Joanna Bryson

@j2bryson.bsky.social

9.1K followers 650 following 5.8K posts

Professor of Ethics & Technology @ Hertie School, Berlin. Interests: Artificial & Natural Intelligence; Behavioural Ecology; Cooperation; Digital Governance. Social media policy: https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2024/10/guidance-to-my-social-media.html .. more

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Joanna Joy Bryson is professor at Hertie School in Berlin. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics and collaborative cognition. She has been a British citizen since 2007.

Source: Wikipedia

Computer science 31%

Neuroscience 25%

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Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · Feb 19

thread. correct numbers and data backing them come later, but this is the thrust.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · Feb 5

One thing I learned last week was that if you don’t count the BS market capitalisation bubble of 7 “AI” firms, the US economy as measured by the s&p 500 didn’t go up 13% last year; it went down 7%.

The EU may be a larger economy already. We need to get our own O2 mask on, then start helping others.

Gary Marcus @garymarcus.bsky.social · Feb 5

Guess why there was no reporting of AI revenue?

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 9h

I'm just glad they are out of that arena. A woods sounds much nicer.

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Sven Nyholm

LMU Munich Philosophy Faculty @lmuphilosophy.bsky.social · 19h

Coming up at LMU Munich: workshop on AI & consciousness, organized by Prof. Sven Nyholm (@svennyholm.bsky.social) & colleagues, on Nov 21. Speakers include Prof. Joanna Bryson (@j2bryson.bsky.social) & Prof. Tobias Schlicht (Bochum). Register here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... #aiethics

AI & Consciousness at LMU

Date: November 21st, 2025 (09:30 until 17:30) Location: LMU München, Leopoldstraße 13, 80802 München, Room 2102. Please register until 18th of November 2025.

docs.google.com

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Aaron Sojourner

Georg Weizsäcker @georgweizsaecker.bsky.social · 23h

🚨Very Strong Job Market Candidates

#EconSky

The Berlin School of Economics is a unique cooperation of 9 institutions - together we do research and train PhDs/Postdocs.

This year: fantastic people in applied micro, behavioral/experimental, and macro. 👇🏻

berlinschoolofeconomics.de/job-market/j...

Job Market Candidates

berlinschoolofeconomics.de

Reposted by Joanna Bryson

Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · 1d

OK I gave in
doi.org/10.1017/S014...

Music as a coevolved system for social bonding (Zohran for New York parody)

Reposted by Joanna Bryson

Maria Popova @popovaprof.bsky.social · 1d

Happy Berlin Wall fall day! Good riddance to the Wall and the regimes that had built it. Celebrate the freedom that followed and don't fall for revisionism. The hard next decade was the pain of extrication from a failed political and economic project. This is my high school class on that day.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

Here are the authors skyping about this paper... bsky.app/profile/lior...

Lior Greenspoon @liorgreenspoon.bsky.social · 14d

What was the composition of mammalian biomass on our planet in 1850? Our new study is now out in @natcomms.nature.com

Milo Lab @WIS @milolabwis.bsky.social · 14d

1/ Wild mammals now comprise ≈5% of mammal biomass globally. How did this come to be? In our new study in @NatureComms, we estimate that in 1850, wild mammals comprised ≈50% of mammal biomass globally www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

Thanks! Did you try asking @liorgreenspoon.bsky.social @uriroll.bsky.social about it?

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Anna O. Law, Jennifer A. Richeson , and 3 more Joanna Bryson, Anna O. Law, Jennifer A. Richeson, Steve Peers, Robert C. Richards, W. Andy Knight

Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 1d

And now, if you read the devastating piece about what Venezuelan deportees endured at the El Salvador torture prison, read what incarcerated U.S. citizens endure in Alabama prisons.

State prisons in the U.S. that are massive systems of human rights violations.
www.theguardian.com/film/2025/oc...

‘How is this possible?’: a new film looks inside the appalling abuses of the Alabama prison system

In the year’s most shocking documentary, The Alabama Solution, prisoners share astonishing footage in a plea for help

www.theguardian.com

Reposted by Joanna Bryson

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

BTW, not evident from the picture, but the linkedin post at the head of this thread complements @rollingstone.com for accurately describing the #systemsAI #systemsEngineering steps Grok (the corporate entity) took to address the harms.
See slide incl. alt text for Musk's ignorance of how LLM work.

A slide about how large language models work. I'd been drawing this on whiteboards for my students, then made a slide at a consciousness meeting where philosophers were confused why LLM never say they aren't sentient. [I hope it's evident that this is informed conjecture, not verbatim truth.] Thus the 3 people in the history of the Internet who ever wrote "I'm not sentient" are out in the fringes of the data, as is the one person who ever said "Check it out, MechaHitler!" However, Musk's attempt to use a second set of guardrails to push Grok right also pushed it towards the under-informed data fringe with the MechaHitler comment. The bottom of the slide says "False statements are not lies, nor hallucinations; just adequate predictions from an inadequately informed part of the data space."

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

Closeup on the whales. Blue whales have gone from huge to invisible to barely visible following the hunting ban. Humpbacks were always in minority, is that related to why they sing?

