Sign in

Kyrill Potapov

@kyrill.bsky.social
381 followers 233 following 98 posts

BRAID UK Research Fellow: exploring the role of AI in solar energy communities. powershiftai.weebly.com Interested in social practices, agency, representations. Vygotsky stan account.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Kyrill Potapov
Ronen Tamari @ronentk.me · 04/10/2026
“Human development in the sense that concerns education is not an informational state we reach but a historical process we undergo, in which what changes is not only what one can do but what one finds it possible to want, to attend to, and to be answerable for.” karger.com/hde/article/...
Development Beyond Information: Human Becoming in the Age of AI  Kyrill Potapova & Ezequiel A. Di Paolob,c,d a University College London Interaction Centre, UK b Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, San Sebastián, Spain c IAS-Research, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastián, Spain d Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, UK Short Title: Development Beyond Information Corresponding Author: Kyrill Potapov E-mail address: kyrill.potapov@ucl.ac.uk Keywords: Development, Large Language Models, Enactive Approach, Cultural Historical Activity Theory, Care, Education Technology  Abstract  Discussions of artificial intelligence in education increasingly equate development with the acquisition and deployment of information. This article argues that such accounts rest on false assumptions. Development is better understood not as an informational state but as a relational, historical process of becoming through which persons emerge and continue to change. Drawing on Vygotsky, on Ilyenkov's distinction between living and petrified ideality, and on the enactive approach to cognition, we characterise development through four features: its historicity, its dependence on reciprocal sense-making, its mediation by others who orient the learner, and its cultivation within relations of care. Large language models operate over the sedimented products of these processes without participating in them. As objectifications of human purposes, such systems
494
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 26/04/2026
AI is finally non-monotonic
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 29/12/2025
I guess the point is that will only know in retrospect. A majority of teenagers are using AI for life advice, almost all teenage boys go on porn, so it’s just about how much crossover there will be with AI companions
020
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 29/12/2025
Them for months after he was getting TV spots to moan about it and still they find a way to sneak him in. Same as Zack Goldsmith
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
I also feel like the other axes (arousal / intensity) accounts for possible “neutrality”
020
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 05/12/2025
I’m with appraisal theorists that emotions are evaluative at multiple levels / moments in a process. Of course emotivism in moral philosophy argues from the opposite pole. I’m dubious about the split because we only have one nervous system for the affective grounding of the valence
140
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
One of humanity’s greatest achievements is being able to tell how many times “t” appears in this sentence.
160
Reposted by Kyrill Potapov
Caterina Moruzzi @caterinamoruzzi.bsky.social · 27/09/2025
Delighted that my contribution and the submission with Kate Milner, Martin Parker, @kyrill.bsky.social, Anna-Maria Sichani and @paulawest.bsky.social as part of @braiduk.bsky.social are cited in the report on AI and creativity of the UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights. 🔗 tinyurl.com/mr27r6h2
152
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
Yes that’s true. I guess the drive to do conferences in HCI is much greater. I’ve been lucky to have had good reviews but am pretty early career. As CHI AC everyone seemed to try their hardest… except for one 2AC whose review just copied the other two reviewers.
100
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
It’s so so much better than many other fields. You just happen to be doing very technical stuff where people can give technical reviews. I assure the process and content of social psychology or philosophy conference reviews is worse and often semi improvised.
100
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
Hjelmslev’s “Prolegomena to a Theory of language” is mathsy but obscure. Vladimir Propp or Eleazar Meletinsky maybe.
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 02/09/2025
50 years of USSR and badge for category winner in a race
100
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
I got your book for UCL. Annoyingly I have to use the Adobe ebook reader to read it but look forward to it
110
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
Just to say I was premature in my judgement. The last chapter is impressive and original. I’m still puzzled why he started with Arendt but otherwise it’s worth reading
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
No assumptions. I’ve read the book. I just misremembered your use of Harari. No problem with you not engaging further
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
doi.org/10.56063/MS....
doi.org
000
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
If we put it through Marx's value theory then we would need to hold in view the full valorisation process, including the ways in which value relates to our reproduction of our life activity. You seem to be saying "Well of course Bengio etc. are the experts so LTV is outdated".
000
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
Apologies, I seemed to remember you endorsing his "Homo Deus" concept
100
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
What other beings? What makes AI a being other than that Silicon Valley people read SciFi where it is? The whole discussion of infrastructure and particularization of dead labour in Chapter 1 is great - but what kind of "being" is this AI other than a vampire sucking living labour?
000
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 15/08/2025
But you have the causality backwards here - as masterfully laid out in 'The Eye of the Master'. Nothing remarkable about it
100
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Interesting! Thanks
