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Michelle Shevin

@michebox.bsky.social
124 followers 177 following 32 posts

Future Preservation Society

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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
I have never run more than 5 miles and have gotten runner’s high more than once. It is like a creeping & then sudden bodily euphoria that makes you feel you could run indefinitely. Still never made it past 5 miles though. It is a stress response in the brain and probably a bad thing to have happen!
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Deb Raji @rajiinio.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
This might be my villain origin story: www.wired.com/story/openai...
wired.com
OpenAI and the FDA Are Holding Talks About Using AI In Drug Evaluation
High-ranking OpenAI employees have met with the FDA multiple times in recent weeks to discuss AI and a project called cderGPT.
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Dr Francis Young @drfrancisyoung.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
People are always saying on social media that gen-AI is here to stay and that it’s retrograde and standing in the way of progress if we reject it. But there are plenty of things that were once the embodiment of progress that we collectively decided to reject, from cocaine in soft drinks to eugenics
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 07/05/2025
The hysteria when you say, “nah I’m good” on all the chat bots is how you know they’re in the grips of roulette fever. You know the guy at a casino, shaking at 2 am, telling you how dumb you are not to get in on this?
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 03/05/2025
I’ve just eaten a braised chicken thigh and a fried wing at hat yai with extra pickles and I feel compelled to tell you that you buried the lede!
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Julia Angwin @juliaangwin.com · 30/04/2025
DOGE is assembling a master database of personal data from across the government -- including tax records, social security files, immigration dossiers etc. This cross-agency master database is exactly what Congress tried to prevent when it passed the Federal Privacy Act of 1974.
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Julia Angwin @juliaangwin.com · 30/04/2025
A centralized database will be "ill-equipped to correct errors, allow for extenuating circumstances, or bring facts up to date," warned Vance Packard. "The notion of the possibility of redemption is likely to be incomprehensible to a computer."
A centralized database will be "ill-equipped to correct errors, allow for extenuating circumstances, or bring facts up to date," warned Vance Packard. "The notion of the possibility of redemption is likely to be incomprehensible to a computer."
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 24/04/2025
Big fan of friction, myself. Reading them next to each other tbf but also rhymes with Postman’s critique of “entertainment” as something that helps with education. “…conceived by someone asking What is the television good for? Not what is education good for?” could easily be about AI…
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 21/04/2025
An unforgettable, excellent, and timeless article!
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Sean Martin McDonald @seanmartinmcdonald.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
This consolidation started long before now and was a product of a lot of American hubris. But this is definitely the “find out” phase and it’s going to be brutal.
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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
This is, the therapists say, very dangerous—the algorithm doesn't know how to detect nuance, or when to ask follow up questions, for instance, and may be turning away people in genuine crisis. Algorithmic triage, they say, has been a disaster, and they've fought it since its inception.
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ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 11/04/2025
i'm ambivalent about litigating algorithmic fairness and accuracy; this is why. negotiating administrating this system fairly or accurately is nonsense. there's no running a colony ethically, or an empire in a human-centered way. you can make up bullshit and hit those targets, but they mean nothing.
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Evidently rich terroir 💫
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 11/04/2025
Genuinely weird bit of resonance for me here. I have just booked my first ever trip to Portland and am naturally already looking for food. In immediate succession I encountered this place on the map near my hotel, bookmarked it, and then switched over here to find this at the top of my feed…
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Brian Merchant @bcmerchant.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
After Trump was elected the first time, there was also a lot of talk about making iPhones in the US. At the time, I co-edited the sci-fi outlet Terraform, and asked @timmaughan.bsky.social to imagine what such a future might really look like. With his permission, I'm republishing the story in full:
bloodinthemachine.com
Flyover Country
What a future where iPhones are made in America would really look like.
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ohpipedown.bsky.social @ohpipedown.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Go slow and love intensely.
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 06/04/2025
“Is your heart beating and do you plan to live? Come this way…” —@adriennemareebrown.bsky.social
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Anna Bower @annabower.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
Erez Reuveni argued on behalf of the Justice Department during Friday’s hearing in the Abrego Garcia case. Reuveni has reportedly been placed on leave. Here’s one exchange with the judge that may have contributed to his ouster:
THE COURT: Mr. Abrego Garcia should not have been removed, right?
MR. REUVENI: Yes.
THE COURT: Can you answer for me, then, on what authority was he seized? When he was --when he was taken off the street, taken out of his car, what authority did those law enforcement officers have to do that?
