Robyn Johnson retweeted
If your kids are in school they’re constantly being prompted to “relate” to some text… listen to Anne
NAOMI KLIEIN to SAM ALTMAN:
"...you ingested the entire written output of human civilization without consent, without compensation and without credit to build a system whose primary commercial application is eliminating the jobs of the people whose work you consumed.
You are not 'liberating human creativity' -- you are strip-mining it and selling it back at a markup while calling the theft 'training data'."
Robyn Johnson retweeted
While listening to council meetings in Montreal, local mayor Sue Montgomery decided to knit in red when men spoke and in green when women spoke, when similar numbers of both attended.
Day 1 results.... #WomensArt
Robyn Johnson retweeted
when i mention "claude" you can assume i'm talking about the albino alligator
Robyn Johnson retweeted
Simone Weil’s greatest insight was that attention is the foundation of morality and that letting your attention span degrade is the first step on the road to hell
Robyn Johnson retweeted
Rest in peace Annie Dillard. You wrote one of the greatest essays of all time theatlantic.com/science/arch…
Robyn Johnson retweeted
A 'tidal wave' of forever chemicals are being pumped out to satisfy the AI industry, according to The Guardian.
Nearly all of the 10 biggest manufacturers of Pfas are planning to increase production for use in semi-conductors and data center cooling systems.
These toxic chemicals never break down in nature and are linked to cancer.
theguardian.com/environment/…
Robyn Johnson retweeted
Back in 2022, during a Q&A three days after Annie Ernaux won the Nobel prize, a guy started his question with “I’ve studied your work at Yale, and then at Oxford, and now at Harvard” and people just got up and started leaving
Robyn Johnson retweeted
The simplicity of John Singer Sargent’s pearls is outstanding. Literally just dabs of white paint:
Even Kubrick couldn't have come up with a line like this.
Ted Cruz on AI: “I'd rather they be American killer robots and not Chinese killer robots.”
He told our @DashaBurns that there needs to be “rules and guardrails” around AI but said that slowing down is an “impossible endeavor.”👇🧵
Robyn Johnson retweeted
Shostakovich enjoyed Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar so much he saw it twice on consecutive nights on a trip to London in 1972, confessing that but for Stalin he might well have written something like this himself. Imagine a Shostakovich version of Cats...
Robyn Johnson retweeted
For those who haven’t read it, Chapter 13 of Project 2025 was literally about reshaping the way our food system is regulated, including cutting safety-net programs and rolling back regulations and protections related to food production.
At the time, many people warned that these changes could make food less accessible, less affordable, and less safe for vulnerable Americans.
And yet, we were told we were being dramatic. That Project 2025 was being misunderstood. That people were overreacting.
We weren’t overreacting. We were warning you.
Robyn Johnson retweeted
For all the "Coyote vs. Acme" fans out there, brace yourselves.
A coyote chasing prey can exceed speeds of 40 miles per hour, more than twice the top speed of a sprinting roadrunner.
Wile E. Coyote is letting the Road Runner win.
Robyn Johnson retweeted
MIT mathematically proved that AI will destroy the democracy.
A Nobel-winning MIT economist published a terrifying paper called "Automation and Repression"
As AI and automation replace human labor, wealth concentrates heavily in the hands of a tiny group of capital owners. Inequality skyrockets.
When inequality hits a critical mass, workers realize they are being crushed and the threat of a popular revolt spikes.
Faced with that threat, the ruling elite are forced to make a choice.
They can redistribute the wealth through taxes, or they can use force to keep people down.
The paper mathematically proves a dark reality: there is a direct, inescapable link between automation and political repression.
The more capital accumulates through AI, the more the elite prefer repression over redistribution.
Why? Because sharing the wealth cuts into their power. Funding a police state protects it.
It gets worse.
The authors modeled what happens when an economy starts inside a clean, stable democracy.
As automation advances and capital concentrates at the top, the math shows that the elite eventually find democracy to be a liability.
They stop supporting democratic systems. They back a coup. They install a repressive system just to protect their automated wealth.
Nobody is voting to end democracy.
The technology’s economic incentives just make authoritarian control the logical next step for survival.
Robyn Johnson retweeted
To be 100% clear: the climate news is bad. Absent radical action, there will be radical ecological breakdown.
Thank you @hausfath for putting this together. The new Climate change scenarios, CMIP7. In short: It narrows the range of future warming. But the medium is still where most scientists have thought it would be by 2100… high 2’s, low 3’s (degrees C of warming from pre-industrial) . Right now we are basically at 1.5. And some of these scenarios rely on aggressive carbon removal. I’m wary of both CDR’s potential and the fact that the pace at which we are reaching these thresholds (1.5, 2, etc…) is faster than earlier assumed. But I’m not the expert on this. So I’ll defer to them…


































