iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 8h

going to start thinking of futurologists not as people who ✨discern what the future will be like✨ but rather as people who 🛂discern what sort of labour force powerful people in the present would prefer to have at their disposal when they get there🛂

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 12h

arguments about writing, reading books vs excerpts or summaries, etc, are arguments about who is able or deserves to gain experiences, develop abilities and reflect on ideas in a non-instrumental fashion and who just needs to be able to access, copy and transmit information to be worth keeping alive

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 12h

Writing survived the Dictaphone, it'll survive AI. Thought is the thing I'd be worried about here

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 13h

can writing survive the New York Times

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

the arc of centrism bends towards right-wing nationalist monoculture. or it would bend that way, if it had started anywhere else

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

all the oldsters look on in dismay as I feed *myself* a Werther’s Original hard candy

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

the third Aaron Sorkin movie about Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Replacement, will cover his petrification

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Dorothy Berry @dorothyjberry.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

"and I said, I said- hey, these days? what ISN'T an archive?" - cocktail party erupts into clapping and laughter

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

there isn’t a racist bone in his body. in fact there’s no bones at all

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I don’t post much sports stuff here but this is an incredibly disgusting story

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

it is really something how unpleasant an experience having anything to do with an airport has been made. let alone using it to fly

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

wouldn’t it be wild if AI cured cancer independently shortly after taking in a bunch of cutting-edge cancer researchers’ works-in-progress? real Newton vs Leibniz stuff, what a time for discovery

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Do something thankless — huge thanks guaranteed!!! also money

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

it is important that the US become a more miserable, isolating place to grow up, where children are increasingly imaginable only as victims or criminals or both

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 29/07/2025

Boiling here at home in Cyprus but I put the finishing touches a couple of days ago on this preprint: What Does 'Human-Centred AI' Mean? doi.org/10.48550/arX... Wherein I analyse HCAI & demonstrate through 3 triplets my new tripartite definition of AI (Table 1) that properly centres the human. 1/n

title and abstract from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

table 1 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

who are aggrieved young people but the aggrieved but aging opinion columnists of the future

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

highest levels of success/ like 5s on AP tests

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

applying market terminology to something does not make it a market

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

must be tough going from needing a million extracurriculars at 18 to having no identity other than potential employee 4-6 years later

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

today in Stop Romanticizing Canada: Quebec’s Bill 9 has just taken effect, barring women in veils from receiving public services. Public employees include university faculty, so professors have been instructed to require veiled women to uncover their faces or be removed from the classroom.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Wealthy private universities certainly face threats from the present administration, but they do not face threats of the same kind or on the same order as public universities, and they have vastly more power to protect and preserve work being cut or banned elsewhere. This is no time for austerity.

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

"Penn’s endowment surged by a record $6.3B in fiscal year 2026, its strongest year-over-year gain in recent history... The endowment saw a staggering 27.4% return last year... In its budget for the upcoming fiscal year, the University has continued to advocate for cost-reduction measures..."

thedp.com

Penn endowment sees over $6 billion jump in largest single-year return on record

After years of steady growth, the endowment saw a staggering 27.4% return in fiscal year 2026.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

“people talking comfortably and confidently on camera” was our worst invention. my evidence? pick another one that people talking comfortably and confidently on camera doesn’t make exponentially stupider and more dangerous

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

If you exchange the ability to read books and perhaps even write them for the ability to ask a machine to tell you about them or to put words in your mouth, you have not made a good trade. You have not traded like for like or worse for better. And that is the exchange being proposed

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

sometimes the issues people care about are not real, but the people you hurt by playing along always are

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Dr Dave Hitchcock @davehitchcock.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

'History is a Human Craft'. In piece about ethics, our classrooms and AI, I suppose I've put up my barricades and drawn my lines. I suggest 8 'considerations' before we do any teaching with AI. This is part of a new @royalhistsoc.org short series on 'AI and History Teaching' in Transactions.

blog.royalhistsoc.org

History is a human craft | Historical Transactions

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

am I alone in thinking that “I need more power. If you don’t give it to me, something terrible will happen to you” is actually the same AI pitch as before

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I understand that bats are millions of years old. But they are also clearly from the late Renaissance

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

amazing how far things have to go before the party of saving democracy is willing to talk about maybe “trying” to “defund” an ethnic cleansing project the state has institutionalized

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

still the latest most important election ever, just a little less important than advertised

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AP Stylebook @apstylebook.com · 23/09/2026

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics.

apnews.com

https://apnews.com/article/openai-safety-ai-framework-089e75b95bc935af092da7b79d92706d

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

This is why I do not think that elite schools are particularly safe from automation. More and more, our elites do not value literacy for their children any more than they support it in other people’s. Internal governance, not formal independence and not institutional rank, determines your fate.

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

these must be those Anglo-Saxon attitudes I’ve been hearing about

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

first no mention of race or gender, now this

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

in universities run like businesses, every agenda is fuel for branding, and every norm is consumed and excreted by it this is why rage over "DEI" in academia, even when it is not simply cynical and racist, is so fundamentally misplaced

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

an unintended consequence of endlessly reworking the same 50-80-year-old IP will be that pop culture references age more and more slowly until time stops and Batman really is Forever

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

oh they’re gonna be speaking in “olde English” eh? like Shakespeare did? “olde English” like Shakespeare spoke, is it? that’s cool. I wanted to die of apoplexy and now I know it can happen

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samuel mehr @mehr.nz · 23/09/2026

after some in-depth discussions with my lab and also drawing on conversations on here, we've edited our new policy on AI usage in my lab feel free to adapt or re-use with attribution, or to reply to tell me how awful this policy is lol

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

telling my disbelieving students what it was like for my generation to live without AI, 18 months ago

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

I do find a provost using AI to write op-eds hilarious, but also, to borrow from Dorothy Parker, how could they tell?

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

just pictured John Updike’s glum face floating between worlds like Colonel Briggs in Twin Peaks: The Return

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

possibly the easiest city on earth to be from

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Ted McCormick @tedmccormick.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

I've been working and reworking a piece on a seventeenth-century "perpetual motion" scheme, the upshot of which was shifting colonial production from animal to enslaved labour, thereby reducing the amount of land needed to feed animals one of several formally similar cases

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Historically, automation tech has commonly made more work for people: the issue is WHICH people. Whether as an excuse for owners to increase the requirements for expectations in a given day, lessen the labor expected of men while raising the expectations for women, etc. "AI" isn't exceptional.

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Canadian Paintings @canadianpaintings.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Pine Trees at Sunset Tom Thomson 1915

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