Dr Brett H Meyer

I love running in lilac season: the sweetness in the air is magical.

Anthropic is out with new nonsense about Claude (or the collection of models called Claude) deserving moral consideration and/or be able to feel distress, so my inbox is filling up with journos asking me to comment. I've also got a day job, so here is a brief set of public comments on this: >>

Forget Columbus Day (US) or Thanksgiving Day (Canada). It should be Indigenous Peoples' Day across Turtle Island. Celebrate Indigenous strength, resilience, and culture today instead of romanticizing settler history.

Whenever someone legitimizes harmful shit with the importance of achieving "dominance" you have a fascist at hand.

Oof, this makes me feel ill. It’s epistimicide on an unfathomable scale, and we’re being led into it to the joyful beating of the drums of “progress.”

Resist the uncritical adoption of AI in education. openletter.earth/open-letter-...

This is about what I would expect. GenAI is a B or C student. For my part, this is driving a move away from graded homework and toward exams that test practical skills in a controlled environment.

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Can you be a billionaire without also being a solipsist?

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I’m so grateful for the voice of @parismarx.com at this morning’s panel at FAccT’26 today. “There’s a real divide between what the government wants and what the public sees.”

🎯🎯🎯 www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Please Use AI

Is something “too dangerous” if it’s easy to slap on guardrails? Tigers are really dangerous. Tigers are at the zoo in my town. Don’t go in the tiger enclosure at the zoo. The zoo is pretty good at keeping you out. Under normal circumstances, tigers aren’t really something to be alarmed about.

Welcome to the Slopocene Epoch.

Particularly in the context of (appropriate) crackdowns on LLM-generated papers (e.g., on arXiv) and more and more tales of fabricated citations, two reminders: (1) LLMs do not "cite their sources" (2) Using an LLM to generate, complete, or fix LaTeX code can result in fabricated citations

In this metaphor, who is the shark and who is the diver?

I desire more in life than to be the “don’t summarise with AI”-guy on bluesky 😅 but reports like this keep coming in, so I’ll repeat ad nauseam, don’t summarise with ‘AI’! www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

This is crushing.

"I have a finite time on this earth that I mostly want to spend interacting with other human beings. I don’t want to be the person arguing with a robot, or wasting my time reading something that a real person couldn’t be bothered to write."

WTF, NYer. "If we agree that college primarily serves a credentialling process that stamps select young people as worthy of work..." We do not. So much for the bastion of erudite journalism. This is sensationalism, damaging our most vital institution: education. www.newyorker.com/news/fault-l...

The National Science Foundation is the main source of funding for basic sciences in the US. For decades, they have supported a scientific R&D ecosystem in the US that has been an engine of economic growth and competitive advantage. Destroying the agency is no less than an act of sabotage.

Just imagine installing an OS and needing to acknowledge that “the software is not intended for use in California” because it does not comply with their age verification law. 🫠

"What exactly do you expect Carney to do / not do?" A thread of 50 specific items (with links, and not in any particular order), a large fraction of which are in line with warning signs we pointed out early on and were told to be quiet, wait and see, or trust his 4D chess acumen. 1/??

“Amazon, Microsoft & Google ​have each recently abandoned construction of multibillion-dollar data centers over community opposition & now the companies are coming under shareholder pressure over ‌the environmental impact” Lose the passive voice—PEOPLE are doing this💫 www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

fresh off the press from yours truly: oecs.mit.edu/pub/b61joemo... I offer an overview of algorithmic bias. I trace its historical roots, examine canonical scholarship and notable real-world incidents, and explore how algorithmic bias emerged as a field of study 1/

I certainly won't claim that all human scientific endeavors have always been good and noble and without any suffering to humankind. But I will say that the scientific impulse--the curiosity that drives us to work together to understand our universe--is one of my very favorite things about humanity.

I met with AI data labelers in Kenya who are organizing their colleagues to fight the brutal working conditions and horrible pay given to the workers at the "bottom of the AI supply chain." They believe the NDAs they've signed are unenforceable so are speaking out: www.404media.co/ai-is-africa...

Category error! I'm sick to the back teeth of comparisons to humans. It's so rife even colleagues do it. What's next? > I compared a rock and a person, and challenged them to stay still the longest and the rock won! Wow! Things thought up by the unhinged & those who wish to dehumanise for profit.

Community *is* the most important part. Don’t let corporations profit from driving us into isolation.

Oof, yes: magical thinking and self-soothing for sure.

"A man free of patriarchy is a man who has found not only every woman's humanity, but one who has at last discovered his own. The actual path to liberation for lonely men is feminism—because pursuing an identity based on dominating others is self-isolating." www.the-reframe.com/fix-your-hea...

The grey goo that we used to be afraid of, the output of out of control nano machines? It’s actually this. It isn’t a sterile organic landscape, it’s an unsympathetically incongruent, incomprehensible, and untrustworthy information landscape.

This is the way.

Tha feeling when you open your laptop 30 minutes before class and it is closing applications to install an update.

Yes, they are harmful— especially in education— precisely because of their utility.

“If you look at major companies and corporations like Microsoft and Google, they are the very entities that are powering genocide, powering war. You start to realize that a lot of the claims around 'AI for good' start to crumble.” - @abeba.bsky.social

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

And not only completing it, but doing so well, producing a durable result worth being proud of. There has always been shortcuts. When the work matters, they’re always a trap.

Rhetoric didn’t shoot the guns.

Blistering piece on ed tech in @economist.com. ‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it.’ economist.com/united-state...