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Luke Stark

@lukestark.bsky.social
6.2K followers 4.5K following 1.8K posts

🏳️‍🌈 just a simple country AI ethicist | Assistant Professor, Western University 🇨🇦 | Co-Director, @starlingcentre.bsky.social | he/his/him | | no all-male panels |#BLM | 🏳️‍⚧️ ally | views my own starkcontrast.co starlingcentre.ca

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Luke Stark
vortex_egg @vortexegg.com · 5h
I’ve been noting that one of the main use cases that everyday users had already been putting LLMs and agents to use is the compilation of dossiers for peer-on-peer surveillance and automated gang-stalking (swarm-stalking) of other citizens, so of course Meta is copying that as a feature.
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 6h
My first thought about this idiotic nightmare of newspeak is how it's going to affect academia, and whether we're about to see a rash of papers calling it "superintelligence" in a bid to get a drop of the ever-diminishing pool of government funding.
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Luke Stark @lukestark.bsky.social · 6h
Stupid Intelligence
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Luke Stark @lukestark.bsky.social · 7h
Oh will we
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Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · 11h
The deep truth of contemporary reactionary politics is that, though they mouth dismissal of postmodernism, feminism, CRT, & intersectionality, they actually believe in all of it but simply want to liberate their exercise of the relevant forms of arbitrary power from any iota of guilt.
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Emmett Macfarlane 🇨🇦 @emmettmacfarlane.com · 13h
Great, next get me some inter-city public transportation between Waterloo Region (the 10th-largest census area in Canada) and Toronto (the largest) that doesn't take 2 hours.
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Luke Stark @lukestark.bsky.social · 11h
People care. The media doesn't seem to.
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Reposted by Luke Stark
Dr Heidy Khlaaf (هايدي خلاف) @heidykhlaaf.bsky.social · 11h
It was great speaking to Sam on this, and really demonstrates in practice how the doomerism narrative really does distract from concrete and current-day AI risks. I suppose faulty and unreliable models (the reality) just isn't as alluring as an AGI god (the fiction).
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CCPA — Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives @policyalternatives.ca · 11h
“It’s deeply alarming that so much money has been spent on for-profit surgeries and, yet, we don’t have the results to show what Ontarians are getting for those dollars,” said report author @alonghurst.bsky.social #onpoli @policyalternatives.ca www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
cbc.ca
Wait times for most priority surgeries in Ontario have increased since 2017, study says | CBC News
Wait times for most of the province’s publicly funded priority surgeries and procedures have increased between 2017 and 2025, according to a study released Monday.
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Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com · 14h
if you want to be the party of government, you have to be the party of good government. this is another way of saying details matter. if you want to attack inequality, you need to make sure it *works.* and it turns out the design of tax systems matters quite a lot.
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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 12h
This is so important. They’ve broken the economic models that fund journalism is because they recognize the *purpose* of journalism threatens their bullshit-based valuations, ie, the sources of their wealth and power. Yet actual-existing journalists were instead crucial for creating their myths.
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 13h
This part of the muse privacy and security debacle manages to be worse than it agreeing to lowball offers in your name on marketplace, giving the buyer your address, and then telling them you're home when you're not; because this part? The "it reading messages you explicitly told it not to" part?…
appleinsider.com
Meta Muse AI reportedly read Mac Messages without consent
In a completely unsurprising turn of events, Meta's Muse AI is stealing Apple Messages, past and present, and uploading the contents to its cloud, even if explicitly told not to.
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GOLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 29/09/2026
“the person who is CEO at the time a company goes public will, until their death, have sole power over company decisions, regardless of how much investment they have taken from the public” was just never how any of this was intended to work and it is a catastrophe for corporate governance
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GOLIKEHELLMACHINE @golikehellmachine.com · 29/09/2026
this simply should not be legal
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dorian @doriantaylor.com · 15h
somebody needs to write a thing about: a) the hyperreality of retail pricing vs what you learn in econ 101 b) the hyper-hyperreality of "surge pricing" retail as some kind of terrarium simulacrum of supply and demand
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 15h
McDonald’s uses “machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across McDonald’s nearly 14,000 restaurants and generate what the company calls ‘the optimal price’ at each location for each menu item, from Big Macs ‌to discounted coffee for seniors.”
reuters.com
Inside McDonald’s push to have AI price your Big Mac
McDonald’s is increasingly using artificial intelligence to guide menu prices across the U.S. and some global markets, a plan that aims to boost headquarters’ profit but risks alienating customers and...
