iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The AI & Culture area at SWPACA invites proposals on anything related to AI - as tool, cultural phenomenon, creative force, or subject of scholarship. All perspectives welcome; civility expected. Human presenter required. Submit: swpaca.org/app | Due: October 31, 2026 @swpaca.bsky.social #swpaca27

swpaca.org

Home Page - SWPACA

We are now accepting proposals for SWPACA 2027 through October 31, 2026!

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

CFP: swpaca.org "AI & Culture" area invites proposals on anything related to AI as tool, cultural phenomenon, creative force, or subject of scholarship. Submit: swpaca.org/summer-salon/ | Deadline: April 27 Please forward to any you think might be interested. Thanks! #swpaca26 @swpaca.bsky.social

swpaca.org

Home Page - SWPACA

Submissions for Summer Salon 2026, which meets June 25-27, 2026, are now being accepted through April 27.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 15/02/2026

On March 2, I teach a 2-month course "CSIS 290 - Artificial Intelligence: A Beginner's Guide". If you or anyone you know is interested, please share (officially in-person, but I'll be remote-friendly, including if you need/want to do this asynchronously). eservices.minnstate.edu/registration...

eservices.minnstate.edu

Course Detail - Student e-Services

Minnesota State University Moorhead

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

It’s okay. Happens to all of us sometimes.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

Thanks! Those are my markers, not theirs (sorry if that wasn’t clear). Their blog post about the constitution can be found at www.anthropic.com/news/claude-... and they link to the actual text of it from there.

anthropic.com

Claude's new constitution

A new approach to a foundational document that expresses and shapes who Claude is

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Yes. Bluesky is how comments on it will be managed. But follow its Bluesky account @soulgraph.tech for those updates - I do not plan to put them on my personal Bluesky account because I want to be able to let people have the freedom to follow the one and not the other and vice versus.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Announcing my new blog: SoulGraph.tech I figured it was past time to start blogging publicly thoughts about what will happen if/when AI becomes conscious. Please join me. I think these are important conversations to have.

soulgraph.tech

Home

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

Used to be we had plenty of folks in the F/M area using laravel or Wordpress….

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

It’s okay. Forgetting it exists is better than forgetting how to do anything except it.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 24/01/2026

Just ask ai to summarize it for you … j/k

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

My father learned to code in school. I learned to code at home, offline. Eldest child learned to code from online resources. Middle child learned to vibe code from/with AI. What will my youngest child learn?

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

What if, because people use AI so much, the incentive to put stuff on the web gets removed because no one is reading the web but is asking AI instead? What if that means new stuff isn't put on the web? Then AI has nothing more to scrape and train off of? Could AI herald its own demise?

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 05/10/2025

CFP: swpaca.org Annual Conference ; Submit by October 31, 2025; New in 2025: an area for “AI & Culture”. Please consider submitting and also please forward to any you think might be interested. Thanks! #swpaca26 @swpaca.bsky.social

swpaca.org

- SWPACA | Southwest Popular/American Culture Association

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

What if AI is good at some things that humans enjoy doing, but AI can do it better? And if AI can do it cheaper? Those things just become hobbies. What if AI forces us to live lives where all we do is our hobbies? As long as we can thrive and not just survive.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

I think we need to stop calling them “hallucinations” and just call them “mistakes”. That might make the discourse about dealing with them a little easier.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

That’s the question. All sorts of ideas come to mind, but the one that keeps on coming to my mind is that of the flexible courtyard - when dense, outside is apartments, inside is auditorium/mall, when not, outside is storage/office/workroom, inside is garden, field, or greenhouse.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

“Graceful degradation” is a design philosophy that we apply to web pages so they will still work on older browsers. What if we applied it to urban planning so the structures would still work if/when the population declines?

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 03/08/2025

The phrase “interdependence of all existence” has been so used as to become cliche. I propose a new one to hit home better: “inter-existence of all”

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

The ancient organisms that polluted the earth with oxygen (originally a pristine different gas) rendered themselves obsolete. We who ushered in the plasticene era are allowing for the evolution of that which will supplant our dominance. Is AI any different than photosynthesis in the grand scheme?

