In which I highlight some findings on the language of perception in Siwu, a language of eastern Ghana, as described in a chapter in an eternally forthcoming edited volume. Studying the language of perception shows the deep entanglements of the sensory and social worlds we inhabit.
In 2023, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) started to develop efforts towards defining open source AI. In October 2024, OSI presented version 1 of their proposed Open Source AI Definition, but it was immediately controversial. This post records two pivotal moments I observed in the OSI discussion forums surrounding this controversy.
Sam Altman wrote: “I am a stochastic parrot”. Bateson comments (in 1979): “The mountain, personified in our speech, will not become a person, will not learn a more personal way of being. But the human being, depersonified in his own talk, and thought, may indeed learn more thingish habits of action.”
The Mawu of present-day Akpafu relate in their oral histories that their ancestors lived in the mountains between their current location and the Volta river, in an area currently known as the Togo Plateau. Names they use for this area include Mawu kùbe (‘Mawu mountain’) and Àwubeame (‘in the Mawu mountains’). Hunters who frequented the area told me they were familiar with several ìkpakpi (historical settlements). This post is a synthesis of information from historical maps, scientific literature, oral traditions, and my own trips with Mawu community members.
The mirage of “AI” reaches us through a narrative centered on inevitability, productivity, and efficiency. It is therefore at loggerheads with the values of a healthy academia, which questions narratives of inevitability, prioritizes process over product, and realizes the value of friction for creativity. This workshop is for everyone who is bored about the typical AI sales pitch and interested in how to do the best science possible and build a better academia together. The workshop promotes a values-first rather than a tech-first perspective and articulates what you probably already suspected: it is perfectly okay not to use “AI”.
We’ve revamped the Futures of Language website, now at the futuresoflanguage.org domain, and our Living Library keeps growing. Here is…
The machine will be able to recreate all of this! But the surface of the whole earth will be too small to accommodate this machine — this machine whose dimensions and weight will continually increase as it attempts to reproduce the peculiarities of mind and soul of an average, inconspicuous human being.
Fascism annihilated tens of millions of people.
In the past months we’ve started the Futures Library, in which we share key ideas and people that drive the project. The first few weeks have featured a wide variety of themes and technologies, from pluriversalism to cosmotechnics and allohistorical maps to magic lanterns.
What seemed an open-and-shut case of plagiarism turned out to be symptomatic of a much more worrying issue: the runaway influence predatory publishers have on declining scholarly standards. The good news: everything is on hand to start creating the future we want. Academics should vote with their feet and move towards scholar-led diamond open access.
Silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.
— Ivan Illich, 1984, Silence is a commons
During the pandemic I built a gather town co-working space for my team. The free tier enabled our team to be together even when working from home. Folks claimed their desks and co-designed the space. Multiple papers were written here and collaborations blossomed. As gather town 1.0 closes down, we say goodbye. In this post I share a few recollections and reflect on what made the gather town experience so compelling for informal co-working and flexible interactions.