Intelligence? Not so much…
Anger has been growing around Apple’s AI-generated notifications on people’s iPhones that have – multiple times – been incorrectly summarising new stories. For example, before he’d even played the match, Apple’s AI was claiming that the BBC were reporting that Luke Littler had won the PDA Darts World Championship: The same system was also happily…
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Meta goes… meta
Welcome to 2025, the year where AI really does its best to embed itself in our lives, for which you can read: get under our skin and up our noses. Meta – the owners of Facebook / Insta etc – already came out of the blocks with the launch of a bunch of AI profiles…