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

agree, but halving is less scary than sixteenthing, though still very scary.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

Here's two-years-ago's linkedin post by me about 9 November if you want links about all those historic events www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

November Pogroms 1938: The world was watching – DW – 11/08/2023 | Joanna Bryson | 10 comments

The 9th of November used to be Germany’s 4th of July. As a small photo slideshow on this article mentions, "On November 9 1918, Philipp Scheidemann, Social Democrat politician and later chancellor of ...

www.linkedin.com

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

9 November is or was Germany's 4th of July. Now the 1918 founding of the Republic is besmirched by the 1923 "Beer Hall Putsch," the 1938 Kristallnacht, & the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

A memorial reminder: it can happen anywhere; it is happening in the US.

www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Elon Musk’s Grok Chatbot Goes Full Nazi, Calls Itself ‘MechaHitler’ | Joanna Bryson | 14 comments

Today in "AI is a product of engineering." I hate the anthropomorphised title & text – grok (like all generative AI) only provides predictions based on the subset of training text it is steered toward...

www.linkedin.com

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

TBH, this is LESS scary than what I've previously seen (& show in my talks) which is strictly proportional. The absolute declines of wild mammals are less severe than I'd realised. Humans are VERY good at producing public goods. But life in general is NOT zero sum. We make biomass from rocks & sun.

Dr Charlie Gardner @charliejgardner.bsky.social · 13d

In 1850 the weight of all the world's wild mammals equalled the weight of humans and our livestock

Today they are outweighed 1 to 20

Reconfiguring life on this planet to produce cheap meat and dairy

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

Everyone please read at least through the bottom three "key points" after the abstract, which are actionable. By which point you may as well look at the pictures too.

via @eightywires.bsky.social

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1d

First: Nobels are not given for recognition but reward. They are never given to the dead.

Second: there is an enormous difference in portraying a smart woman as a partner than a victim. The latter plays into a sexist trope.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

I you REALLY, REALLY want a story of a woman whose data was stolen by her evil phd supervisor who then won a Nobel Prize with it, there’s always en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn... She hid proof it was really her data in a place she knew her supervisor would never look—the appendix of her dissertation.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

“According to journalist Horace Freeland Judson & Franklin’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin has been reduced to the “wronged heroine” of the double helix. She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal contributor to the solution of the structure.”

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

“One of the first public displays of the double helix, at the Royal Society Conversazione in June 1953, was signed by the authors of all three Nature papers1–3,21. In this, the discovery of the structure of DNA was not seen as a race won by Watson and Crick, but as the outcome of a joint effort.”

According to journalist Horace Freeland Judson and Franklin’s biographer, Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin has been reduced to the “wronged heroine” of the double helix22,23. She deserves to be remembered not as the victim of the double helix, but as an equal contributor to the solution of the structure.

Reposted by Joanna Bryson

EHBEA 2026 @ehbea2026.bsky.social · 2d

📢 Call for abstracts!
🚀 The time has come — abstract submission for #EHBEA2026 is officially OPEN since this week! 🎉
🗓 Submission Nov 1st – Dec 15th
📝 300 words
🧠 Important: Make an OpenReview account before submitting — it takes time!
👉 www.ehbea2026.com

Overview | EHBEA2026

www.ehbea2026.com

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Will Jennings, Fabián Muniesa , and 2 more Joanna Bryson, Will Jennings, Fabián Muniesa, Beatriz Gallardo Paúls, David Murakami Wood

Francesca Bria @francescabria.bsky.social · 2d

The Authoritarian Stack: how tech billionaires are building a post-democratic America and why Europe is next.

My new project is an interactive investigation and open data platform to expose tech authoritarianism and mobilize collective power for democratic alternatives.
www.authoritarian-stack.info

The Authoritarian Stack

How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next

www.authoritarian-stack.info

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

Mastodon?

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

Same for all my social media posts.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

That and that the BBsB has funding for the world’s 3rd largest military, entirely to be aimed at domestic suppression. Even if most of that money goes to grift, the rest could be serious trouble for any Americans who favour democracy.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

This is why I’m not thrilled about Tuesday. 1) How do we get voters to stop thrashing and actually reliably select functioning government. 2) How do we rapidly rebuild governance capacity after it’s been destroyed by vandals, WITHOUT enabling radical anti-democratic redeployment of the same skills?

John Burn-Murdoch @jburnmurdoch.ft.com · Nov 7

We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.

Some of those stories may even be true!

But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

I often ponder reading an interview of a Balkan academic talking about his best friend, another academic. They used to get together with their wives every weekend & dine & talk. The other guy went on to perform genocide. The interview subject kept trying to understand how he hadn’t seen that in him.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

We all have to be vigilant about workplace bullying, and remember that successful bullies have to have two faces. Of course, accusations of bullying can also turn out to be bullying, or (fixable!) misunderstandings. It’s complicated.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 2d

I’m conflicted about all this. The double helix story is important and incredible. My inclination is to say it’s great that his terrible statements are out there, so we all remember we’re not in a scripted narrative — no amount of wonderful works or generosity proves someone isn’t also doing evil.