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tldr if your campus isn't talking about whether AI is ethical, and isn't talking about environment or labour, let's take anything they say about it with a hefty grain of salt

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Artificial intelligence is creating a new colonial world order

People have been trying to talk about this, including conceptualizing it as a sort of neo-colonialism. But a lot of the need for ethical attention is getting lost in the noise of shiny new tools and EdTech sensing profit www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/19/1... +

technologyreview.com

An MIT Technology Review series investigates how AI is enriching a powerful few by dispossessing communities that have been dispossessed before.

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Long hours and low wages: the human labour powering AI's development

Finnish company Metroc, as reported in November 2023, turned to prison labour for their LLM training - a sort of labour not known for its positive workplace environment theconversation.com/long-hours-a... +

theconversation.com

Tech firms are relying on low-wage workers to power their AI models. That raises serious ethical questions about how the technology is being developed.

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Exclusive: The $2 Per Hour Workers Who Made ChatGPT Safer

Reliance on underpaid and precarious human work was highlighted in this TIME investigation of OpenAI, ChatGPT's creators, and their use of outsourced Kenyan workers to label data time.com/6247678/open... +

time.com

A TIME investigation reveals the difficult conditions faced by the workers who made ChatGPT possible

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Noema is a magazine exploring the transformations sweeping our world. We publish essays, reporting, interviews, videos and art on the overlapping realms of philosophy, governance, geopolitics, economi...

But it's not just environment - it's what AI does to people. Training AI has gone hand in hand with some devastating labour exploitation, often of historically exploited people www.noemamag.com/the-exploite...

noemamag.com

NOEMA | Noema Magazine

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TechScape: Turns out there’s another problem with AI – its environmental toll

More recently, last year, it was clear that the environmental impact of AI remained a huge problem, both in terms of carbon footprint and water consumption www.theguardian.com/technology/2... +

theguardian.com

AI uses huge amounts of electricity and water to work, and the problem is only going to get worse – what can be done? Plus, the wider TechScape

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Back in 2020, people were already talking about AI training as resource-hungry. Corporate interests in the tech, especially as a replacement for specialist workers, already contributed to an exponentially expanding carbon footprint nature.com/articles/s42... +

nature.com

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Matt Chalmers @mjchalmers.bsky.social · 24/12/2023

As the semester kicks off, the inevitable emails about how cool AI is ooze down from management. Here's a thread about how, regardless of AI being a good tool or not, it's not clear it's *ethical* atm Two main points: environmental strain and labour 1/n

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I like both Religion in Five Minutes and Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Cliches (volume I and now II). Both helpful, and oriented around "common knowledge" claims

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Statistically, you actually have a better chance of getting hired to TT as ABD than once you're a couple of years out (unless you are moving TT to TT). It's a lot about what people imagine you can do

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Oh, then I've misunderstood you - I thought that was what you meant. What do you see as the importance of getting them with initial application?

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Even if you consider letters irreplaceable as a way to vet problem candidates, that vetting can (and imo should) still take place later on

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Matt Chalmers @mjchalmers.bsky.social · 17/12/2023

I gently suggest that even when considered crucial, letters should still happen further down the line. That's because it should not be just about the committee's decision-making process, but about what is reasonable to require of most applicants, most of whom will be unsuccessful

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I can appreciate this Speaking from the other side of all this, I think asking for contact details rather than letters at initial application is best. Most candidates just get ghosted most of the time. In that light, we really should cut down how much work we expect from them and their writers

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Matt Chalmers @mjchalmers.bsky.social · 17/12/2023

I do not understand why we still ask for multiple customized documents plus three letters of recommendation for 1-year visiting positions* We really should just lift some of that unnecessary burden from junior and precarious colleagues *also unnecessary for tenure-stream positions, as an aside

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Matt Chalmers @mjchalmers.bsky.social · 24/11/2023

Our new open-access article: without attention to non-European premodernity, can you properly understand minority status? (Co-authoring is fun - you can collate knowledge to throw some punches) www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

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Matt Chalmers @mjchalmers.bsky.social · 14/11/2023

an awful lot of the time, the conditions for cuts in higher ed are just like this one invented out of thin air for reasons that management either (1) use cynically or (2) train themselves to then consider to be vital

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Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 13/11/2023

what so annoying is that, from the experience of people close to me - not me - social stuff is very often categorized as service I know people whose reluctance to attend evening social things a long commute away has been judged as "uncollegial", for example, which is very telling

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Reposted by Matt Chalmers

When we bemoan how "things have changed" in academia, we can and should center the ongoing devastating toll of the pandemic on so many of us. If we're disengaged, at least for many of us, its because we're genuinely struggling to cope. And department "climate" or socializing is not a priority.

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Dr. Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi @rjelevi.bsky.social · 12/11/2023

"people just realized how much of their lives were being taken up by stuff they weren't getting paid for" is the nail-on-head explanation for 90% of management headscratchers in higher ed cheap free cookies aren't going to get extra attendance at faculty meetings and that's not surprising

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Reposted by Matt Chalmers

Several years ago I did a thread on different types of “it’s complicated” claims, and I think I should bring it over here. The histories of Palestine and Israel, its’ peoples’ claims re: the land, etc. are all legitimately complicated. Whether it’s acceptable to bomb civilians is emphatically not.

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It's frustrating for organizers, of course, to make events that are poorly attended. But while there's a lot of academics thinking it's business as usual, there's also a lot of people who (imo correctly) refuse that

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