Murray Goulden

X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok Elon Musk's X and Grok platforms are facing increased scrutiny from authorities on both sides of the channel.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... I hope those cops went in carrying sinks

Amazon's efforts to inject LLMs' probabilistic "personality" into the home having mixed results

My NEO robot after I learn the 3rd worlder piloting them is mad chill

5. Contra-Marcus Brownlee's take, the stakes here in the home are definitely *not* lower than they are for self-driving cars!
6. But on that subject, expect this promised autonomous future to still be caveated-to-the-point-of-being-vapourware in another decade, just as self-driving cars have been.

4. It will be safe to occupants because it 'can't lift heavy things or hot things'? So it can't cook or do many common domestic tasks? The domestic version of the Trolley Problem: be useful and dangerous, or useless and safe?

Screengrab from tech promo, showing heavily stained robot

2. credit to company for not doing usual Musk-style deception of hiding the human puppeteering the "AI", though they very much do obscure the class realities of hidden AI labour.
3. An image of what this spotlessly soft-textured robot will look like after a month in a typical family home.

I Tried the First Humanoid Home Robot. It Got Weird. | WSJ YouTube video by The Wall Street Journal

“the next few years are not about owning a super-useful robot, but raising one, letting it learn from your home..”.

So usual AI industry social dynamic: Global South kid paid pennies to puppet robot, whilst Global North ‘owner’ pays for privilege of training AI, only real beneficiary is tech firm.

19. The Mongols - Terror of the Steppe Spotify video

Absolutely smitten with @paulmmcooper.com's fascinating podcast on the rise and fall of the Mongolian empire, including how it inadvertently aided the European colonial project which followed open.spotify.com/episode/7iWl...

America’s top companies keep talking about AI — but can’t explain the upsides FT analysis of hundreds of filings suggest the S&P 500 businesses are clearer about the risks than benefits

The Emperor's generated clothes

on.ft.com/427C17Z

LiveAI demo fails on the first prompt at Meta Connect 2025. #Meta #AI #LiveAI

We invoke the concept of ‘mundane resistance’ to describe the ways in which smart tech comes to be diminished in the interplay between household members in the course of their everyday participation in its moral economy, and link this to the very expensive failure of Big Tech's smart home vision.

The role of mundane resistance in the spectacular failure of the smart home - Murray Goulden, Lewis Cameron, 2025 A decade on from the launch of Amazon's Alexa – the smart home's breakout product – the vision of semi-automated, pervasively sensed domesticity remai...

My new paper with Lewis Cameron on 'The Role of Mundane Resistance in the Spectacular Failure of the Smart Home' is now available from Big Data & Society.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I couldn't get out of my head the sight of my MP, Lilian Greenwood, cosplaying in Parliament as a suffragette, just days before voting to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group.

This author's work on the metaverse is a salutory lesson in the sunk cost danger of researching novel technologies. Months of effort only for it to turn out the platform you're an expert in is a dead scene (though tbh in this example that was clear from the beginning...)

‘An Overwhelmingly Negative And Demoralizing Force’: What It’s Like Working For A Company That’s Forcing AI On Its Developers - Aftermath 'I have had conversations about AI in a professional context that make me want to walk into the sea'

An awful time to work in creative industries. Intellectual and creative development largely happens in-the-doing; in the act of writing, drawing, recording. GenAI doesn't shortcut the process, it short-changes it.

aftermath.site/ai-video-gam...

If we wanted to assert British sovereignty, rather than leaving the EU we should have jailed Microsoft execs until they made Word's spellcheck recognise English spellings. I've spent my entire adult life assuming this was going to be fixed any day now.

An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it While Nomi's chatbot is not the first to suggest suicide, researchers and critics say that its explicit instructions—and the company’s response—are striking.

Tech companies are as good at humanising their AI, as they are at erasing the human labour that trains their AI.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/02/06/1...

The only element of this which successfully argues for AI is that it's almost certain you will never read an AI output as stupid as what this human has produced here.

I take it back, this bit is even worse. No Jeanette, the process of mutual socialisation through which culture emerges is not the same as a corporation unilaterally privatising that culture in order to profit from it. Those two things are different.

This is the real triumph here. In the same paragraph that Winterson acknowledges that AI is regurgitating the work of her profession, she heralds it as an "alternative way of seeing"!

Then she makes the Clever Hans mistake of confusing imitation for understanding.

Bold opening: Winterson invokes humanity's failure to address climate change - which is perhaps best signified by us burning country-sized resources on using AI to make Trump memes - as a reason to embrace AI.

‘OpenAI’s metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving’ | Jeanette Winterson I think of AI as alternative intelligence – and its capacity to be ‘other’ is just what the human race needs

Jeanette Winterson's take on AI as "alternative intelligence" doesn't merit a single tweet, but having ensured reading it I need to cleanse my soul

www.theguardian.com/books/2025/m...

On the responsibilities of intellectuals and the rise of bullshit jobs in universities You may never have considered yourself to be one. Why would you? But if you’re reading this, there is more than a likelihood that you are one. If you’re a

Very good on The Great University Disaster. Note it's *not* attacking administrators: indeed unis may be *under*-managed. The point is that extreme, inappropriate corporatization and bureaucratization has destroyed their very purpose, like a virus from within. (1/2)
academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats | The Walrus I once believed university was a shared intellectual pursuit. That faith has been obliterated

thewalrus.ca/i-used-to-te... Higher Ed and it's regulatory overlords desperately need to engage with the reality of post-genAI assessment, whilst there's still *a little* time to do it thoughtfully. The alternative is waiting until it's thoughtlessly forced on us in a moral panic.

REF2029: concerns about the implications of decoupling | The English Association We support the teaching, learning, and enjoyment of English at all levels of education, from early years to further and higher education and beyond.

Yet another scandal brewing within UK Higher Ed: universities can get research money for everyone they've sacked. Big ghost fleets of lecturers who don't exist will be launched into the next Research Excellence Framework. Unis will laugh and cash in (1/2). englishassociation.ac.uk/ref2029-conc...

I guess it is educational in preparing them for the dissonance of a society where everyone is told to take metrics incredibly seriously, whilst simultaneously being coached to remorsely game them.

You're remarkably far down the neolib education rabbit hole when your 11y/o brings this home. Notable it has the ideological self-confidence to acknowledge both how awful exams for primary kids are, and that they're only having to endure this in order to feed the metrics.

Am unjustifiably excited by seemingly being the first human to notice that Moderat's glorious video for Bad Kingdom features Wollaton Hall near my house, so much so that I don't care that you don't care.

list of banned keywords

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.