Emanuelle Burton
@emanuelleburton.bsky.social
I’m a religion scholar who teaches ethics to computer science majors, talks about the books I have read, and ignores the books I want to read and watches tv instead
Computing & Technology Ethics: Engaging through Science Fiction now out from MIT Press
Computing & Technology Ethics: Engaging through Science Fiction now out from MIT Press
(The preview photo is unrelated to the story itself)
November 22, 2025 at 5:46 PM
(The preview photo is unrelated to the story itself)
One more: this story feels like Hunter S Thompson writing about cryptocurrency with a sci fi twist www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mone...
Money in the Bank - Lightspeed Magazine
“I lined up a new gig for you,” said the Glovemaster. “All you have to do is protect one special guy.” I sat in my trailer with my Bluetooth headphones on and my laptop perched on an Amazon box. I wor...
www.lightspeedmagazine.com
November 22, 2025 at 4:23 PM
One more: this story feels like Hunter S Thompson writing about cryptocurrency with a sci fi twist www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/mone...
Another one by Vina Jie-Min Prasad which doesn’t really meet the brief of your current ask but which I strongly suspect you would love: www.uncannymagazine.com/article/fand...
Fandom for Robots - Uncanny Magazine
Computron feels no emotion towards the animated television show titled Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード). After all, Computron does not have any emotion circuits installed, and is thus constit...
www.uncannymagazine.com
November 22, 2025 at 4:16 PM
Another one by Vina Jie-Min Prasad which doesn’t really meet the brief of your current ask but which I strongly suspect you would love: www.uncannymagazine.com/article/fand...
Oh you know what another one that might appeal is E M Forster’s The Machine Stops, which was published in 1909 and no doubt felt like a generic future dystopia as recently as 25 years ago but which really hits now: www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teach...
www.cs.ucdavis.edu
November 22, 2025 at 4:11 PM
Oh you know what another one that might appeal is E M Forster’s The Machine Stops, which was published in 1909 and no doubt felt like a generic future dystopia as recently as 25 years ago but which really hits now: www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teach...
I’d also recommend Vajra Chandrasekera’s work more generally: the story I wanted to link, Applied Cenotaphics in the Long Long Longitudes, doesn’t seem to be online anymore (possibly because Strange Horizons has closed?) but everything of his I’ve read is really interesting
November 22, 2025 at 4:06 PM
I’d also recommend Vajra Chandrasekera’s work more generally: the story I wanted to link, Applied Cenotaphics in the Long Long Longitudes, doesn’t seem to be online anymore (possibly because Strange Horizons has closed?) but everything of his I’ve read is really interesting
A griefbot story doing something much more trenchant and interesting (imo) than a lot of the others clarkesworldmagazine.com/jia-wen_06_25/
If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow by Claire Jia-Wen
Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.
clarkesworldmagazine.com
November 22, 2025 at 4:02 PM
A griefbot story doing something much more trenchant and interesting (imo) than a lot of the others clarkesworldmagazine.com/jia-wen_06_25/
A very fun cyberpunk story with a kind of a heist vibe clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad_01_17/
A Series of Steaks by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.
clarkesworldmagazine.com
November 22, 2025 at 4:01 PM
A very fun cyberpunk story with a kind of a heist vibe clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad_01_17/
If you’re interested in short stories as well as novels, I can recommend several! This one isn’t cyberpunk, but it is near-future and technosocially disconcerting www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...
“Asleep at the Wheel”
“She’s smiling as he comes up to the car, and he’s smiling, too, and now he’s reaching for the door handle . . . but the door seems to be locked, and she’s fumbling for the release.”
www.newyorker.com
November 22, 2025 at 4:00 PM
If you’re interested in short stories as well as novels, I can recommend several! This one isn’t cyberpunk, but it is near-future and technosocially disconcerting www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...
We had a really good paper on overlearning by search models at AIES this year! ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...
Emergent AI Surveillance: Overlearned Person Re-Identification and Its Mitigation in Law Enforcement Context
| Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
ojs.aaai.org
November 13, 2025 at 3:35 PM
We had a really good paper on overlearning by search models at AIES this year! ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...
Reposted by Emanuelle Burton
I do, of course, have a paragraph from "Why We Fear AI" for this
November 11, 2025 at 8:36 PM
I do, of course, have a paragraph from "Why We Fear AI" for this
Oh that sounds so good! We watched BODKIN on the strength of an old-fashioned recommendation algorithm (a human friend told us that it was similar and they’d liked it) but it was only ok. We’ll give BS a try!
November 12, 2025 at 6:03 PM
Oh that sounds so good! We watched BODKIN on the strength of an old-fashioned recommendation algorithm (a human friend told us that it was similar and they’d liked it) but it was only ok. We’ll give BS a try!
Aaaaaaaa FINALLY
November 12, 2025 at 4:47 PM
Aaaaaaaa FINALLY
…which is that the fantasy of objective knowledge is not benign: it gives you permission to launder your own founding premises into some kind of universal truth, and the whole project of research can get remade into a search for the method that gives you plausible cover for that laundering
November 7, 2025 at 2:37 PM
…which is that the fantasy of objective knowledge is not benign: it gives you permission to launder your own founding premises into some kind of universal truth, and the whole project of research can get remade into a search for the method that gives you plausible cover for that laundering
I ground my whole approach to teaching ethics (to CS students) in epistemology, bc I think anyone working with data & information needs to understand that those things are created & constructed rather than found in some kind of natural state, but this is the other reason I think it’s so important…
November 7, 2025 at 2:34 PM
I ground my whole approach to teaching ethics (to CS students) in epistemology, bc I think anyone working with data & information needs to understand that those things are created & constructed rather than found in some kind of natural state, but this is the other reason I think it’s so important…
And for some strange reason — who can say, really — isolating and identifying the kinds of racism that are acceptable for Science Knowers is a very high priority research project
November 7, 2025 at 2:32 PM
And for some strange reason — who can say, really — isolating and identifying the kinds of racism that are acceptable for Science Knowers is a very high priority research project
Yeah there’s an alarmingly large number of people who agree that racism is bad if it’s rooted in bias (ie human weakness & limitation), but that if you ground it in “pure data” (heavy scare quotes) it’s somehow legitimate
November 7, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Yeah there’s an alarmingly large number of people who agree that racism is bad if it’s rooted in bias (ie human weakness & limitation), but that if you ground it in “pure data” (heavy scare quotes) it’s somehow legitimate
This reminds me of when some right-wing commentator — I want to say Dinesh D’Souza? — said smugly in the mid-aughts that queer people had the exact same marriage rights as everyone else, which is to say the right to marry a person of the opposite sex.
November 7, 2025 at 1:52 AM
This reminds me of when some right-wing commentator — I want to say Dinesh D’Souza? — said smugly in the mid-aughts that queer people had the exact same marriage rights as everyone else, which is to say the right to marry a person of the opposite sex.
It’s going to be whack-a-mole as long as people in AI understand the barriers to credible phrenology as a data-and-implementation problem rather than a “that’s just racism in a scientific bow tie” problem
November 6, 2025 at 9:44 PM
It’s going to be whack-a-mole as long as people in AI understand the barriers to credible phrenology as a data-and-implementation problem rather than a “that’s just racism in a scientific bow tie” problem
I want to say “are we really doing this again” except we’ve never stopped doing this
November 6, 2025 at 9:41 PM
I want to say “are we really doing this again” except we’ve never stopped doing this
Well, we’re glad to have you in Chicago
November 5, 2025 at 4:26 AM
Well, we’re glad to have you in Chicago