A Future Worth Thinking About

afutureworththinkingabout.com · American English

Thinking about magic, cyborgs, robots, and artificial intelligence--and why some of those words could use changing--since 1982.

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Failures of “AI” Promise: Critical Thinking, Misinformation, Prosociality, & Trust
Dec 6, 2025 · original
So, new research shows that a) LLM-type “AI” chatbots are extremely persuasive and able to get voters to shift their positions, and that b) the more effective they are at that, the less they hew to factual reality. Which: Yeah. A bunch of us told you this. Again: the Purpose of LLM- type “AI” is not to tell you the truth or to lie to you, but to provide you with an answer-shaped something you are statistically determined to be more likely to accept, irrespective of facts— this is the reason I call them “ bullshit engines .” And it’s what makes them perfect for accelerating dis- and misinformation and persuasive propaganda; perfect for authoritarian and fascist aims of destabilizing trust in expertise. Now, the fear here isn’t necessarily that candidate A gets elected over candidate B (see commentary from the paper authors, here ). The real problem is the loss of even the willingness to t
Reimagining “AI’s” Environmental and Sociotechnical Materialities
May 22, 2025 · original
There’s a new open-access book of collected essays called Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity , and I happen to have an essay in it. The collection is made of contributions from participants in the October 2024 “Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity” panels and workshops put on by Jess Reia, MC Forelle, and Yingchong Wang, and I’ve included my essay here, for you. That said, I highly recommend checking out the rest of the book, because all the contributions are fantastic. This work was co-sponsored by: The Karsh Institute Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, The Environmental Institute, and The School of Data Science, all at UVA. The videos for both days of the “Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity” talks are now available, and you can find them at the Karsh Institute website , and also below, before the text of my essay. All in a
ChatGPT is Actively Marketing to Students During University Finals Season
Apr 4, 2025 · original
It’s really disheartening and honestly kind of telling that in spite of everything, ChatGPT is actively marketing itself to students in the run-up to college finals season. We’ve talked many ( many ) times before about the kinds of harm that can come from giving over too much epistemic and heuristic authority over to systems built by people who have repeatedly, doggedly proven that they will a) buy into their own hype and b) refuse to ever question their own biases and hubris. But additionally, there’s been at least two papers in the past few months alone, and more in the last two years ( 1 , 2 , 3 ), demonstrating that over-reliance on “ AI ” tools diminishes critical thinking capacity and prevents students from building the kinds of foundational skills which allow them to learn more complex concepts, adapt to novel situations, and grow into experts. Screenshot of ChatGPT[.]com/students
Audio, Slides, and Transcript for my 2024 SEAC Keynote
Dec 31, 2024 · original
Back in October, I was the keynote speaker for the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum ‘s 25th annual conference. My talk was titled “On Truth, Values, Knowledge, and Democracy in the Age of Generative ‘AI,’” and it touched on a lot of things that I’ve been talking and writing about for a while (in fact, maybe the title is familiar ?), but especially in the past couple of years. Covered deepfakes, misinformation, disinformation, the social construction of knowledge, artifacts, and consensus reality, and more. And I know it’s been a while since the talk, but it’s not like these things have gotten any less pertinent, these past months. As a heads-up, I didn’t record the Q&A because I didn’t get the audience’s permission ahead of time, and considering how much of this is about consent, that’d be a little weird, yeah? Anyway, it was in the Q&A section where we got deep into the environm
More Light
Dec 21, 2024 · original
One more deep dark to go in 2024, the deepest dark left this year. I don’t necessarily think of the dark as a bad thing— i know it shelters and protects— but the last week leading up to this solstice has been among the personally worst I’ve had in a while, and the last two months among the globally worst. I know that the turning of years and the passage of human-marked time don’t mean more than what we make them to mean, but as a bunch of us have said, over and over, their meaning what we make them to mean still means something. Know what I mean? So I’m trying to go into this wheel turn into more light with an intention and a resonance wherein the meaning of “more light” is in line with “better things.” It’s obviously no guarantee, but things have been pretty… squishy lately. And this it’s a way to set the stage and a reminder of a direction to and through which to aim. So here’s to more
