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Tom Chatfield

@tomchatfield.bsky.social
377 followers 100 following 45 posts

Tech philosopher, author, dad. Critical thinking, AI ethics, future skills. Latest book: Wise Animals (Picador) tinyurl.com/WiseAnimals Views mine

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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
"AI’s power must not be allowed to hollow out the very skills required to navigate an AI age successfully." After six months of writing and research, my white paper on AI and pedagogy is finally out! sagepub.com/explore-our-... Do share; do join the conversation.
sagepub.com
AI and the Future of Pedagogy
Tom Chatfield’s AI and the Future of Pedagogy cautions against letting AI erode essential human skills, such as critical thinking, discernment, and domain expertise, and instead advocates for utilizin...
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John V Willshire @willsh.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
Saw @tomchatfield.bsky.social last week, and he gave me a sneak peek at his forthcoming book ‘How To Think Clearly’, where he’d pointed to my #cognitivedebt coinage from earlier this year. So I have written a proper page laying out the thinking, examples etc… smithery.com/cognitive-de...
smithery.com
Cognitive Debt
“Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Artefacts Newsletter #247, April 25th, 2025 I first wr…
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 01/04/2025
I've spent the last six months writing and researching this white paper about why our greatest challenges are human, not technological. Do take a look. www.sagepub.com/explore-our-...
sagepub.com
Human skills for an AI age: How today’s business schools can develop tomorrow’s leaders
Stay updated with the latest company news, press releases, and media resources. Visit our Press Office for corporate announcements, media inquiries, and brand assets.
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Sage @sagepub.com · 12/03/2025
Missed our webinar on AI and academic excellence? Catch up on the discussion with Dr. Leo Lo & Dr. Tom Chatfield & discover how to turn AI into a collaborative tool for research while maintaining critical thinking & ethical standards. Watch now: ow.ly/5aYV50VgkTF @tomchatfield.bsky.social
Free webinar. AI and academic excellence: Ethical considerations and best practices. Dr. Leo Lo & Dr. Tom Chatfield
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mia ridge @miaout.bsky.social · 12/02/2025
Video from our 'Libraries and AI' panel is now online! www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsRk... Thanks @britishlibrary.bsky.social @cawston.bsky.social @suelacey-bryant.bsky.social @tomchatfield.bsky.social @timandraharkness.bsky.social, Maja Maricevic and Svein Arne #AIDebates
youtube.com
Libraries & AI - Opportunities or Threat?
YouTube video by British Library
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 04/02/2025
A newsletter on the usefulness of hasty, heartfelt writing; plus some suitably speedy thoughts on AI, critical thinking and the future of literature. open.substack.com/pub/tomchatf...
open.substack.com
Thinking out loud onscreen
Harnessing the hasty and the heartfelt
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 30/01/2025
"If you think you might have something to contribute, don’t you have some kind of duty to move forward at 70%, instead of depriving us of your contribution thanks to your finicky and frankly rather self-indulgent insistence on perfection?" ckarchive.com/b/wvu2hghk5m...
ckarchive.com
The Imperfectionist: Seventy per cent
@media only screen { .email * { word-break: break-word; } } @media screen and (max-width: 384px) { .mail-message-content { width: 414px !important; } } @media only screen and (m...
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 29/01/2025
Perfection, of a kind.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
First glimpses of Wise Animals in its paperback incarnation, out on 13th February. Please do consider picking one up! I'm very proud of this book. www.panmacmillan.com/authors/tom-...
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mia ridge @miaout.bsky.social · 21/01/2025
I'm looking forward to an excellent panel at @britishlibrary.bsky.social 's #AIDebates on 'Libraries and AI' on Thursday, with @suelacey-bryant.bsky.social @cawston.bsky.social @tomchatfield.bsky.social @sveinarne.bsky.social and Svein Arne Brygfjeld thebritishlibrary.seetickets.com/event/librar...
thebritishlibrary.seetickets.com
Libraries and AI: Opportunity or threat? from See Tickets
Buy tickets for Libraries and AI: Opportunity or threat? at British Library from the official retailer, The British Library.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
Given that AIs will in due course be trained upon all the papers currently being written about AI—including about ethics, deception and alignment, and how to test and explore such things—is there a genuine risk that today's scholarship will help improve tomorrow's automated manipulators?
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 20/01/2025
Very much looking forward to this: do join us!
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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 18/01/2025
there is so much hype around AI agents, but like most current AI, they spectacularly fail when put to actual real-world use www.answer.ai/posts/2025-0...
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
Crept into new days, Dodging old futures, sly looks From rickety dreams.
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Oliver Mantell @olivermantell.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
Stage Hamlet in a game of GTA and it’s all “⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ brilliant cross-fertilisation of genres, reimagining dramatic possibilities in the C21st” - but play GTA during a staging of Hamlet, and suddenly it’s “you have to leave now, Sir: you’re disturbing the performance…”
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 13/12/2024
A moral milestone. My children are old enough to have learned the golden rule: do unto others whatever they'll let you get away with.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 11/12/2024
The notion that we may be glimpsing the nature and properties of a multiverse via quantum computation is rather beautiful blog.google/technology/r... the most fundamental informational properties of existence as we know it, shedding light on its unimagined other echoes
blog.google
Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip
Our new quantum chip demonstrates error correction and performance that paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 07/12/2024
Front-line reportage from the school Christmas fair's darker peripheries...
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James McConnachie @jamesmcconnachie.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Coffee, to prevent that murmur, soon replies: "Lift doors opening. Going up."
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Chris Baraniuk @chrisbaraniuk.com · 05/12/2024
NEW: I spoke to Gaia Vince about her book on the coming climate upheaval - and how cities and infrastructure will have to change. www.thereengineer.pro/p/we-have-to...
thereengineer.pro
‘We have to adapt’ – Gaia Vince on cities, tech and climate migrants
The climate upheaval is already, arguably, underway.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 05/12/2024
Morning tea brewing: A rope ladder dangled down The deep well of sleep.
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James McConnachie @jamesmcconnachie.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
