Anna Plyushteva
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plyushteva.bsky.social
Anna Plyushteva
@plyushteva.bsky.social
270 followers 370 following 26 posts
Migrant, geographer, public transport enthusiast. Research and teaching on urban mobilities, economies, and inequalities. Very sceptical of AI in HE. Titular Associate Professor at @oxfordgeography.bsky.social and @tsuoxford.bsky.social She/her
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plyushteva.bsky.social
www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives...

Fantastic article on AI and why it will let you down. Passage below is my favourite.
LLMs follow a “Kepler-esque” approach: they can successfully predict the next position in a planet’s orbit, but fail to find the underlying explanation of Newton’s Law of Gravity (see here). Instead, they resort to fitting made-up rules, that allow them to successfully predict the planet’s next orbital position, but these models fail to find the force vector at the heart of Newton’s insight. The MIT-Harvard paper is explained in this video. LLMs cannot and do not infer physical laws from their training data. Remarkably, they cannot even identify the relevant information from the internet. Instead, they make it up.
October 17, 2025 at 11:45 AM
plyushteva.bsky.social
Where I am with AI
I have discussed AI use with many colleagues and friends. Some of them work in research, teaching, and administration in higher education; others have generously shared experiences from other sectors. I am now fully convinced that the costs of using AI as part of my work – to myself; to the environment; to the precariously employed people who maintain these systems ‘behind the scenes,’ and face harm as a result – far outweigh the benefits. As a result, I have decided to make a pledge not to use AI in my professional work. I am sharing this pledge firstly, for accountability; and secondly, because I hope to amplify the minority of voices who remind us that this is not the unstoppable march of history and progress; just one type of technology that we can buy into, or not. My own view is that AI use is not universally beneficial, necessary, or inevitable. Maybe the costs and benefits will shift later on. But for now, I am going to keep AI out of my research, teaching, and outreach work; I will not use it to make slides, to get a quick summary of others’ work, to write up my own, or to reply to emails. There are practical limits to this choice: averting my eyes when my default search engine puts AI-generated results in front of me may be a step too far. But wherever opting out is a feasible option, I will opt out.
June 20, 2025 at 12:38 PM
plyushteva.bsky.social
I loved contributing to this book review forum on Romit Chowdhury's wonderful 'City of Men: Masculinities and Everyday Morality on Public Transport'

You can read my review alongside those of some outstanding scholars in the latest issue of Urban Geography - www.tandfonline.com/toc/rurb20/4...
March 9, 2025 at 9:28 AM
plyushteva.bsky.social
Have you signed up yet?

The wonderful Prof Rachel Aldred is giving a webinar as part of the @tsuoxford.bsky.social 2025 seminar series. She will discuss unequal mobilities and active travel, and you can register here: www.tsu.ox.ac.uk/event/unequa...
February 3, 2025 at 10:47 AM
plyushteva.bsky.social
On 23 January, join us @tsuoxford.bsky.social for a webinar with Daniel Agbiboa, Harvard University:

'Transport Aliveness and Social Imagination in an African Megacity'

Register here:
www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/transport-...
December 16, 2024 at 8:58 PM
plyushteva.bsky.social
Before I start posting here about unaffordable trains, inaccessible buses, and lax speed limits, I think we all need a cat picture.
December 10, 2024 at 11:30 AM