nickbernards.bsky.social
Critical Political Economist -- Author: A critical history of poverty finance (http://bit.ly/3pEV7Cf); Fictions of financialization (http://bit.ly/3PUWzdR) -- Associate Prof. in Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick.
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But also this is a very far cry from the image of students feeding assessment briefs into Chat-GPT and turning in AI-generated papers...
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Should people learn how to skim read rather than using AI-generated summaries? Yes very much so. (Even setting aside the environmental costs, these tools will all break down and/or be quietly shut down or paywalled within the decade... again the tiniest shred of political economy would be good...)
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4) The headline figure of '90%' is somewhat alarmist -- somewhere halfway down there's a more detailed breakdown of what students are actually using AI for.
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3) It's really not that hard to design assessments that are, if not AI-proof, difficult for students to do *well* using Chat-GPT. It doesn't have to be paper exams, LLMs are pretty useless for e.g. any version of a research task or close engagement with a specific source.
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(The above post is unfair, UUK is very good at the thing it's there for, it's just that the sector-wide consolidation of managers' interests is antithetical to universities' ostensible core functions and increasingly antithetical to their survival...)
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2) Universities UK is the single most useless organization on the planet. What the fuck is this:
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(People should also read this, about the material role of this kind of hype in valorizing venture capital...
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....)
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It's very far from inevitable, far more fragile than it looks. And a shred of perspective about blockchain, cryptocurrency, 'big data', and whatever other 'inevitable' bullshit which has come out of the same ecosystem in the last decade would probably be useful...
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Generative AI hasn't just happened, it's the product of a very specific confluence of venture capital, requires the production of very specific kinds of infrastructures and the appropriation of land, energy and water in very specific ways.
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In what specific sense are ‘tech oligarchs’ not capitalists? And what is the ‘capitalism’ that those relations no longer resemble?
(I also don’t think US plantation slavery can be described as ‘feudal’ but that’s maybe a separate debate.)
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Solidarity. Even by present UK standards this is grim.
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To be honest I don’t think there’s any need for fat cheques, zealous overcompliance with real or anticipated government mandate is very much the MO of the managerial university in all respects and the UK government is thoroughly committed to imperialism in all its forms…
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This is genuinely incredible. Really cannot recall a government anywhere so universally unpopular after six months.
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Much wishful thinking, through which the basic facts that bond markets don’t mind a little fascism and that monetary and financial hierarchies mean that the costs of ‘uncertainty’ are borne at the peripheries poke through.
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It's cool to see more critical work taking seriously the failure of these projects to generate 'investible' assets or investment. This piece manages to say really useful things about the constitutive role of race and racialisation in the process.
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And it’s very possible that we need to understand both coal and renewables in China primarily as *cheap* energy, which along with cheap labour has made possible a large scale geographic and organizational restructuring of global production in recent decades.
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To be clear, I don’t mean this in a ‘global warming is China’s fault’ way, but rather that the intractable problem is capitalism, or better that energy use is always inevitably entangled with the uneven development of capital accumulation.
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I don’t believe so.
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(Lest anyone forget these people campaigned aggressively for the current funding model…)
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I just mean — not that the distinction likely matters to anyone being displaced — that ‘we’re not forcing anyone to move’ is a separate and even more brazen claim from ‘this will be good for them in the long run’.
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Indeed, although as far as I know no one had the audacity to call the Trail of Tears 'voluntary'...
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Couldn’t even muster a fucking scare quote.