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 · 35m

AI is already superhuman. So are libraries, cars, and calculators. Not a reason to abandon the strong history of science-led digital policy in the EU.

Please sign if you have a PhD in or near AI.

#digitalGovernance #AIEthics

pads.c3w.at/form/#/2/for...

CryptPad

pads.c3w.at

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 41m

Even as a 1980s programmer I met @davidgunkel.bsky.social in the laundry room of the building we both had studio apts in (both having refused to move back to our parents' after college & found the cheapest OK place in Chicago). We then moved non-romantically into a 3B penthouse in the same building.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 48m

I learnt a lot from my many 1990s roommates (which I needed after giving up my programmer's salary to be a PhD student) Some are still close friends.

Americans constructing their own poverty and precarity, eg being "trapped" in GAFAM salaries or even US vs UK academia is a big part of the problem.

Nathan J. Williams @nathanjw.bsky.social · 7h

This has bothered me since it came up in 2001 in Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich - she's exploring being working poor and housing is expensive but a (non-romantic) roommate is beyond the pale.

Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 8h

Okay I'm going to flag this not to dunk on Sandra but because I want to point that one major driver of increased housing costs is that young people today are MUCH more reluctant to have roommates than in the past. I personally know a number of folks who just refuse to consider it!

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 52m

which takes longer and works less well?

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 58m

This is funny, but AI is different from astronomy. Humans respond automatically and implicitly to language, we alter our language to conform with what we perceive as our in group. If we actually woke up different planets some days, scifi might affect our astronomy more.

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2h

*I'd be alarmed if this was true, but if it was, then science fiction would have caused astronomy to explode in flames in 1634 when Kepler wrote that nutty book about his Moon trip

David Grinspoon @drfunkyspoon.bsky.social · 8h

And they only serve to boost his ego, and book sales, while confusing and alarming the public, eroding trust in real science and harming the credibility and efforts of actual astrobiologists to build serious technosignature searches into a sustained and supported branch of science. (5/7)

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1h

I was just talking to the head of ETH about how Bush killed Fermi Lab in Batavia, Illinois.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1h

this is totally the content I need to wake up to in my notifications :)

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 1h

Still, better than humanoids slaughtering each other :(

Reposted by Joanna Bryson, Andrew Curry

Ulrike Franke @rikefranke.bsky.social · 1h

That’s a lot.

67% of Germans say that “When in doubt, we can and should no longer rely on military assistance from the US.”

Study: www.moreincommon.de/wp-content/u...

Reposted by Joanna Bryson

#BruceSterling @bruces.bsky.social · 2h

*I'd be alarmed if this was true, but if it was, then science fiction would have caused astronomy to explode in flames in 1634 when Kepler wrote that nutty book about his Moon trip

David Grinspoon @drfunkyspoon.bsky.social · 8h

Reposted by Joanna Bryson

Nathan J. Williams @nathanjw.bsky.social · 7h

This has bothered me since it came up in 2001 in Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich - she's exploring being working poor and housing is expensive but a (non-romantic) roommate is beyond the pale.

Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 8h

Sandra Flood @slickflood.bsky.social · 8h

A loan and because I was a young woman my dad had to co-sign and the car was $2500. My apartment was $200, my share $100, heat and electric included. No IPhones, computers and other must have expensive tech. Once the gas went crazy high from .35 to over .52 sold the Mach and bought a VW bug.

Joanna Bryson @j2bryson.bsky.social · 11h

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 · 21h

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 · 1d

🚨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.”

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