MR. REUVENI: So, Your Honor, my answer to a lot of these questions is going to be frustrating. I am also frustrated that I have no answers for
you on a lot of these questions.
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 05/04/2025
a pro life tip is to find someone you like to tell your dreams to
medium.com
a poem i wrote while falling in love with my life
I dreamt my body electric -- tree-like, geomagnetic...
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
whose future is not only a space of problems to be solved, but also circumstances to navigate in community with one another. Through this lens, choices become not just good or bad, true or false, left or right, but assessed against their potential to cultivate the conditions for right relationship.”
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
“Planning on co-liberation and collective thriving doesn’t mean things proceed according to a plan. It looks more like prioritizing, over and over again, the reality that while the future is unwritten, my destiny is tied up with yours— that all life is an interconnected web…
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
lolsob
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Tom King @tallgeekychap.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
The hype machine for Big Tech, "AI", and cyberlibertarianism shows no sign of slowing down. This is because it actually has to speed up to balance the number of red lights flashing on the dashboard in terms of "AI's" usefulness, contribution to human happiness, and (crucially), profitability.
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Tamara Kneese @tamigraph.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
Holy shit “Trump administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs’ outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family”
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Nick Miroff @nickmiroff.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
BREAKING: Trump admin says it mistakenly deported a Maryland father who had *withholding of removal* back to El Salvador on March 15. Govt told court Monday it won't bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back. "What.The.Fuck..." one govt attorney told me. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc... @theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison
The Trump administration says it mistakenly deported an immigrant with protected status but that courts are powerless to order his return.
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
Really enjoyed this, Eryk! I came to a similar conclusion in this piece out last week — fun to put these in conversation with each other. “…Computers are very useful in many contexts. They are not a vision of the future…”
medium.com
Possibility + Power = Plan
I soured on my first strategic foresight job gradually, and then all at once.
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
Pro-AI hype and Anti-AI doom are so deeply personal and polarized for a reason: they are the only visions of the future anyone is offering at all. In my latest for @techpolicypress.bsky.social, a look at the loss of faith in participatory politics that frames AI hype, but also its backlash.
techpolicy.press
Future Fatigue: How Hype has Replaced Hope in the 21st Century | TechPolicy.Press
To resist AI hype, we must not reassert the fiction that we could “return” to a functional democracy, writes Eryk Salvaggio.
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
Setting them aside isn't the prescription, so I don't think we're that far off. Mostly I want to see a "future" without AI at the center. Most Gen AI use cases are inseparable from this techno-capitalist impulse. But others aren't. Giving up one because we don't like the other feels like a retreat.
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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 26/03/2025
Brilliant piece by @hannahstoryb.bsky.social here - the naive 'JUST BUILD THINGS' abundance agenda is a boon to the fossil fuel industry. prospect.org/culture/book...
powerful enemies. The "liberalism that builds" camp, in short, would find more allies among the progressives they criticize if they acknowledged that some things should not, in fact, be built. We need better levers to prevent abuses and
better processes for getting
public goods built. But the authors refuse to dignify the
question of how to prevent existing abuses from worsening if we take away existing
guardrails.
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 23/03/2025
I’m not sure if it reads like this but what you are describing is a helpful articulation for my writing process. I read, synthesize, and stew — then when the feelings manifest I allow something flow out of me automatically as if channeling. It’s in my body before it’s in my mind.
…Computers are very useful in many contexts. They are not a vision of the future. The ones you’ve been hearing are ‘getting so good we should be worried they’ll take over’ are more akin to several layers of human-directed exploitation and extraction in a trench coat than they are ‘reasoning machines’ or promising sites for ‘social progress.’ 
We should be worried: not that super ‘intelligent’ machines are taking over, but that while waiting breathlessly for their arrival we are busy putting dumb ones in charge. For those who intuit this, it can be tempting to passively observe the dimensional collapse of datafication. In this Flatland nothing matters unless it can be measured and managed, and “intelligence” is just whatever computers can do. It can be lulling to interpret this overt absurdity as the swan song of a paradigm losing its grip — a story about concentrated power and limitless consumption no longer believed or believable…

https://medium.com/@michebox/possibility-power-plan-1ac2fc506dfa
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John Skiles Skinner @skiles.blue · 21/03/2025
There is a quasi-religion in Silicon Valley that views AI as godlike. This faith has always been parallel to Evangelical Christianity: salvation (transhumanism), the rapture (the technological singularity), and demons (Roko's Basilisk) Lately the AI faith has fully fused with Christian Nationalism.
