Mastodawn

“The most extreme form of cognitive surrender is what the authors call “autopilot,” which is basically automating yourself.”

A New Wharton Study on AI Warns of a Growing Problem: Cognitive Surrender
https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/a-new-wharton-study-on-ai-warns-of
via Instapaper

A New Wharton Study on AI Warns of a Growing Problem: Cognitive Surrender

Casual users should pay special attention

The Algorithmic Bridge

Frank Pasquale Jan 28

Their “primary, essential view of reality is an unending scroll of text and video. A realm of textureless, scentless, touchless, phantasmic data that neatly sorts itself into increasingly refined and predetermined categories, in other words the essential subjectivity of the computer. Prediction markets are born from this new subjectivity, and within their endless marketplaces create a panorama of human affairs derealized, broken into discrete events with binary outcomes.”
https://defector.com/prediction-markets-are-betting-on-a-grim-future

Prediction Markets Are Betting On A Grim Future | Defector

During last summer’s NBA Finals, a fully AI-generated commercial featuring people in man-on-the-street interviews yelling toward the camera about all the things they were going to bet on (football games, the price of eggs, hurricanes, alien visitations) introduced the world to Kalshi. Tagline: “The world’s gone mad, trade it.” The ad was made by “AI…

Frank Pasquale Jan 28

“Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people. As the other 55 states and territories are now forced to join Georgia and implement new work requirements, millions will lose their healthcare and Deloitte will cash in.”
https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-means-testing-industrial-complex/

The Means-Testing Industrial Complex

As Republicans tightened work requirements and eligibility rules for Medicaid and SNAP last year, Equifax’s CEO openly celebrated the profits to be made from administering this deprivation.

LPE Project

Frank Pasquale Jan 14

“Wang’s article argues that both the left and right in China’s current mainstream discourse belong to the Touchy-Feely Parties. The Industrial Party believes in the supremacy of productivity and technology, and sees the value of industrialization as transcending that of political parties, regime change, political systems, and ephemeral cultural trends.”
https://www.readingthechinadream.com/lu-nanfeng-and-wu-jing-on-the-industrial-party.html

Lu Nanfeng and Wu Jing on the Industrial Party

Lu Nanfeng and Wu Jing, “Historical Transformation and Grand Narrative: A Political Analysis of the ‘Industrial Party,’ an Online Intellectual Trend” [1] Introduction and Translation by...

Reading the China Dream

Frank Pasquale Jan 9

“How are robustness and trustworthiness understood in AI? Let us start with robustness. If not left intuitive, it usually refers to various forms of immunity to so-called distribution shifts. They occur when an AI-model is deployed—as common in practice—on input data sampled from a different distribution than the data on which it was trained: e.g., when the model was trained on patient data from a few hospitals but is deployed at many hospitals”
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-025-05272-4

Robustness and trustworthiness in AI: a no-go result from formal epistemology - Synthese

A major issue for the trustworthiness of modern AI-models is their lack of robustness. A notorious example is that putting a small sticker on a stop sign c

SpringerLink

Frank Pasquale Jan 8

“Generative AI is too often described as uncontrollable. I previously wrote on Tech Policy Press about…how companies deploy it to their advantage. But AI architecture is, at its core, a system for shaping words into the outcomes somebody considers desirable. Companies are developing a variety of systems that steer the swarm of words and pixels toward more predictable outcomes, which they define in terms of their own interests.”
https://techpolicy.press/why-musk-is-culpable-in-groks-undressing-fiasco

Why Musk is Culpable in Grok's Undressing Disaster | TechPolicy.Press

Grok’s functionality is not a black box, but the result of specific design decisions made by executives and engineers at xAI, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

Tech Policy Press

Frank Pasquale Jan 6

“Even if we begin in a democracy, inequality can entrench itself and grow arbitrarily extreme, as the rich push policy or steer technological development in the direction that best serves them. Relatedly—or as an extreme case of the same phenomenon—revolutions may be much easier to suppress when a state or ruling elite has a robotic military that obeys its commands without the need for any popular support.”
https://philiptrammell.substack.com/p/capital-in-the-22nd-century

Capital in the 22nd Century

Piketty was wrong about the past. He’s probably right about the future.

Philosopher count

Frank Pasquale Dec 30

“In pursuit of scientific rigor, these scholars subscribe…to a conception of ideology as something measurable through the affirmation of isolated beliefs on a survey (that is, mostly in our heads). But ideologies are holistic phenomena: large-scale narratives that not only guide action but are embodied in…our social rituals & ways of organizing. The entire modern political world is the artifact of various heterogeneous ideologies that we participate in unthinkingly”
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/01/in-the-land-of-the-data-blind-jason-blakely-political-science-trumpism/

Frank Pasquale Dec 29

“We already have general intelligence in humans, and instead of attempting to replicate it artificially, we should focus on amplifying collective intelligence through AI-human feedback loops. The core challenge is not creating autonomous artificial minds but developing dynamic, adaptive systems that enhance human cognitive capacities.”

-The New Cybernetics
https://erikjlarson.substack.com/p/the-new-cybernetics?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1898401&post_id=182225085&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=348uz&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The New Cybernetics

A research proposal.

Colligo

Frank Pasquale Nov 22

“What AI produces is not “thinking in language.” An AI condenses its training data and outputs syntactically correct sentences, but it cannot leap to the deeper stratum where meaning is formed, where a text imagines hidden contexts, expands, implies, connects to other texts, and is reanimated the moment it touches them. A work written by someone with genuine literacy is expandable, implicative, linked to other texts”
https://thebaffler.com/odds-and-ends/brain-rot-without-borders-forum

Brain Rot Without Borders | Baffler Forum

There’s no point in denying it anymore: literature as we know it is well on its way to becoming a lost art.

The Baffler