Category: Artificial Intelligence

Situational Awareness … or Blindness

You can see the future first in San Francisco.

The New York Times has a story about the company Situational Awareness, Floundering A.I. ‘Nostradamus’ Hedge Fund Is Rescued by Rival. The company was founded by Leopold Aschenbrenner who wrote an essay on Situational Awareness arguing that,

The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.

The company basically was set up to bet on the predictions from the 2024 essay. Alas, they bet too much and there has recently been a drop in the value of some of the AI-related companies they bet on so they had to be rescued.

The phrase, “situational awareness”, however comes from the belief that those in and around San Francisco, working in AI labs, have a privileged awareness of what is happening or going to happen. The essay begins with the phrase,

Before long, the world will wake up. But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness.

The subtext is that the rest of us are ignorant and should believe the SF folk because of where they are and where they work. This runs in the face of research about the value of expert predictions. Philip E. Tetlock’s work on forecasting suggests that generalists outperform those with a narrow expert focus.

Our generation too easily takes for granted that we live in peace and freedom. And those who herald the age of AGI in SF too often ignore the elephant in the room: superintelligence is a matter of national security, and the United States must win.

There is a further issue with the essay, and that it is the compounded prediction that since superintelligence is going to happen, and it will be the most powerful weapon ever developed, it is important that WE (the Unites States) control it. It is all about the “win” and betting on that win.

How does one unpack the assumptions in this essay and situational ideology?

DHCC Project Self-Assessment Tool (v1.0)

This self-assessment tool is intended to support Digital Humanities practitioners, researchers, technicians, curators, software engineers, and related professionals seeking to embed environmental sustainability into their project design, delivery, and reporting. In line with the EPSRC AREA framework for responsible research and innovation, the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition recommends using the tool to reflect on how project design, delivery, and reporting might Anticipate, Reflect on, Engage with, and Act to mitigate the environmental impacts of Digital Humanities work.

At DH2026 I heard Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert present on DH and sustainability. The Digital Humanities Climate Coalition has produced a DHCC Project Self-Assessment Tool (v1.0). This tool is a series of questions to get people to think about the sustainability of their project. It was inspired by the Framework for responsible research and innovation.

She talked about different events she organized at the British Library, inviting people who had developed workshops to run them at the BL. Another project to look at is the The Carbon Literacy Project.

With Chelsea Miya I worked on a paper on “Platitudes: The Carbon Weight of the Post-Platform Scholarly Web.” The Journal of Electronic Publishing. Vol. 28, No. 2. 2025. https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.7247 .

What I like about the Self-Assessment Tool is that it asks questions, though they are leading questions rather than questions that don’t have obvious answers. I think it could be used by students to assess DH projects.

Pacing the Frontier

We request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.

Over a 1000 employees of frontier AI companies, including Dario Amodei, have issued a statement, Pacing the Frontier, that calls for the AI governance. Some of the things to note:

  • It is similar to the 2023 Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter that was also signed by all sorts of important people (and some unimportant people like me. In both, the idea is that we need to go more slowly if we are to make sure that AI is safe and used for good.
  • This version doesn’t ask the AI labs to “immediately pause”, but asks for the U.S. government to “support an international effort” which is an interesting shift. That international effort already exists in the form of the network of AI Safety Institutes set up after the Bletchley Summit. (I am on the Research Council of the Canadian AISI.) I also note that the statement calls for “support” not leadership. This is realistic as few countries are likely to sign up to be led by the U.S. right now. This U.S. Administration has squandered any international good will they had, at least from Canada.
  • Another difference is the call for “governance tools.” This sounds a lot like the “regulation” word that normally isn’t welcome in innovation focused circles. To be fair there are other sorts of tools that can be used to govern companies and products. Many exist now, they just have to be used. The problem is that governing is something humans do. No amount of tools left on the shop floor of government are going to substitute for consistent, public, articulate governing. Who has a track record doing this? Who would trust the U.S. to support them?
  • I should add that “technical and governance tools” sounds again like a techno-solutionism where you solve problems that arise from the poor governance of technology with more technology. (See Morozov’s book To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism.)
  • Finally, I should mention that the opening to the Statement has a now tired hinge statement of the sort “AI will save us all, BUT ….” where after the hinge (the BUT) there is a little problem raised for which, of course, the authors have a solution.

AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed. The world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research. It is hard to predict exactly how much this will accelerate AI progress, but there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.

To realize AI’s potential, industry, government, and society at large may need the option to buy time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight. But each company—and country—is under intense competitive pressure not to unilaterally slow that acceleration. And today, the world lacks the technical and governance tools to deliberately pace frontier-wide progress.

Sorry, Sam and Elon, we have not reached the Singularity

Gary Marcus has a nice substack gathering recent (and not so recent) inflated statements from the titans of the AI industry (Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis) to the effect that we are in the Singularity.

Is this more Singularity Theatre, a performance designed to keep us glued to our seats waiting for the next act (and paying as we sit)? Or is it the Rapture of Nerds to name a Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross novel. The Rapture would be the supposedly inevitable end when we are swept up from this corrupt meat world and immortalized in a virtual heaven.

Either way, a history of science-fiction works like Stross’s Accelerando deserve attention as imaginative ground in which such technological speculations grow.

Mockaroo – Random Data Generator

A free test data generator and API mocking tool – Mockaroo lets you create custom CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel datasets to test and demo your software.

Reading a draft journal article I came across Mockaroo – Random Data Generator and API Mocking Tool | JSON / CSV / SQL / Excel. This tool lets you generate testing datasets following different rules. You could generate a test dataset of personae with different configurations of personal characteristics for testing bias.

Neat!

Once again we are told AI may be conscious – Anil Seth

Anil Seth, who wrote Being You, a great and accessible book about the study of consciousness, has an opinion in The Guardian on Once again we are told AI may be conscious – I study consciousness, and I have my doubts. He makes a couple of interesting points in response to recent Anthropic research claiming they have found something like (consciousness) workspace using new techniques for looking into LLMs like Claude.

  • He returns to Nagel’s point that for some organism to be conscious “there is something that it is like to be that organism”. The question then is whether there is something that it is like to be an AI. Does that make sense at this point?
  • Consciousness is experience and is not the same as intelligence. Intelligence is about the doing of tasks, consciousness is about feeling and experience. Can an AI feel?
  • Consiousness is also continuous and reflective. Claude isn’t continuously conscious reflecting back on its consciousness.
  • Above all, for Seth, it is about the body. Our consciousness is about the experience of being me, in this mortal body, in this place, at this time. Claude has no experience of being in finite body thrown into a time and place.

CSDH Conference 2026

The CSDH-SCHN 2026 conference was held this year at the Université de Montreal.

The Bridging Divides team had a number of papers at the conference that I was part of:

  • “Platformed Racism: Anti-South Asian Immigration Narratives in Canadian Telegram Networks” was presented by Ayushi Khemka. (I was a co-author, along with Leonardo Nascimento and Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Yasmeen).
  • “From Black Boxes to Glass Boxes: Auditable Voyant Workflows (with Bounded LLM Assistance) for Evidence-Based Distant Reading” was presented by Augustine Farinola. (John Bradley and I were co-authors.)
  • “Abstract Rhetorics of Algorithmic Governance: A Bilingual Corpus Study of Canadian AIA” was presented by Augustine Farinola and Ralph Padilla. (Yasmeen Abu-Laban and I were co-authors.)

We also had a panel which was introduced by Yasmeen Abu-Laban and moderated by me on “Critical Digital Humanities and Immigration Research.” The participants were Sawafta, Eleyan; Le, Huong; Alzubaidi, Abdullah; Farinola, Augustine; Khemka, Ayushi; and Padilla, Ralph.