000
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Don’t know who Slobodan is and only know limited stuff about Hayek’s use of neural nets for modelling stuff but definitely want to find out about it
110
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
So many people think Harari is some kind of genius prophet. Look forward to reading it
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
From a Marxist perspective, this is, to borrow Wittgenstein’s metaphor, like the right hand paying the left
000
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
Your thesis is that cognition is a series of heuristics performed by modules of the brain, which is what an AI does too. Where is the critique of transhumanism?
210
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
I don’t say you say it’s better but you’re keen on people like Yuval Harari who see this future God as inevitable
200
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
You are Landian, or at the very least opposing foundations of Marxism, for accepting that there can be “capitalism that happens without humans”. There can’t be Capitalism without labour power - the power to withhold labour and a metabolism that must be sustained by it
200
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 14/08/2025
You very much do have an opinion on what the mind is. You think it’s a series of mechanisms the brain performs. More importantly, you believe these are algorithmically formalisable. You seem to go much of the way to agreeing with Timothy Morton in fact
300
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
Great thanks I’ll check it out!
110
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
I heard Steinhoff at the last Historical Materialism. He gave a good general overview of AI there too. I don’t agree with his views on psychology/cognitive science though. I’ll try to find the book you mention.
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
Yeah it’s fundamentally Landian in that the overall thesis is that a) the mind is a set of mechanical functions b) capitalism + tech can perform these functions better than us c) capitalism will go on much better without humans. What’s your book? Certainly interested to check it out
310
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
Excellent list! Don’t think “Inhuman Power” should be there as they’ve very much drunk the Kool Aid. Atlas of AI is a classic missing from here
210
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
I think it’s cool to mix Gillian Rose with MacIntyre, Arendt and Brandom, but I don’t understand why others rate it so much. I’ve not read the last chapter yet. I do like it but it’s no Mute Compulsion
110
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
Vanessa Wills had a year earlier released the very impressive “Marx’s Ethical Vision” impressively dealing with many of these themes.
210
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 29/07/2025
I’m really puzzled how Absolute Ethical Life got all this hype. It’s a solid early researcher work of largely disconnected essays which go on for a bit too long. I’m on board with the project but don’t see the originality of “hey have you considered that Marx is Aristotelian and Hegelian?”
120
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 12/07/2025
Some ideas on Ilyenkov and artificial intelligence youtu.be/Pqn7IF_8LMY?...
youtu.be
Kyrill Potapov - Designing Ilyenkovian AI systems
YouTube video by International Friends of Ilyenkov
031
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
Yes definitely agree with that too
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
Because illusions themselves allow for the kind of triadic perception I was describing. They *demonstrate* this complex tacit process. When context is artificially constrained, cultural repertoires became more visible
110
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
The environment of course has a structure independent of our perception and we rely on this for the triadic perception/trianglulation but we don’t perceive it as anything/don’t perceive affordances without the influence of enculturation
000
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
In triadic perception (the baby points and the mum looks at what he’s pointing at or vice versa), the key is that certain things already strike us as relevant, meaningful, significant and we fine tune this for each other. Perception always involves picking things out in this way
100
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
The illusion example illuminates how the immediacy of perception actually involves multiple interacting layers/processes, some of which are dependent on enculturation
200
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
“Getting good at” suggests that things are there waiting for us to discover them. This is not about that but about how we carve nature at the joints e.g. so that I perceive a road, my mug
200
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
The alternative view, which Sellars called The Myth of the Given - that the world imprints its categorical structure on us like a stamp in wax - does not explain the differential sensitivity people from a culture automatically display e.g. in driving
000
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
The point of the study is that our history of interactions with our environment also involves the history of perceiving that environment
020
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
Of course cultural background affects perception. It is pregnant in all perception, not just illusion. Vygotsky gives the example of a child first seeing something as a chess board then being able to see moves on the chess board
320
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
Normative patterning of affective responses is my fave. Will get the book, thanks!
010
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
Thanks! No idea what an “emotional regime” is but guess I’ll need to read it to find out
100
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
What’s the third? Robert Sapolsky and Kate Wilkinson separately also talk about centrality of felt status
100
Kyrill Potapov @kyrill.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Congrats! I’ve seen some interesting related work e.g. on how LLMs can be used to engineer LLM prompts that LLMs respond well to but humans don’t get
140