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 16h
Many people are asking.
prospect.org
Why Is Sam Altman a Free Man? - The American Prospect
OpenAI’s models aren’t “going rogue” from their creators as much as they are mimicking them.
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 15h
Things are getting weird
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Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social · 15h
My Catholic school experience was the second category
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Luke Stark @lukestark.bsky.social · 15h
Note the subhead
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Kevin Reuning @reuning.bsky.social · 15h
Guy in a ragged suit telling 3 children around a fire in a cave: "Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 28/09/2026
“The goal was to destabilize U.S. educational infrastructure and carve out a large space for reactionary indoctrination within it. I think we have to acknowledge…it has been substantial everywhere and in some places the goal has already been reached.”
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
What this looked like in practice: People came to the class excited or at least mildly interested in learning what an ai agent could do for them. The trainers came to help people train an agent for their known specific cases. Everyone quickly realized that there wasn’t much middle ground.
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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
We’re in the middle of a hostile takeover. Liberal democracy is being replaced by authoritarians favorable to destroying general protections and representation and overseeing violent oppression and surveillance on behalf of historically wealthy oligarchs.
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vortex_egg @vortexegg.com · 28/09/2026
Incidentally this is the same radical transformation of self that everything from the quantified self movement to the getting things done system were driving
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Mel Woods @melwoods.me · 28/09/2026
Fresh off the digital presses from me today in @xtramagazine.com, on Canadian election season and how our progressive parties can actually speak up for trans people instead of staying quiet and letting anti-trans bad actors set the terms of the conversation. xtramagazine.com/power/politi...
xtramagazine.com
The Democrat turn on trans rights should be a warning to Canadian progressives | Xtra Magazine
In elections across Canada, centre and left-wing politicians can’t let anti-trans arguments set the terms of the conversation
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
We are talking about a radical transformation of the understanding of self for this to get off the ground.
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Luke Stark @lukestark.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
This, of course, is the desired goal of both AI firms and their political supporters. Agre's "grammars of action" applied to existence.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Also, all this “frontier AI” nomenclature is so laughably colonialist that it has to be on purpose. 🙄
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Technology enthusiasts severely overestimate the average person’s desire or willingness or capacity to build and use AI agents. I understand some work roles that could mandate or encourage it but that is no way a tech revolution. Agents are best for structured, clearly delineated tasks.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
In practice, AI literacy doesn’t start with building the tool for your personal use. It starts with understanding yourself as a collection of tasks who should subcontract those out to a machine. Almost no regular person’s life currently exists as such.
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Sean Marshall @seanyyz.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
“What is certain, however, is that a vast sum of our money will be wasted, countless Torontonians will find themselves profoundly inconvenienced for extended periods, and, eventually, a cyclist will get struck by a car. But at least the congestion will be worse.”
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I can almost guarantee you that if a man in a het normative family structure finds meal planning easy enough to turn it into an AI task, it is because a woman has made the task easy enough that he is willing to do it.
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huck mason @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
according to christian teaching, this IS victory for the lamb. christian teaching is extremely unambiguous on this point.
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huck mason @tylerhuckabee.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
we really need to start calling out these conservative christians for just straight up not believing in christianity. if you don’t believe christian teaching, nobody is forcing you to call yourself a christian! free yourself!
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 28/09/2026
oh, how could i have forgotten about this gem from the recent Yud Archive
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
i don't think this is solely due to some kind of mcluhan-esque property of social media as a medium, you can also obviously ascribe it to both material conditions offline and the political economy of how social media platforms are organized
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
and those qualities dovetail with the physical and economic contingency you see in industrialized states, creating a sort of 'network man' to replace hitler's "mass man." network man is isolated from his fellows and watches andrew tate videos www.tabletmag.com/sections/new...
tabletmag.com
Japan’s Cynical Romantics, Precursors to the Alt-Right
I still remember when I encountered my first far-right netizen in the wild. It happened in 2011 while I was living in Japan. Internet citizens, netizens for short, referred to Japanese who practically...
