Democratisation and AI
A philosophical critique of AI “democratisation,” exploring how skill, freedom and education relate, drawing on Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger and Berlin.
Matthew Barnard
This Government, This Crisis.
Higher Education funding is in crisis and the present Labour government is not making comforting noises. Until recently, the Government has been mostly silent on Higher Education, even their manifesto says very little of substance. The closest I could find to a concrete proposal is this deliberately ambiguous paragraph:
The
Imposters
In my last post, I argued that academia is beset by anti-intellectualism from without. I now wish to talk about the anti-intellectualism that threatens it from within.
The twenty-first century has been heretofore an epoch of disruption. The removal of almost all barriers to mass communication has radically transformed how
A world without experts: alienation in academia
Thoughts on the level of alienation in academic work, and how as much as we cannot exit the economy, we must recognise the inherent value of academia.
The LLM of the Gaps: AI, God and Death Angst
I consider the similarities between ascribing saying LLM text results from intelligence and saying the universe is intelligently designed
LLMs Have Plateaued. Now we can finally figure out what to do!
AI feels overwhelming, alien, and unstoppable—but LLMs may already have peaked. GPT-5’s underwhelming release shows it’s time to pause the panic, catch our breath, and finally think clearly about what these tools mean for us.
ChatGPT: An Uncritical Friend?
ChatGPT shows promise as a helpful interlocutor for research, but its overly complimentary nature threatens its usefulness.
AI Literacies launch
On Friday I attended the launch event of the AI Literacy initiative of the Digital Society Research Group, aka DISC, at Manchester Metropolitan.