Joanna Bryson
Professor of Ethics & Technology @ Hertie School, Berlin. Interests: Artificial & Natural Intelligence; Behavioural Ecology; Cooperation; Digital Governance. Social media policy: joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2024/10/guidance-to…
- Something that to be honest I don't entirely understand the ramifications of (who benefits long term?) but breaking #privacy doesn't seem to help you in court, which might be a good thing? www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-...
- www.theguardian.com/environment/... Those of us focused on research can forget how much a university means to local economies and societies. 52% of people on this campus were local to its deprived town, many doing healthcare degrees. But the UK's insane migration policies killed the campus. #brexit
- This is one reason I hate "campus" universities; all our lectures and many other things can and should be public goods, available to build and inform local communities. Link via @uniessexgov.bsky.social's Nicole Baerg, whom I will now signal to try to get her to join bluesky!
- When I was in tech, a company collapsing was a sad loss of community, but people with high salaries & no pension took some months self-funded "sabbatical" then thought of new business ideas and hired each other. University layoffs don't seem to generate that innovation; newspapers seem in between.
- Why do people angry at Bezos unsubscribe from the journalists? Stop using AWS, Amazon, Alexa, etc! These things actually make Bezos money! (And anyway, Amazon undercut legitimate competitors using VC, which is skeezy AF.)
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonWorth noting that when the Montgomery boycott started they probably thought it would be quick. The Baton Rouge boycott before them lasted less than a week. Of course Montgomery would last for over a year and go in front of SCOTUS multiple times.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonMy story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonAnthropic’s Super Bowl ad which criticizes AI chatbots that run ads (aka ChatGPT) just dropped. They aren’t pulling any punches and I love the song choice.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonAs jobs begin to shift with AI, I think there will be increasing numbers of people feeling like Aditya (former CTO Dropbox, early Facebook engineer, etc). People are more psychologically resistant to major changes than you might expect, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to reconstruct meaning.
- What the @washingtonpost.com was doing y'day. I picked up an "international NYT" (I still think "IHT," & remember when it was WP & LAP as well as NYT articles) in the airport a week ago today and it was godawful, and I was thinking "good thing I can read the WP "print edition" on my ipad every day."
- On today's Vergecast, I talked w/ @davidpierce.xyz about Anthropic's wild plan to "destructively scan all the books in the world:" why they did it, why a judge found it legal, and why — nefarious as it might sound — what other tech giants did was arguably worse. www.theverge.com/the-vergecast
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonWhatever you think of the Washington Post at this moment, here's a chance to support the dedicated, hard-working journalists who were just laid off. If you have the means, your donation is most welcome. If you don't, a kind thought and maybe spreading the word to others is support enough 💙
- This and Colbert, there will be no one domestic to report on the US midterms.
- OK this may sound petty, but canary in the coal mine: I don't know whether to put this www.raconteur.net/technology/w... under the "press" or the "AI slop" parts of my CV. It successfully paraphrases me and links to one of my blogposts, but it seems like an infotainment advertisement? #AIEthics 🐤
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonAlso the demise of extramural education in universities, which offered so much to local communities. Long gone, I'm afraid.
- Google Flights seems to be broken. #ThanksAI
- Reposted by Joanna Bryson"The hottest club is always the one you can't get into."
- This really is astonishingly good. But then, America was founded by people many of whom were the age of present high school students.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonCyber threats have evolved over time. If the risk of a particular threat decreases, then our list of top to-do items should reflect the changing landscape. Today @boblord.bsky.social argues that some old advice should be retired as #Hacklore. podcast.firewallsdontstopdragons.com/2026/02/02/d...
- These paintings and this collection had a huge impact on me as a small girl, though I already decided I wanted to be a paleontologist (in first grade, when I was 5.)
- My nomination for the most influential scientific visualization ever produced. 🧪🌿🌎🪶🐡 #scicomm #sciviz #visualscicomm #sciviz #dinosaurs alwayssomethingtosee.substack.com/p/the-age-of...
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonThe Nowak-Epstein emails reminded us about the genius summary of that strange paper, which has better stood the test of time 😂 youtube.com/watch?v=oE6I...
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonBREAKING: Europol & Paris cybercrime unit raid Musk X office in France. "Investigations range from sexually explicit deepfakes, aiding the distribution of child sexual abuse material to the dissemination of Holocaust-denial content." #DefendDemocracy #HandsOffOurEU www.politico.eu/article/poli...
- Steven Levitsky per @pkrugman.bsky.social #Trump #USA "Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. In Hungary if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary." paulkrugman.substack.com/p/american-d...
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonELIZA passed the Turing test. It’s. not hard convincing a human that something has agency - I currently think my phone hates me because it’s randomly adding typos just to pias me odd
- America was founded by fundamentalists. Even those of us who self-identify as atheist often erroneously believe in "final solutions" – simple (or complex) fixes. Black suffrage has waxed & waned, never been perfect, often been decisive. Women & migrants may suffer the same, and also need resilience.
- 10. Of the 104 delegates elected to the state constitutional convention, 24 were Black (depicted in the engraving below).Together these delegates were the framers of Virginia’s new constitution,which guaranteed voting rights, elected govt throughout the state, & a public school system for the state.
- A diary by a “queer” English teacher 1932 (when the nazis were outcasts)–1933 (when they’d taken power) documenting their abuse, disappearances, and murder in camps of communists, pacifists, Jewish people & presumably queers. US feels somewhere between the two years right now.
- apropos bsky.app/profile/cdel... Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonRobert Trivers (?) ranting about Peter Richerson's ideas of cultural evolution, courtesy of the DOJ of the US; also some comments about DJT as an organism. www.justice.gov/epstein/file...
