Keynote at BSP26
I’m going to be speaking this week at the BSP Annual Conference at the University of Sussex. The conference is titled ‘Heidegger Fifty Years On: Can …
Blog Index
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Freedom of Speech and the University
Part of being a philosopher is appreciating really good sophistry. And, one need not look further for great sophistry than the free speech in universities …
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 …
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 …