Critiques of artificial intelligence abound. Where’s the utopian vision for what it could be?
AI FOR EPISTEMICS & COORDINATION
Civilization and technology have radically improved the human condition. Nonetheless, the world sometimes goes in directions which essentially nobody would prefer — e.g., nuclear arms races, unexpected financial crashes, predatory marketing, or ubiquitous political misinformation.
AI, Ethics, and Society — Home
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Human Thought
This research paper examines, from a multidimensional perspective (cognitive, social, ethical, and philosophical), how AI is transforming human thought. It highlights a cognitive offloading effect: the externalization of mental functions to AI can reduce intellectual engagement and weaken critical thinking. On the social level, algorithmic personalization creates filter bubbles that limit the diversity of opinions and can lead to the homogenization of thought and polarization. This research also describes the mechanisms of algorithmic manipulation (exploitation of cognitive biases, automated disinformation, etc.) that amplify AI's power of influence. Finally, the question of potential artificial consciousness is discussed, along with its ethical implications. The report as a whole underscores the risks that AI poses to human intellectual autonomy and creativity, while proposing avenues (education, transparency, governance) to align AI development with the interests of humanity.
Is there something it is like to be an AI?
Posted on Wednesday 2 Jul 2025. 1,593 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.
Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion
For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).
The AI Apocalypse Is Already Here | Compact
Americans do not care for artificial intelligence. Recent polling shows that their attitudes mostly range from ambivalence to horror.
Building Political Superintelligence
Amidst fears of dystopia, a blueprint for how we use AI to reinvent the way we govern ourselves
Anthropomorphism Is Breaking Our Ability to Judge AI
Tech Policy Press fellow James Ball asks, how should we interact with a technology designed to ‘speak’ with us on what appear to be human terms?
Are We Betting on the Wrong Kind of Intelligence?
AI optimizes for the world as it was. Rewilding could be what prepares us for the world as it is.
Governments Can’t Agree on What AI Actually Is
Without clear definitions, governance is impossible.
Reify This
The authors contend that contemporary efforts to render AI systems interpretable rest on a mistake: reification, the process of treating abstractions and statistical artifacts as if they were concrete realities.…
The Thoughts The Civilized Keep
The hype around a new AI language generator reveals the sterility of mainstream thinking on AI today — and indeed on how we think about thinking itself.
The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025
An inside view of the AI revolution, from the people an…
70 years of AI hype
Quoting from Olivia Guest et al. (2025) "Against the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia."
