Will Wilkinson
LightNews LightNews
banner
wlknsn.xyz
Will Wilkinson
@wlknsn.xyz
14K followers 4.1K following 1.7K posts
Tech policy and government affairs guy. Ex-Block, Niskanen, NYT, Economist, Cato. Los Angeles / Iowa City
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
paulgp.com
This is a great piece (got via @simonwillison.net ) steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampi...

As an economist would say: the productivity enhancement can be real, but the gains should not exclusively accrue to the firm!
The AI Vampire
This was an unusually hard post to write, because it flies in the face of everything else going on.
steve-yegge.medium.com
February 16, 2026 at 5:14 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
eryk.bsky.social
Functionalist approaches measure intelligence by how closely its outputs resemble the human mind. If you constantly recalibrate its outputs to resemble a human mind, you're not creating a thinking machine. You are creating a machine to trick other functionalists.
michaelhobbes.bsky.social Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 5d
To me the chatbots pose zero interesting questions about the ‘nature of selfhood’ but dozens about the nature of manipulation. Here the Claude team pretends they are programming the robot for ethical responses but they land on one that is false and disingenuous.
February 11, 2026 at 7:13 PM
wlknsn.xyz
I think the correct take is that (1) LLMs are normal automation technology. They eliminate some jobs that can be automated, create other jobs managing the automation processes, and increase the productivity of workers who gain mastery of the tools; and… 1/2
chrislhayes.bsky.social Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 5d
I understand why people are exhausted by AI hype, and why those of us squarely in the corner of "human dignity uber alles" see AI doomerism as self-serving hype, but I *really* think people on the left broadly need to start thinking seriously about the possibiltiy of the hype being...true.
February 12, 2026 at 9:25 AM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
josie.zone
Put it in the Louvre? Nah, sis — put it in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations after the grid goes down, because this one needs PRESERVING:
Avery Edison tweet from Mar. 24 2023: "I wrote 'I am alive' on a piece of paper, and placed it into a photocopier. What i saw next has shocking implications"
February 11, 2026 at 8:30 AM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
meo.bsky.social
February 9, 2026 at 5:00 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
shikhadalmia.bsky.social
A tale told in two screenshots :)
February 9, 2026 at 2:40 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
histoftech.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...
Gladys Mae West obituary: mathematician who pioneered GPS technology
She made key contributions to US cold-war science despite facing huge barriers as a Black woman.
www.nature.com
February 6, 2026 at 9:09 AM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
watchyourrepssc.bsky.social
In Minneapolis, people are literally singing resistance before marching to the hotels where ICE agents are staying—inviting them to defect and join us in solidarity. It’s an action rooted in compassion, courage, and collective humanity. Transforming fear into shared power.
February 4, 2026 at 3:23 AM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
wiringthebrain.bsky.social
Now out in Synthese! 😊 "Reframing the free will debate: the universe is not deterministic", with Henry Potter and George Ellis rdcu.be/e2hIh
Figure. 2 Top: Universal (Laplacean) determinism posits a single, unbranching timeline, with no real possibilities. Middle: The standard way to conceptualise indeterminism (“determinism-plus-randomness”) sees the future as a series of forking paths, where alternate possibilities in a sense are pre-existing or pre-statable, and which branch is taken is determined by the intrusion of randomness at specific moments into an otherwise deterministic evolution. Bottom: An alternative way to conceptualise indeterminism (“pervasive indefiniteness”) which sees the future as radically open; with the near-future tightly constrained by current states, but the far-future highly under-determined beyond some time horizon. The present is then defined as the time during which events occur, resolving the open possibilities into actual happenings, which then become the fixed past (Smolin & Verde, 2021; Mitchell, 2023). In this view, in the present “indeterminacy gets resolved as particles catch each other mid-jitter and interact to form some new state, the components of which start jittering all over again” (Mitchell, 2023:163)
February 4, 2026 at 11:24 AM
wlknsn.xyz
Still awash in cortisol from kids summer camp sign-ups.
February 1, 2026 at 7:04 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
charlotteclymer.bsky.social
Well, Kristen Radtke of The Verge just made me cry with this remembrance of her childhood best friend Alex Pretti.

