Ethical AI, Law, Tech & Human Rights | Seasoned Columnist @DailyMonitor | Interested in how tech improves lives. All views are my own. Retweets ≠ endorsements
Honoured to share my 2 cents on the Regulation of #ArtificialIntelligence#AI in today's Daily Monitor. Notice the overt #MissionImpossible movie reference in the introduction 🫡
Ronny Chieng had one message for Harvard grads during his commencement speech: destroy AI.
"Look, a lot of other respected graduation speakers in colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master AI for the future. I'm here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI...
"And I know, I know there's someone sitting out here right now who’s just like, 'Well, you know, what about the use of AI to pioneer breakthroughs in medicine and physics?' Well, first of all, shut up, nerd. I'm not talking about that. Obviously, if you're using it for that purpose, you're not the problem.
"I'm talking about the accumulation of cognitive debt due to excessive use of large language models according to a study by MIT published in 2025. That's right, MIT. MIT did that study. I guess you guys were too busy giving each other A's. Feel free to boo MIT, by the way, and AI, and yourselves, I guess.
"Look, this is actually good news, okay? This is why you guys shouldn't be scared of AI, because I think AI is just going to end up making mediocre people dumber. Have you heard how dumb people brag about how they use AI? They're always like, 'Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and drop a response?' Yeah, you know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can't do that? How useless are you? You need artificial intelligence just to match me? I'm a dumb*ss who couldn't get into Harvard.
"From what I can see, getting an actual advantage from AI in the future will require a minimum escape velocity of intelligence that I'm assuming you guys from Harvard have. Everyone else who can't match that is just going to get dumber, and that's when you run up the score on them, assuming we still have a functioning society, of course.
"But to run up the score, you’re going to have to master your craft. And AI can be the fuel, but fuel is useless if you can't kindle the fire. For example, I recently used AI to use regression analysis to prove that a certain race of people are mathematically terrible at sports. I won't say which race, but thank you for not inviting Hasan Minhaj to Harvard. My point is, learning the fundamentals still matter. If I didn't know what a regression analysis was, and if I wasn't fundamentally racist, would I have been able to do any of that? No.
"Untalented people love bragging about using AI to help them draft their speeches and their scripts and their podcasts and their promo videos for UFC fights at the White House, which to be fair, even if they had filmed that for real, it would still have looked like AI. But what they're missing is this: the creating is the fun part. The best part of comedy writing is figuring out the puzzle pieces of a joke and getting the self-regard from having accomplished a difficult thing. Why would I want AI to take that away from me?
"You know what problem I want AI to solve? I want the problem of AI making everything look like sh*t. I want AI to solve that problem. How about that?
"Or how about, can AI take away the part of comedy writing where my TV pilot gets passed on and when I ask if I can pitch it to someone else, the network says, 'We don't want it, but we also don't want anyone else to have it. We just want you to be sad.' Can AI solve that?
"I recently tried to introduce my friend to Buddhism through a book called Buddhism Made Simple. It was literally a book about Buddhism made simple. And instead of reading it, he used AI to summarize it in 10 seconds. Believe it or not, he didn't reach enlightenment. It turns out speed running Buddhism is completely missing the point.
"And I know this platitude is almost worthy of AI, but the reason shortcuts to skip to the end aren't always good is because the journey isn't just how we acquire skills. The journey is the point of all this. It is! It turns out maybe the real Harvard was the friends we made along the way.
"Look, I know this won't apply to everyone's industry, but I'm just saying whatever your chosen profession is, please don't let AI rob you of the fun part of it.
"I think your generation's upcoming battle won't be humans against AI. That's at least two months away. It's going to be people with substance versus people with shallow knowledge. It’s going to be mastery versus faking it. It's going to be people with good taste versus tacky. I trust you will put in the work necessary to be on the right side of those battles."
The AI executive order Trump ended up signing ultimately reflects a lot of what Sacks wanted. Even from his new perch outside the White House, Sacks continues to exert significant influence on the president.
W/@ashleyrgold
AI tools variously invented fictitious scandals, gave the wrong date for the election, claimed wrongly that voters in Scottish elections needed ID at polling stations and placed candidates in the wrong contests.
https://t.co/fDbSX6FWsh
Listen to students-- “The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at ‘elite’ universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons." https://t.co/UMpZbZKPmQ
As Americans stew over the looming risk of job-stealing AI and data centers in their backyards, the feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat, documents obtained by WIRED show. https://t.co/zevYyP3lPF
Seen reporting that AI labs like Anthropic and DeepMind are quietly hiring philosophers. Yes, actual philosophy PhDs.
From shaping AI “constitutions” and alignment to tackling machine consciousness, these thinkers are wrestling with the big questions engineers alone can’t answer.
And they’re not stopping there. Historians, anthropologists, poets, novelists and lawyers are joining the fray to improve training data, ethics, and societal fit.
Who knew the humanities would stage a comeback in the AI age? (Uganda’s humanities-hating President Museveni wouldn’t take this well). The future isn’t just code; it’s values, culture, and wisdom too.
#AI #Philosophy #Tech
New research reveals alarming patterns in AI hiring tools.
A large-scale study of 4 million job applications found that 26% of Black applicants and 15% of Asian applicants faced algorithmic discrimination.
When one AI vendor screens for multiple employers, qualified candidates can be systematically rejected everywhere they apply.
As 90% of U.S. employers now use AI screening, understanding these tools' impact on the workforce becomes more urgent.
Hear more from the study's lead author @RishiBommasani or read our latest blog: https://t.co/NvIpUbYPQS
Generative AI doesn’t run on magic. It runs on massive data pipelines built on privacy violations by design.
Our new @Amnesty report exposes how big tech’s AI systems are powered by surveillance, data extraction, and abuse of people’s rights, at scale.
We researched the models powering some of the most popular publicly available standalone generative AI tools, including GPT 3 by Open AI, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek and tools by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.
This is not innovation at any cost. It comes at a high price: our human rights.
Read the report: https://t.co/MGRonqai7o
🎤 CETaS researcher Sam Stockwell has delivered a TEDx talk exploring how AI is reshaping the information environment during elections and moments of crisis: https://t.co/5VSK3TfI9Q
From deepfakes to conspiracy theories, the talk examines #AI, #democracy & public trust.