Latest Posts
Against Nihilism, For Appetite: Why Teaching Still Matters
Cross-posted from my LinkedIn posts, where I mostly put stuff these days.. “In these troubled times” is a phrase we hear often, sometimes in a darkly humorous, sarcastic-not-sarcastic tone. At other times it feels like mere rhetorical habit. And yet it persists, because the underlying feeling it gestures towards persists too. The nihilism that Nietzsche…
Dead University Theory?
This is a short LinkedIn post that I’ll post here as a reminder to expand! You’ve heard of ‘dead internet theory’?* Which seems to get more persuasive every day. The idea that the internet is now largely driven by bots and algorithms interacting with each other, and as the automations and AI take up more…
Disciplinary Specificity and Domain Expertise: Why Generative AI systems need scholars.
Does anyone need to remember or know anything anymore? We carry the sum of all human knowledge in our pocket, so can’t we just look stuff up? But this atomised attitude towards knowledge as mere lists of discrete facts is hugely inadequate. Not only is there the matter of knowing what to ask, but most…
Why Being Polite to AI Matters (And Not For the Reason You Think)
Cross-Posted from where I put it on LinkedIn: I am writing a longer piece on politeness to AI and ethics, but in light of Sam Altman’s recent comments – I asked Claude GAI (very nicely) to extract a 250 word summary from my draft – which I have (quite heavily) edited and is here: We…
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Dave Webster 