Kirk’s rhetoric consistently seeks to suppress dissenting voices, such as when Turning Point promoted campaigns to ban certain books and curricula in US schools. These behaviours demonstrate his commitment to “free speech” is purely performative and fundamentally incompatible with open dialogue.

How can you share a room and “debate ideas” with someone who does so in such bad faith? As an academic body, how can you invite someone who is waging a war on academia and science in the US? Not to mention this isn’t even a debate, it’s a *speech*. They have invited him…to speak!! Not debate!

The Union prides itself on being a defender of free-speech, but as with many orgs that adopt that framing, they seem to neglect that people like Kirk do not support free speech. Kirk is a fascist. Fascists, by definition, do not believe any world view other than their own is acceptable.

As someone who attended the Union during my MPhil, the choice to bring this man & his hate to Cambridge and Britain at large is extremely concerning & hurtful. Kirk has actively contributed to the radicalisation of many US Americans and has helped lead us to our current constitutional crisis.

“I found most people” - typo.

I guess this thread is one big “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” whinging session to my fellow left-oriented folks. There is use for this very innovative and cool tech - it isn’t all slop. Unfortunately and increasingly, the slop has become the point…so brace yourself for it.

Trump is too stupid, too old, and too bereft of morality to care, so he and the rest of MAGA will let them do whatever. The obvious answer to this is comprehensive AI regulatory policy and data protection guarantees in American federal law on par with civil rights protections (I know, I know 🫠).

This is, of course, to say nothing of the environment concerns about AI, which are totally valid. I would argue this is an issue of scaling and poor regulation and management of growth. Why is there AI in my gmail now? I honestly can’t defend that one…

I can’t overstate how problematic this is, culturally. You see it all the time…”Elon is a genius, but…”. No, he’s not. None of his cronies are, they just fooled you into thinking that. It’s time to drop it. Elon isn’t a rocket scientist and his prize car looks like a trash bin. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Another issue is that we have culturally elevated tech-bros to “Tony Stark” levels of genius. This helps them access halls of power they don’t deserve to be in without relevant expertise. The reality is many of the tech-bros are actually just industrial capitalist charlatans in trendier clothes.

They also don’t know how public service works because they’ve never actually been of service to anyone for a single day in their life. They don’t know what a crisis is like, they don’t understand why the systems of care we have exist in the first place, and they don’t care about learning about it.

Peter Thiel and the techno-fascists want AI in everything because they want to take surveillance capitalism to the next, almost unimaginable level. They want curated echo-chambers run by AI agents who whisper the things you want to hear over and over again, while selling you a new toothbrush.

I really *did* understand - because I am a human too! As someone w/ experience in crisis, I know that people you interact with in your crisis need to “get it”. Our public servants do this every single day. They support people with food insecurity, wage theft, unemployment, etc. and they *get* it.

I used to be a 911(112) dispatcher. If you get hit by a car and call for help, do you want a real person speaking to you, or a robot? In that role I found the menu people needed the first words out my mouth to be affirmative: “That must be scary” or “I understand”.

AI makes TONS of mistakes. It hallucinates constantly. Just the other day it proposed creating a file for me that it had no ability to produce?? It also…quite obviously…is an algorithm. It has no ability to entertain liminality, which is what our public servants do every day.

Note how the use case I present is fairly simple in scope. Not…running the government! We should be terrified the tech-bros are in power & making plans for widespread deployment. Anyone who works with these tools knows how unreliable they are. We shouldn’t let them anywhere near critical systems.

This data could help us better understand how the texture of urban spaces change over time, & even direct public resources more strategically.

I can’t help but feel the suspicion of AI on the left to be a bit too extreme. There are clear opportunities available to us now.

Eg. “6 garbage cans, 3 piles of trash, 4 street lamps.” Basic stuff, but something that helps build a database that might be too laborious to prepare otherwise. If AI could do this, we could leverage rich, existing sources (think Google Street View) that are functionally inaccessible at present.