Stephen Downes

This article uses a lot of words to make what is at heart a simple point: "Drawing on experience across higher education in the UK and Malaysia, two academics argue that the real AI divide in universities is not about access to tools but about institutional readiness - and why it is an urgent equity issue policymakers can no longer afford to ignore." Via Sai Gattupalli.

Haven't tried it, but I definitely want to take note of a federated version of GitHub. "Forgejo can be trusted to be exclusively Free Software. You can create an account on Codeberg and other instances or download it to self-host your own. It focuses on security, scaling, federation and privacy." Via Paul Walk.

To put it simply, in 'modernism' there was one point of view (one type of truth, one view of the world, one way of describing it), which had its good and bad points. Then came 'post-modernism', which allowed for many points of view. "Instead of thoughtful maps, we had endless competing realities." Now we're in a mess that "leaves us trapped in blinded deadens of certainties of yesterday and the endless fragmentation of today." Now what we're searching for is a way to support 'shared meaning' and 'collective action'. That's the article. Here's my take: there never was just one point of view; there were always multiple points of view, but we just weren't able to see them. Now, the scales have fallen from our eyes, and we see the complexity of perspectives for what it is. Trying to force the entire world into having 'one point of view' is a fool's errand. Forget shared meaning and collective action. Focus on global networks and cooperation. (That's my pitch, and if you like it, you can subscribe to my newsletter).

Lucy Suchman writes (5 page PDF), "The term 'AI' can be read as a label for currently dominant computational techniques and technologies that extract statistical correlations (designated as patterns) from large datasets, based on the adjustment of relevant parameters according to either internally or externally generated feedback." Great definition. So how did AI come to be thought of as a 'thing'? "'AI' is a term that suggests a specific referent but works to escape definition in order to maximize its suggestive power...  the thingness of AI works through a strategic vagueness that serves the interests of its promoters, as those who are uncertain about its referents (popular media commentators, policy makers and publics) are left to assume that others know what it is." Image: Heaven.

My own take is that Anthropic's competitors (one especially that rhymes with 'tusk') have been given a gift by the U.S. government (there are a million other points of view being expressed out there that I won't attempt to review). "The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national... The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance." I tried Fable briefly to run a security scan on my software; it did find a new issue, but also ate my (admittedly meagre) budget quickly.

As a long-time government employee I learned early that there's no such thing as job security, and when I retired in April the entire Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) team was cut, which took the bloom off the rose. I've never understood layoffs; it really is like "chopping off their own arms and legs in a vain attempt to protect the heart." Layoffs seem like recognition that your workload is shrinking, and instead of using all the resources already at your disposal to find a way to expand your services develop new offerings, you just contract to make sure the next quarter is profitable. As this article makes clear, if you thought universities were different, you're wrong. "Our universities have now become hollowed-out and unmoored from their original purpose... they are more like aggressive medium-sized enterprises struggling for market share than the school-like cloisters that voters perhaps picture."