@tomchatfield.bsky.social : "The UK’s creative industries generate over £124.6 billion annually not because they churn out content to order, but because they entail hundreds of thousands of people creating works that audiences love."
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Confirmation bias can sound so (laughably!) easy to avoid. And yet. To carefully ask what the evidence does and does not show, and how and why, is not only hard but can also be painful and thankless. So much simpler first to pick your side, then your story, then your evidence.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
The season's sweet mulch Rots into a thousand lives. Hope, but not for you.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
I'm very much looking forward to discussing Wise Animals with the great Adam Rutherford this Saturday afternoon in Hay. If you're there, do come! www.hayfestival.com/p-22707-tom-...
hayfestival.com
Tom Chatfield talks to Adam Rutherford - Hay Festival
A challenge to re-evaluate our thoughts on humanity’s entanglement with technology.
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Clare Spencer @clarespencer.bsky.social · 29/11/2024
“… The promise of ‘human-in-the-loop’ approaches sits awkwardly alongside AI’s central selling point: scalability.” @felixsimon.bsky.social reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/neither... I would add: Sometimes it is quicker to write from scratch than it is to fact check AI output.
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
Neither humans-in-the-loop nor transparency labels will save the news media when it comes to AI
“The notion of a human needing to intervene in every decision undercuts the idea of speeding up various tasks,” argues our researcher Felix M. Simon.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Easy to overlook the simple fact that people are above all interested in other people and even the choicest AI-generated content won't sustain a platform of engaged, curious humans. In the short term, people are easily duped. In the long term they get wise (and bored, and angry).
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 28/11/2024
Miles slip past my feet Like a younger life lived well. There, almost in sight!
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
A sudden, sad thought that we may end up looking at today's LLMs like this if, rather than the mad/flaky/amazing business of chatting to them to try to work out what on earth they can (and can't) do we end up with endless streams of templates and productivity-enhancing tools doing pseudo work for us
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 25/11/2024
ICYMI, an extract from Wise Animals, which came out in Feb and explores our co-evolution with technology. "To love something is to be obliged to worry about its history, purposes and imperfections; to want it to be better; to say no as well as yes to its offerings." open.substack.com/pub/tomchatf...
open.substack.com
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
"I have never understood why, when everyone on the planet is one accident or medical condition away from disability, many people seem to lack any empathy and do not attempt to understand how it must feel to be refused service because of a disability." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
'Refused service again with my guide dog, I'm done speaking out'
Sean Dilley is inundated with abuse on social media whenever he posts about discrimination issues.
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Eileen Clancy 🧿 @clancyny.bsky.social · 24/11/2024
I love this writing teacher laying out her thoughts about AI in a Google Doc and inviting other teachers to jump in with comments. It feels very "let's struggle together" and not "I'm above the fray." Yes, it's good even if you want to take AI for a long walk on a short pier. :)
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Felix M. Simon @felixsimon.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
A summary of my current thoughts on AI disclosure and human-in-the-loop approaches in the news: both are widely touted solutions in news media, but would that it were so simple… Short thread below ⬇️ reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/neither...
reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk
Neither humans-in-the-loop nor transparency labels will save the news media when it comes to AI
“The notion of a human needing to intervene in every decision undercuts the idea of speeding up various tasks,” argues our researcher Felix M. Simon.
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Nigel Warburton @nigelwarburton.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
It’s #WorldPhilosophyDay today, so why not listen to a few episodes of the Philosophy Bites podcast - over 300 to choose from on Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/p...
podcasts.apple.com
Philosophy Bites
Philosophy Podcast · 379 Episodes · Monthly
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 21/11/2024
A recording of the talk I gave in New York last week, exploring our co-evolution with technology—and how this deep past can help us think humanely about the current and future challenges of AI. www.linkedin.com/posts/tomcha...
linkedin.com
Tom Chatfield on LinkedIn: Presidential Speaker Series: Our Relationship with Technology with Tom…
A recording of the talk I gave in New York last week, exploring our co-evolution with technology—and how this deep past can help us think humanely about the…
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Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 14/05/2024
Sarah Hrdy’s ‘Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies’ just arrived on my kindle 😊 If you’ve not read any of Hrdy’s books, then start today
Front cover of Father Time A Natural History of Men and Babies SARAH BLAFFER HRDY
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
So much to savour, as ever, in this latest newsletter from Michael Sacasas open.substack.com/pub/theconvi...
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
The late, great David Graeber asking what it might mean (or have meant) to rethink the post-pandemic world.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 18/11/2024
Dr Dog hopes you are having a marvelous day
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 16/11/2024
A forest within a forest
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
Homeward bound
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
Glossy gorgeous starling, patrolling the crockery
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
Multi-storey carpark, NYC style...
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
A line that won't leave my head, from Hanif Kureishi's latest newsletter. "There is no longer anything ‘social’ about social media... Friends and family don’t post anymore. It’s all war and adverts for cheap clothes—like an Adam Curtis documentary." open.substack.com/pub/hanifkur...
open.substack.com
SOMETHING IS HAPPENING
One has to maintain contact with the world as it is—a horror show.
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
I'm only a sporadic Substacker, but it's where I tend to share longer thoughts. This piece from a few months ago, on philosophy and everyday flourishing, is a personal favourite open.substack.com/pub/tomchatf...
open.substack.com
Flourishing, philosophy and the everyday
A tea-house with a view
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Tom Chatfield @tomchatfield.bsky.social · 13/11/2024
A beautiful morning and a fresh start
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