I can’t believe my life is being affected by the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment

newrepublic.com/article/2013...

Valuable info about the Physics Nobel Prize today from Prof. Joseph Barranco at SFSU on Martinis and Devoret being a grad student and postdoc in Clarke's lab at UC Berkeley & Clark and Devoret being immigrants. "California *public* education made this happen. Immigration made this happen." ⚛️

Michel was my neighbor for many years. Who knew when he was sitting on the condo board that he would soon be a Nobel Laureate. It was an honor to accidentally receive his mail on occasion.

fieldnote feb 2010. Baby me putting some things together...

"They were employees from Tesla Motors, an electric car company owned by Elon Musk. Musk is also the intrepid owner of spaceX AND a donor to the mars society. A NYTimes article also just tooted him as the future of human space flight."

always vague and also always so unappealing!

the definition of 'the metaverse' that Zuck offered in Connect 2025 is awesome revisionist history: "Our goal is to build great looking glasses that deliver personal super intelligence and a feeling of presence using realistic holograms. And these ideas combined create what we call the metaverse."

i'm much madder at Big Tech than i was when i first submitted this article. I offer my tracked changes revision as evidence of entering the no holds bar stage of my career.

This is extortion. Faculty, students, staff, alumni across the country need to get to their Presidents & Trustees today. Just say no. This blackmail only works if most everyone folds. Capitulation now means the end of American higher education for a generation. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/u...

Horrifying.

About to give the first of a few Fall book talks. If you’re in Princeton and free in an hour or so, come through!

anthropology.princeton.edu/events/land-...

Glad Science collected this data (though the results are entirely unsurprising). GenAI cannot accurately summarize scientific papers, sacrificing accuracy for simplicity.

And shame on publishers who are pushing genAI summaries on readers. Great way to accelerate an epistemic apocalypse.

"the AI apocalypse ...is simply our own world... Instead of superintelligent AI, we have super-wealthy tech oligarchs; like the hypothetical AI, the oligarchs want to colonize the universe; like the hypothetical AI, the oligarchs don't seem to care abt the desires and well-being of the rest of us."

This has a healthy dose of schadenfreude

And/but this product makes me nervous. Zuck's quest is to "connect." For him this means having the digital always present. He has never understood the tradeoff by which being connected digitally disconnects us from those with whom we are physically present.

Turns out, Mapquest still labels the body of water to the west of Florida The Gulf of Mexico. Welcome to the resistance, Mapquest.

oh oh! "this one" (i thought the study, not the original claim) got misunderstood by me :)

I know. When I first read it I hemmed and hawed about sharing it. But bc I see people increasingly saying how good GPT is at summarizing, this is right now the only empirical study I have to retort with. Very happy to update reference if you have a better one!

and also, it's not:
www.cjr.org/analysis/i-t...

at any moment, without disclosing doing so, OpenAI can change the performance of ChatGPT to express certain views and suppress others. Even without the abundant evidence that this is not a good tool for purportedly fact-based enterprises, it is even worse at the intersection of fact and policy.

🙏

I have a student, Michelle Venetucci, who goes even harder on this point. She doesn't have her argument yet published, but very much offers a warning for scholars not to over index on what these people 'say.' It's just about profit. So easy!

yup! shameless book and article plug if you want to go deep on the previous hype cycle and get some different angles for critiquing AI
Book, "In the Land of the Unreal": www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-land-...
Article, "Putting Big Tech in its Place": anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

I always love these, but please draw your attention to the bottom row. Donald Trama.

seems super relevant that the silicon valley rationalists are absorbing all of the same source material and ideas that L. Ron Hubbard did before he launched scientology....