Coverage of My Work in WRAL
Aug 4, 2024 · original
A few months ago, I was approached by the School of Data Science, and the University Communications office, here at UNC Charlotte, to ask me to sit down for some coverage my Analytics Frontiers keynote, and my work on “AI,” broadly construed. Well, I just found out that the profile that local station WRAL wrote on me went live back in June. My conversations with the writer Shappelle Marshall both on the phone and email were really interesting, and I’m really quite pleased with the resulting piece, on the whole, especially our discussion of how bias (perspectives, values) of some kind will always make its way into all the technologies we make, so we should be trying to make sure they’re the perspectives and values we want , rather than the prejudices we might just so happen to have. Additionally, I appreciate that she included my differentiation between the practice of equity and the felt
Appendix A: An Imagined and Incomplete Conversation about “Consciousness” and “AI,” Across Time
Sep 19, 2023 · original
Every so often, I think about the fact of one of the best things my advisor and committee members let me write and include in my actual doctoral dissertation, and I smile a bit, and since I keep wanting to share it out into the world, I figured I should put it somewhere more accessible. So with all of that said, we now rejoin An Imagined and Incomplete Conversation about “Consciousness” and “AI,” Across Time , already (still, seemingly unendingly) in progress: René Descartes (1637): The physical and the mental have nothing to do with each other. Mind/soul is the only real part of a person. Norbert Wiener (1948): I don’t know about that “only real part” business, but the mind is absolutely the seat of the command and control architecture of information and the ability to reflexively reverse entropy based on context, and input/output feedback loops. Alan Turing (1952): Huh. I wonder if wha
My New Article at WIRED
Aug 12, 2023 · original
So, you may have heard about the whole zoom “AI” Terms of Service clause public relations debacle , going on this past week, in which Zoom decided that it wasn’t going to let users opt out of them feeding our faces and conversations into their LLMs. In 10.1, Zoom defines “Customer Content” as whatever data users provide or generate (“Customer Input”) and whatever else Zoom generates from our uses of Zoom. Then 10.4 says what they’ll use “Customer Content” for, including “…machine learning, artificial intelligence.” And then on cue they dropped an “oh god oh fuck oh shit we fucked up” blog where they pinky promised not to do the thing they left actually-legally-binding ToS language saying they could do. Like, Section 10.4 of the ToS now contains the line “Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without
My New Article at American Scientist
Jul 7, 2023 · original
As of this week, I have a new article in the July-August 2023 Special Issue of American Scientist Magazine. It’s called “ Bias Optimizers ,” and it’s all about the problems and potential remedies of and for GPT-type tools and other “A.I.” This article picks up and expands on thoughts started in “ The ‘P’ Stands for Pre-Trained ” and in a few threads on the socials, as well as touching on some of my comments quoted here, about the use of chatbots and “A.I.” in medicine. I’m particularly proud of the two intro grafs: Recently, I learned that men can sometimes be nurses and secretaries, but women can never be doctors or presidents. I also learned that Black people are more likely to owe money than to have it owed to them. And I learned that if you need disability assistance, you’ll get more of it if you live in a facility than if you receive care at home. At least, that is what I would beli
The “P” Stands for Pre-trained
Apr 18, 2023 · original
I know I’ve said this before , but since we’re going to be hearing increasingly more about Elon Musk and his “Anti-Woke” “A.I.” “Truth GPT” in the coming days and weeks, let’s go ahead and get some things out on the table: All technology is political. All created artifacts are rife with values. There is no neutral tech. And there never, ever has been. I keep trying to tell you that the political right understands this when it suits them— when they can weaponize it; and they’re very, very good at weaponizing it— but people seem to keep not getting it. So let me say it again, in a somewhat different way: There is no ground of pure objectivity. There is no god’s-eye view. There is no purely objective thing. Pretending there is only serves to create the conditions in which the worst people can play “gotcha” anytime they can clearly point to their enemies doing what we are literally all doing

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