As we sink further into the pit that is the Musk/Trump presidency, who better to survey the hellscape on the way down than Audrey Watters, ed tech’s sharpest and toughest commentator? If you don’t know Audrey’s work, you really should. You’ll find her Second Breakfast newsletter in the shownotes, along with a link for her book, Teaching Machines, and plenty more that came up in our discussion. It’s the first imperfect x breakfast cross-over on the pod, and I hope it won’t be the last.
Audrey’s newsletter, Second Breakfast: https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/
Audrey’s book Teaching Machines https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262546065/teaching-machines/
Simone Brown on the origins of surveillance in the management of plantation labour: https://journals.kent.ac.uk/index.php/klr/article/view/1100
Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru (et al’s) famous paper: On the dangers of stochastic parrots: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922
Recent critique of this paper from a posthumanist perspective, referenced by Helen: https://posthumanism.co.uk/jp/article/view/3287
Meredith Whittaker on Babbage, computers and plantation labour: https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/
Reid Hoffman ‘AI will empower humanity’ in the NYT, referenced by Audrey: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/opinion/ai-chatgpt-empower-bot.html
The article is paywalled but there is an interview with similar takes here: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/26/why-reid-hoffman-feels-optimistic-about-our-ai-future/
A recent Guardian UK article on the ‘Paypal Mafia’: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/26/elon-musk-peter-thiel-apartheid-south-africa
Peter Thiel’s argument that freedom and democracy are incompatible, referenced by Audrey: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/. This is also referenced by Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land in support of their Dark Enlightenment neo-reactionary movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
Links between Palantir (Peter Thiel’s company) and the US military: https://www.palantir.com/offerings/defense/air-space/
Helen’s original substack post on Faculty AI (a new one follows shortly): https://helenbeetham.substack.com/i/139080460/safer-ai-round-two
AI Snake Oil, blog of the book by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, discussed by Audrey and Helen:
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