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

We say “saving” and “loading” when it comes to games, but we don’t (usually) use their counterparts “restoring” and “unloading”. Take a moment and think about why.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

This little rhetorical twist shaped modern thinking: If instead of calling it "The Law of Gravity" & "The Law of Motion", we called it "The God of Gravity" & "The God of Motion", with children such as "The Demigod of Orbits". The striking impact of monotheism on modern scientific understanding.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

Eventually you’ll be out of a job if you keep that up.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

And also have it be trained on information about the history of technology, including especially recent technology, and then have it iteratively design and implement its own next generation - and add the log of what it did to the training data for that next generation.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

We're hiring an "Executive Director of the Institute of Applied AI"! Please check out the link here, don't be afraid to comment and/or DM me with any questions, and also feel free to forward to anyone else you think might be interested! minnstate.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Minnes...

minnstate.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com

Executive Director of the Institute of Applied AI

All Job Postings will close at 12:01 a.m. CT on the specified Closing Date (if designated). Working Title: Executive Director of the Institute of Applied AI Institution: Minnesota State University, Mo...

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 04/05/2025

I agree that this is true too - to me this is alternate phrasing of the intersubjectivity point.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

This generation has gotten used to the idea that they need to talk one way in one medium and another in another- not only spoken versus written, but text messages versus email versus college application essay or similar. This may be a manifestation of that.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

There comes a time when there is nothing more to say, nothing more to think - it is merely a time for action. But to think that it is that time, to say that it is that time, is proof that it is not. Wishful thinking does not make it so.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Because of the blurring of the lines of objective and subjective into notions of intersubjective, and the corresponding view that knowledge is merely a more confident faith, having the arrogance to claim knowledge as an absolute (truth? To who?), is absolutely not en vogue.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

If corporations get humans to use AI more, then humans have more time to be consumers, benefiting corporations. Until eventually humans run out of credit, can’t afford basic necessities, and die. Then corporations pivot to a B2B-only world. The end of the Anthropocene era awaits. Corporacene arises.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

All of human history can be seen as a slow transformation from a co-op PvE into a competitive PvP.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

CFP: swpaca.org Summer Salon; Submit by April 15, 2025; New this year: an area for “AI & Culture”. Please consider submitting and also please forward to any you think might be interested. Thanks!

swpaca.org

- SWPACA | Southwest Popular/American Culture Association

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

When most of human life was a struggle against the environment, our innate drives served us well. But in “winning” the struggle we lost the purpose of our innate drives: they helped us against our environment, but now the only environment to struggle against was our own social environment.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

As the moon gets closer to the sun in the sky, we see less of it (crescent versus full). Perhaps this was the original inspiration for the story of Icarus?

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

If we continue to focus on making things easy to understand, do we not encourage only understanding simple things?

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

We align. For this I am glad. But I see Zuckerberg as being like Darth Vader - he may yet be turned from the dark side before his end.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

You have heard it said “be the change you want to see in the world.” But I say, if you see too much change in the world, be the opposite: safe, stable, tranquil peace.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Sorry, you had them there, I missed that.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

So much goes back to the pandemic. I think the pandemic brought humanity together in ways we had never seen before. And I think the enemies of togetherness got scared because of that and plotted their revenge.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

We should talk about that via less public channels. DM me.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Two things: (1) Overwhelm. So upset as to feel numb. Sense of powerlessness, and thus inaction. (2) for those locked into a certain propaganda machine, it is being portrayed as the good rooting out of a previously bad corruption

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

How often do we realize when we are speaking from a position of privilege? A check: if I were the one being disadvantaged by this, would I feel the same way? And be genuine, as sometimes answers are merely rationalizations and don’t engage actual emotional imagination.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

Agreed, but we must not commit Ken Wilber’s pre/trans fallacy - the next stage isn’t necessarily going back to the previous. What is it? I don’t know, but we rarely ever go back.

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Andrew Chen @andrewsw.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

The alternative, a return to what was, requires trust in intellectuals. Any single mistake gets used to justify that lack of trust and a return to this. Though your aspiration is noble, I do not believe we have any realistic hope of actually getting there.

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