Then we had two posters:

  • “Constellation Word2Vec Viewer in Voyant” was presented by Ryan Chartier.
  • “Making AI Legible: Visual workflows for Critical Reflexivity and Ethical LLM Use in the Social Sciences and Humanities” was presented by Abhik Hasnain.

Congratulations also to Ayushi Khemka for her own paper on “Misnaming in the Machine: Epistemic Injustice, Digital Translation, and the Racialisation of “Indian””, and Augustine Farinola who had a paper on “Untranslatable Lived Experience: Persona‑Driven RAG for Digital Humanities Pedagogy in Immigration Systems.”

Anthropic co-founder remarks on “Magnifica humanitas”

Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah was one of the respondents on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas. (You can see my blog post here.) His remarks have been posted on the Anthropic site. Unlike some accelerationists who don’t want to listen to anyone outside the magic circle, he is humble and invites dialogue. Some of the points he makes:

  • He starts by recognizing how those who work in the AI industry operate “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.”
  • Which is why he welcomes “Magnifica humanitas” and calls for dialogue.
  • He hopes that “if this technology is coming, it must go well—for our common home, and for the children to come.” Note that he doesn’t assume it is coming.
  • He describes it in almost human terms. “They are grown, on a structure roughly modeled after the brain, on an enormous inheritance of human thought and speech.” He says they are not the cold beings we expected but developing them is, “a little like bringing a fictional character to life.” Note that he doesn’t say it is like bringing a person to life, but making close as fiction. (Remember that “fiction” comes etymologically from “fashioning.”)

He names three questions where the Church’s discernment is needed. For that matter, he is clear that these discussion are not just for the engineers or Church, but for all.

  • The first is our duty to the global poor. 
  • The second is the need for moral imagination and ambition regarding human flourishing.
  • The third is the need for discernment on the nature of AI models. 

I would like to ask how a dialogue that goes beyond those in and with power could take place? Many just wait and hope they don’t lose their jobs or end up managed by a machine.

Ross Douthat has an opinion piece on Leo’s encyclical that is interesting. He says, “the core idea that we need to treat the A.I. future as a fundamentally political sphere, requiring democratic deliberation and political constraint, seems essential and correct.”

Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power

Pope Leo the XIV just released an encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. The encyclical was released on the 135th anniversary of the encyclical Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Human Labor by his namesake pope, Leo XIII.

The two are clearly meant to be connected. Magnifica humanitas, or “magnificent humanity” doesn’t paint AI as either good or bad, or for that matter, neutral. It is about humans making choices that safeguard (or not) our dignity (and magnificence.) I rather like the emphasis on our magnificence and the suggestion and AI could be one of our great deeds.

The encyclical identifies 5 principles that are not the usual principles for AI as they are principles of Social Doctrine with application to AI:

  • Common good
  • Universal destination of good (that not all goods be concentrated in the hands of the few)
  • Subsidiarity (that have shared responsibility, not paternalistic welfare)
  • Solidarity (that we care for others and future generations)
  • Social justice

The encyclical is long and deals with a number of issues including the need for dialogue. You can read a summary on the Vatican news web site here. The New York Times has an article on Main Takeaways From Pope Leo’s Encyclical on A.I. and one on how At the Epicenter of A.I., Pope Leo’s Warnings Are Dismissed. This last article captures the attitude of some that “no one outside of Silicon Valley understands AI and therefore we don’t need to listen to them.” No need for dialogue with others when you think you are magnificent.

Edmond de Belamy by Obvious

The Portrait of Edward de Belamy is a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) ink print created by the art group Obvious.

The name “Belamy” is a joke on the name of the developer of GAN, Ian Goodfellow.

The print was bought at auction for $432,500 (USD), a first for AI generated art.

I learned about this from a talk on “Alternative Histories of genAI” by Lauren Tilton. She talked about the institutions involve in authorizing art. Is it art because it was bought for a lot of money?

This talk was part of a conference in Nice and Cannes, Colloque “Créativités artificielles: Approches critiques de l’IA” @ Nice that I also presented at. My talk was on “Thinking-Through Trust in AI”.