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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
The promise of AI in education is it will save educators time. That's rubbish. It's sapping all our time already in working groups, committees, workshops, and marking anxiety. It's the most time-sapping, exhausting and frankly boring thing I've ever encountered in HE - and it's in my research area.
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 22/03/2025
despite popularised beliefs, LLMs are not fit for medical applications. SoTA models produce "non-trivial levels of hallucinations" even w inference techniques like CoT & search augmented generation: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.05777 of surveyed clinicians, 53% use LLMs daily & 91% encountered hallucinations
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gquaggiotto.bsky.social @gquaggiotto.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
[Looks terrific] "This conference aims to examine hype as a performative force, exploring its mechanisms, effects, and implications across different domains" hypestudies.org/conference
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Just learned a lot about the egg cartel. Big egg is worth the read.
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Deepest gratitude to @biancawylie.com and Ben Gansky for loving feedback during the editing process, and to @ruha9.bsky.social @seanmartinmcdonald.bsky.social @tallgeekychap.bsky.social @adriennemareebrown.bsky.social @astra.bsky.social and many others for their brilliant work linked within
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
David Graeber once said “this feeling of hopelessness that everyone has is a manufactured product.” Today I’ve published a piece about how the future gets foreclosed and how we fight back with our minds and relationships.
medium.com
Possibility + Power = Plan
I soured on my first strategic foresight job gradually, and then all at once.
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 18/03/2025
Very excited to participate in this event with @randomwalker.bsky.social next week! lectures.princeton.edu/lectures/202...
lectures.princeton.edu
A Guide to Cutting Through AI Hype: Arvind Narayanan and Melanie Mitchell Discuss Artificial and Human Intelligence
Princeton University Professor Arvind Narayanan and Professor Melanie Mitchell of the Santa Fe Institute, will share their insights on Artificial Intelligence in a discussion format, followed by a que...
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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 17/03/2025
In this post Kelly provides great list of easy steps you can take: sign the EveryLibrary petition, call your senators + reps (use 5Calls!). Protect our state libraries, tribal libraries, interlibrary loan, digital equity, vital grants to libraries of all species... 📣 And please spread the word!! 📣
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Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
“Denying the Seriousness of Long COVID Is Dangerous for Me – and You” On Long COVID Awareness Day, pleased to publish this piece for Zeteo from @juliadoubleday.bsky.social
zeteo.com
Denying the Seriousness of Long COVID Is Dangerous for Me – and You
What is Long COVID? Are there treatments? A guide to the illness that affects millions, but is hardly talked about.
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Arrianna Marie Planey, PhD MA @arrianna-planey.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
We need mask mandates in healthcare settings more than ever
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Erin Richardson @erinrichardson.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
This is going to kill many public libraries, especially in rural areas. If you use a public library, you will be impacted. #imls is a dust mote in the federal budget. It also provides things like internet at your local library so people can apply for jobs and kids can do homework.
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Michelle Shevin @michebox.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
Instant fan of the Latour reference. Excited to read!
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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 15/03/2025
“‘The Trump administration has removed safety, fairness, misinformation, and responsibility as things it values for AI, which I think speaks for itself,’ says one researcher at an organization working with the AI Safety Institute, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.”
wired.com
Under Trump, AI Scientists Are Told to Remove ‘Ideological Bias’ From Powerful Models
A directive from the National Institute of Standards and Technology eliminates mention of “AI safety” and “AI fairness.”
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Eryk Salvaggio @eryk.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
Oof.
In a recent study, colleagues and I asked computer scientists to develop a software tool that gives automated advice about whether people are eligible for bankruptcy relief. The computer scientists completed the task quickly, with one even noting, “this seems very simple.” However, when we analyzed the software tools they built, we found that errors and legal misconceptions were rampant. Despite these flaws, the computer scientists were confident that their tools would be beneficial in practice. Seventy-nine percent of them stated that they would be comfortable with their tool replacing judges in bankruptcy court.
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Amanda Litman @amandalitman.bsky.social · 14/03/2025
Run for office. runforwhat.net - our next intro call is 3/25.
runforwhat.net
Where Can I Run — Run for Something Action Fund
Use this tool to find out when, where and how you can run for office.
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