Democratisation and AI
I keep hearing AI fanatics talk about the “democratisation” of various skills. For example, AI image generators are said to allow users to express their ideas …
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Matthew J. Barnard is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has written on Heidegger, Bergson, and Kant, and he is the author of Heidegger’s Conception of Freedom: Beyond Cause and Effect (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He serves on the Executive Committee of the British Society for Phenomenology and edits its podcast. He is currently working on the phenomenology of technology. [more]
Recent Posts
This Government, This Crisis.
Higher Education funding is in crisis and the present Labour government is not making comforting noises. Until recently, the Government has been mostly silent …
Imposters
In my last post, I argued that academia is beset by anti-intellectualism from without. I now wish to talk about the anti-intellectualism that threatens it from …
A world without experts: alienation in academia
Academia is a peculiar place to work. I’ve worked in several places outside of it, and in all of them I had a very clear idea of how my labour produced …
The LLM of the Gaps: AI, God and Death Angst
I want to unpack something I’ve been thinking about for a while; arguments in favour of the ‘sentience’ of LLM chatbots, and AI in general, …
LLMs Have Plateaued. Now we can finally figure out what to do!
The most intimidating thing about thinking about technology, whether as an academic, a policy maker or just as a human being trying to imagine the next five …
ChatGPT: An Uncritical Friend?
I’ve recently found myself getting on a bit of a soapbox in my conversations with ChatGPT. Naturally, as an academic and particularly as a philosopher, I …
AI Literacies launch
On Friday I attended the launch event of the AI Literacy initiative of the Digital Society Research Group, aka DISC, at Manchester Metropolitan. I recently …
The Predator (2018) | a belated review
The Predator is a surprisingly enjoyable film. It maintains the recent re-injection of humour into action films that started with Deadpool, whilst telling an …
Derren Brown — Miracle (2018) | a belated review
Derren Brown — Miracle | a belated review All argument aims at consensus. We might pretend that we’re “establishing the truth”, but all that really means is …