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonDifficult to resist the urge to tweet 'told you so' every I see a headline like this. And so I've decided not to resist that urge at all! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
- I applied to work 3 x in St Andrews, but I won't this time, so go for it. [seriously – great psychology, biology, behavioural ecology, international affairs, decent but formal computer science.]
- Permanent post vacancy for a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at St Andrews @standrewsanthro.bsky.social @uniofstandrews.bsky.social - Application deadline: 6th March 2026 www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQG970/l...
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonThere is a case against workday ongoing in California. www.lawandtheworkplace.com/2025/06/ai-b...
- Is anyone organising anything class action about AI-enabled bias in hiring in the US? I've had two totally different queries on this in the last two days – one ironically from an AI researcher who used to work with Geoff Hinton but his liberal arts college went bankrupt & he needs a job.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonCan Europe do nuclear deterrence without America? France and the UK are deepening their cooperation. Other European conversations with the continent’s two nuclear-armed powers are also underway A joint report with @shashj.bsky.social economist.com/europe/2026/...
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonThe thing where ICE parks masked men in school lots is something I would not have believed unless I saw it with my own two eyes. They do it constantly. It’s purely a terror tactic and they’ve done it to schools over the region. Our schools are collapsing - often at 50% attendance or less.
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- Maybe it's who I follow / that I'm really somehow a scientist, but I'm mostly seeing confirmation that skeezy ivy league end of evopsych & AI folk are in Epstein. Is someone else running a thread about transhumanist bigtech? Which LLM makers have the most & least employees & boardmembers menitioned?
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonJust to reiterate: loads of academics have fully successful careers without ever having to suck up to pedophiles (or Nazis, or whatever) for money. I want to push back on the defeatest attitude that says this obsequiousness is required, because that's the surest way to make it *become* required.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonBlack people's right to vote is the law. It has been under siege for more than 150 years--up to the present with the FBI raid on Georgia election offices. This enraging *and* inspiring #BlackHistoryMonth 🧵 reminds us that the fight for justice is not a footnote in US history but a throughline.
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- Reposted by Joanna BrysonNext time someone asks you about energy and land use, maybe remind them that the ~35 million acres that currently grow corn for ethanol in the US could produce ~15 PWh per year of electricity from solar photovoltaics. That's ~3.5 times more than *total annual generation from all US power plants*.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonAmong the most vivid declines in the American people's trust -- their diminished trust in other people. Data from @gallup.com's Social Series.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonThe Human Archipelago: only territories are shown where population density exceeds 1 human per square kilometer.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonOh wow. The invaluable Mike's Amazing World site now has a subsite devoted to public-domain-era newspaper comic strips! Which you can read! In black and white from microfiche, but it's a resource I've always wanted! www.mikesamazingworld.com/main/strips/
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonIreland has dismantled its first commercial wind farm to make way for a step-change in scale. Each new turbine generates more power than the entire 1992 Bellacorick site, illustrating how 3 decades of innovation have compressed land use while multiplying output. buff.ly/goiabIO #ShareGoodNewsToo
- It at some point really bothered me that every cognitive scientist with a book had Brockman as an agent. I just didn’t like the whole “edge” take, though I had good friends who were involved, and of course I had fomo.
- I wrote about this a bit, in the third, longest obituary for Margaret Boden here joanna-bryson.blogspot.com/2025/07/marg... you can literally search for Minsky and/or Epstein, it's a ways down that longish blogpost.
- Against Imaginary Friends: Why #DigitalCompanions Are No Solution to Social Isolation cacm.acm.org/research/aga... Nice by Robert Sparrow and James Brown – even if they don't cite my #AIEthics papers running since 1998 touching on the topic. They do cite @sturkle.bsky.social, who is more in there.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonMarvin Minsky, computer scientist. 13/ bsky.app/profile/robe... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvin_...
- The tangled web becomes even more tangled. Turns out frequent Epstein island guests were AI pioneers Marvin Minsky and Roger Shank. It's worse than that. Shank had closer ties to Epstein than just professional. He frequently defended this monster. slate.com/technology/2...
- Reposted by Joanna Bryson“What is tear gas for? It is for inciting riots. How did people go out and get gas masks? They ordered them online, because they do not want to riot.”
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonLawyers can't reach clients in ICE detention. I've heard it anecdotally, but scale of issue is horrifying. Bloomberg Law is a legal trade pub so many may miss this. Screenshot from their CA newsletter summarizes "bleak" situation for justice and rule of law. news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/l...
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonThe AI community is re-learning 20 years of cybersecurity. The hard way www.404media.co/exposed-molt...
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonKey takeaway: stop using biometrics to unlock your devices.
- New court record from the FBI details the state of the devices seized from Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson: phone was on w/Lockdown Mode; personal laptop was off; work laptop was on w/Touch ID; several Signal chats used disappearing messages. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonHe's looting the U.S. Treasury, people. Most crooked dictators find covert ways to get rich. Trump intends to simply order his government to transfer money into his bank account.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonA little girl in Portland, OR after being tear gassed by ICE. what the actual fuck.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonFederal paramilitaries running up on the rooftops to fire irritants and flash bangs down into a peaceable assembly full of little kids
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonI just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions. I expect to see enforcement of our city code prohibiting the use of tear gas.
- Reposted by Joanna BrysonFor those in southwest Ohio worried about a possible ICE surge next week, you can sign up to connect with community here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
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- *IS the Amazon claim... I wish @ap.brid.gy picked up Mastodon edits!