"Alex was an easy playmate: generous, curious, sweet. His mother always ensured he had a tidy haircut and a clean room."

www.theverge.com/policy/86856...
I grew up with Alex Pretti
The kind-hearted ICU nurse shot by federal agents was my childhood best friend.
www.theverge.com
January 27, 2026 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
kristenradtke.bsky.social
I wrote about my childhood friend Alexi Pretti. Please read it and share it and remember him as a human being. @theverge.com
I grew up with Alex Pretti
The kind-hearted ICU nurse shot by ICE agents was my childhood best friend.
www.theverge.com
January 27, 2026 at 4:45 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com
Hello I’m the ubermensch, my one weakness is whistles
justinbaragona.bsky.social Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 21d
Whistles are now WMDs, according to the "high IQ" crowd.
January 25, 2026 at 9:13 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
polgreen.bsky.social
Superb reportage on Minneapolis from one of the all time greats.
January 23, 2026 at 5:15 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
adamjst.bsky.social
If the admin's strategic goal was to break public resistance to immigration enforcement activities, it was a tactical mistake to go to the Twin Cities.
It is the misfortune of Minnesota’s ICE contingent to have invaded the state with the second-highest levels of social trust, trailing only Utah. Many activist networks were formed in 2020; we are seeing, Petrus says, Minnesotans call upon the “muscle memory” of the George Floyd protests. In mid-January, a neighborhood organization for a part of town called Whittier put out a call for a meeting to organize a “Neighborhood ICE response”; more than 800 people showed up at the local elementary school and formed a tidy line extending well beyond the door. (“Why a line?” I ask someone later. “Because we are in Minnesota,” he says.) In the cafeteria, in their big coats, adults struggled to get their legs through benches attached to long lunch tables. Because there were too many Minnesotans to fit in a single room, officials and parents and teachers went room to room giving the same speeches about how to help neighbors in hiding. They then gridded out the rooms, dividing the neighborhood into smaller subdivisions. Close neighbors met one another (“Oh, you live on the other side of the museum”) and formed hyperlocal Signal groups. At the first sighting of an agent, someone could ping the group and draw them outside. Their favored tactic was noise. They would make it impossible for ICE to conduct raids in secret.
January 23, 2026 at 5:57 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
aaronblackshear.bsky.social
Always read Kerry Howley
January 23, 2026 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
andylevy.net
nine years old
“I am Puerto Rican,” she says. “I send my kids with their passports to school. I’m having conversations with them about safety: Am I safe at school? A week ago we had an incident where there was a school bus with the STOP sign open and kids were getting on the bus and it was surrounded by ICE agents. And this is 7:20 in the morning and — just — you get that fight-or-flight response.” At first her 9-year-old was carrying her passport in her backpack; now it’s in her back pocket. “I have to prepare them for it if they get stopped,” she says. “I said, Do not engage. This is not the time to be cussing at anyone. But she said, Mom, if I create enough noise, my friends can get away.”
January 23, 2026 at 3:41 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
nymag.com
Kerry Howley reports from Minneapolis as the city fights back against Trump’s ICE invasion. “The chaos is both real and routine, a stasis that will hold until it doesn’t.” Read the full Cover Story: tinyurl.com/55xjswrn
January 23, 2026 at 1:14 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
kerryhowley.bsky.social
I wrote about Minneapolis.

nymag.com/intelligence...
The People vs. ICE
Renee Good’s death galvanized a city eager to push back against Trump’s invasion.
nymag.com
January 23, 2026 at 12:32 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
eryk.bsky.social
What we call generative AI is actually the logic of poetry infused into the humanity of an insurance table
January 22, 2026 at 2:52 PM
wlknsn.xyz
Just finishing watching Task. Great show. But it struck me that depicting federal law enforcement as apolitical and professional in a contemporary setting now feels like a dispatch from an alternate reality. The feds as the competent grown-up cops is a broken trope.
January 20, 2026 at 5:35 AM
wlknsn.xyz
Just a normal dog
A sleeping couch-bound tri-color bernedoodle puppy splayed in ludicrous fuzzy languor
January 17, 2026 at 6:29 AM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
hamiltonnolan.bsky.social
America has a housing shortage. Every single housing proposal you see that is not "build more housing" will have the primary effect of pushing up the prices of existing housing, and is therefore, in reality, a plan to enrich current homeowners. In conclusion, build more housing.
January 16, 2026 at 9:11 PM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
airbagged.bsky.social
Fuck it I don’t care anymore
Mogwai
January 1, 2026 at 7:01 AM
Reposted by Will Wilkinson
jowolff.bsky.social
Just published, my “The Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the World.”Philosophy and Society 36 (4): 985–1000. Open access.

journal.ifdt.bg.ac.rs/index.php/fi...
View of The Philosophers Have Only Interpreted the World
journal.ifdt.bg.ac.rs
December 29, 2025 at 3:58 PM