"You Are Not a Parrot and a chatbot is not a human" - an interview/profile of Emily M. Bender, the "computational linguist at the University of Washington ... [who] co-wrote the octopus paper... to illustrate what ... LLMs ... can and cannot do"The paper: "Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Ag…

everyone is intransigent now ... Social media acts as a massive collective Sorting Hat, silently assigning most of us to filter bubbles wherein our beliefs and biases are rarely challenged. News (or “news”) sources rise up to cater... slowly, these isolated groups do what isolated groups do... become more extreme. Increasing extremity in one group…

in 2016, the criticism from Hannity and a vocal faction of the conservative news media reached a fever pitch... full-blown, searing criticism. Even figures like Ryan and Cruz, considered by most to have iron-clad conservative credentials, were no longer safe... an incidental twist, considering how Republicans helped foster the growth of the conser…

In 2007 I tangled with the UK’s Eurosceptic movement when it was nothing more than a lunatic fringe. Post-Brexit, Welcome to the New Normal.

Mr. Trump’s campaign has engendered impassioned debate about the nature of his appeal and warnings from critics on the left and the right about the potential rise of fascism in the United States... leaders like Vladimir V. Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan employ strongman tactics. In Austria, a nationalist candidate came within three-tenths of a pe…

The candidate for the far-right Freedom Party in Austria lost the country’s cliffhanger presidential election on Monday by the slimmest of margins. Still, it was an example of the electoral gains made by right-wing parties in a growing number of European countries

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered the impact of social media on news; technologies like augmented reality; and the impact of both on society. It is the first time these Top3ics have meshed so perfectly in one month.

The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump... thin-skinned authoritarians ... do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their powe…

His incoherent and contradictory utterances have one thing in common: They provoke and play on feelings of resentment and disdain, intermingled with bits of fear, hatred and anger... he has tapped into is what the founders most feared when they established the democratic republic: the popular passions unleashed, the “mobocracy".. Successful fascis…

Trump staged a rally in which three girls–called “The Freedom Kids”–lip-synched a pop song praising the brutality of their incumbent leader. “... Deal from strength or get crushed every time!” they sang... Many Americans found it baffling. For those familiar with the decadent patriotism of Central Asian national performances... it was disconcertin…

the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither... But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades... views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending... There…

[leaders are] usually busy furiously making believe that there is no decline. Instead of leading societies out of decline (which is what they should be doing), they’re working night and day manufacturing (or luxuriously reclining in) what I’ll call Unreality Bubbles... intelligentsias manufacture unrealities in eras of decline because their positi…

"So you think “President Trump” is the worst case scenario?" - Some thoughts, originally on my oldblog and then updated on Medium:

So you think "President Trump" is the worst case scenario? The rise of American authoritarianism provides the best article I've read explaining the Rise of Trump, even if it's a bit longer than previous favourites. It covers psychological research into authoritarianism, the profile characterized by a desire for order and a fear…

If I’d told you last Christmas that the leading contender for President of the richest and most powerful country on the globe had openly said that he was OK with armbands, internment camps, extra-judicial bans, and blood rights, unless you were a card-carrying member of Conspiracy Theorists International, you probably would have laughed at me.