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
its really impossible to fully summarize several decades worth of theoretical and empirical discourses on social media effectively but they collectively point to the subject of the jager hyperpolitics book: someone who is contingent, parochial, ephemeral, fearful, and isolated
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ae @aelkus.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
i broadly agree with the thesis, but not the way that WBF argued it
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Andrew Longhurst 🇨🇦 🍉 @alonghurst.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Wait times are increasing with greater for-profit involvement. Between 2017 and 2025, median wait times for eight of 12 priority procedures have increased in Ontario For example: MRI scans: median wait times increased from 35 days in 2017 to 47 days in 2025—34% increase #onpoli
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Andrew Longhurst 🇨🇦 🍉 @alonghurst.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The Ontario government is aggressively privatizing surgeries and medical imaging—core hospital services My new @policyalternatives.ca research study evaluates whether this policy direction reduces wait times and serves the public interest www.policyalternatives.ca/news-researc... #onpoli
policyalternatives.ca
Not adding up: Surgical and diagnostic privatization in Ontario | CCPA
The Ontario government favours for-profit delivery of surgeries and medical imaging, but the evidence shows this isn't good health policy
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Luke Stark @lukestark.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
It's worth noting that folks like Geof Nunberg clocked the potential of digital media to produce epistemic collapse thirty years ago.
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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
A great illustration of the way social media has essentially shredded society’s informational immune system: The USSR spent a fortune trying to spread conspiracy theories, without success because they couldn’t crack newsrooms. Today, you can reach the globe with a post that costs $20 to make.
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 28/09/2026
“The playing field of the social media informational environment is uneven, and it systematically benefits autocracies.” www.liberalcurrents.com/social-media...
liberalcurrents.com
Social Media Has Not Brought Liberation
Social media has been a boon to autocratic regimes and their allied movements in democracies.
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David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Ospreys are disappearing along the US East Coast due to a shortage of Atlantic menhaden, a crucial food source for ospreys. One company alone harvested nearly 300 million pounds of the fish in 2024 but somehow claims they’re not at fault. 🧐
wapo.st
Ospreys are disappearing along the East Coast. Scientists think they know why.
At the center of a widening crisis for one of the nation's great wildlife comebacks is a fish most Americans would hardly recognize.
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David Dark @daviddark.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
"The illusion of speed and urgency promulgated by the tech companies is also a ploy to misdirect both policymakers and the public. Unfortunately, it sometimes works." @timnitgebru.blacksky.app & @emilymbender.bsky.social www.technologyreview.com/2026/09/22/1...
technologyreview.com
Don’t be fooled by this summer of AI hype
Breathless claims about AGI and new capabilities fall apart pretty quickly under scrutiny.
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Melissa Johnson, PhD @ladyhistorian.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
I am tired of having to pretend that the value of studying my discipline solely rests on the "marketable skills" we teach. Sometimes things are just worth knowing and doing because they make your life bigger and richer.
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Laine Nooney @ 🔥🗑️🔥 @lainenooney.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Still getting mad about this every time I remember that Levy also LITERALLY INVENTED the idea of the "hacker" as a technoclass with a collective meaningful ideology, rather than, let's say, a bunch of guys doing a programmer's version of shitposting
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Pam Spaulding @pamspaulding.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
⚠️ Boeing AGAIN puts planes in the air w/known software issues (a prior issue caused 2 fatal Boeing 737 MAX crashes). Boeing failed to publicly disclose this new “glitch” — in the 737 Max's automated nav — that can fail *while planes are landing*. Boeing: "not a safety risk." 🎁 t2m.co/MUXqU01
wsj.com
Exclusive | New Boeing 737 MAX Software Glitch Could Disrupt Navigation Feature
The issue is prompting concerns about a potential safety risk while planes are landing. Boeing is working on a procedure for pilots and a software fix.
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