As the regular Blundell crew of mega-influencers – which reminds me of a kid joke The budgie went missing but hey grandfather (the writer’s own grandpa, a 1920s-on South Australian public educator steeped in Alfred Marshall, Wm McDougall & Albert Venn Dicey was an Oxford University Press pre-publication appraiser) opened the door and influenza, you’ll all be passionate about the fundamental Content : Process dial-out and consequent upon your studies of the last five years champing-at-the-bit to demand that it be mainstreamed in every educational institution on Earth on pain of cessation of public funding (in the breach) AND to the challenges of document titling, ever socially conscious that the mere announcement, presentation and display of a brand or category of study ensures Foucaultian artificial or socially-constructed ex fact compartmentalisation and ‘siloing’ of your written works – as the million so-called posts on X Comms that are 95%, say, lost to reflective deliberation, assessment and decision1 by the public in 30 minutes flat.. to 99.9 recurring beyond 35mins.. So yes it’s shaped up as Content-Enumeration-Process, ahmm.
Beavers
Castoroides (from Latincastor (beaver) and –oides (like)[2]), or the giant beaver, is an extinct genus of enormous, bear-sized beavers that lived in North America during the Pleistocene. Two species are currently recognized, C. dilophidus in the Southeastern United States and C. ohioensis in most of North America. C. leiseyorum was previously described from the Irvingtonian age but is now regarded as an invalid name. All specimens previously described as C. leiseyorum are considered to belong to C. dilophidus.
Yes Everyone it’s a Photo of Sarah Cooper from, Well/ Cromwell, Say Seven Years Ago
GEA 1/6
I see the way ahead to the light, but I could hardly leave my family in the state it is: I love you, Annette, in spite of everything. What kind of man would I be if i just abandoned you? Not much cop on the wheel of life. I’d fall right off, right through to the cockroaches. Laughing?
‘Trying to,’ said Annette.
‘Take another slug of Easy Night. Gilda rang me. She was really worried about you. Go back to sleep, sweetheart. See you later. We’ll bring back fish and chips.
‘And Dr Rhea Marks? Will she come too for fish and chips?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Spicer. โYouโve terrified her out of her wits, Annette. Iโm not exactly lkng frwrd 2 Rainbow Puppeteers. Donโt make matters even worse than youโve made them already.โ
โSorry, Spicer. Is this call being broadcast through the office?โ
โYes,โ said Spicer, โcome 2 think of it. But you’re a media personallty. It shouldnt worry you.โ
GWA 2/6
โMrs Horrocks?โ โYes.โ โThis is the Oprah Winfrey Show. Amelia speaking.โ
โOh, hi.โ โWe mean to record tomorrow and hold over and screen for our New Year show. We like to do things
GEA 3/6
live but even Oprah has to have a holiday sometimes. Can I just say how much I loved Lucifette Fallen? Of course the timing is good for you – Ernie Gromback tells me heโs scheduled publication to fit in with our transmission. isnโt he a charmer?โ
โOh yes,โ said Annette.
‘We’re building the programme around the domestic row,’ said Amelia. We reckon
GEA 4/6
God and Lucifer had the first one: brilliant of you to have seen that Lucifer was female. After that it was Jupiter and Juno. What can the rest of us poor mortals do in the face of the archetype? We have our pet psychotherapist to help us see through the dark to the light.
GEA 5/6
That’s the bit we’d like you to read from Lucifette Fallen : on page eight of the proof copy. I must say your publisher whizzed ir round to us. The para beginning “Where darkness becomes light” – down to “What can a child do but repeat the experience?” And then sit next to Oprah and chat a bit about your own experiences and what drove you to write the novel,’
GEA 6/6
‘I’m sorry – I’ve lost you. I’m still a bit sleepy – ‘
‘You are very central to the show, Mrs Horrocks, said Amelia. Have you had experience of TV before?’
‘No,’ said Annette.
‘Welcome to the real world,’ said Amelia.
John Blundell ๐ฆ๐ฆ๐บ ๐
In celebration of Fay Weldon 22 Sept 1931 to 4 Jan 2023 with detail from Affliction 1994. Oh that year in John Foster Dulles’s Christendom. Australia? No, too hard.
FW
1 Australia’s ABC Radio National this evening 8th July ran its weekly program The Law Report with four academics in startling explication on certain issues that the institution’s sub-editors figured should be billed ‘AI and Automated Decision-making,’ oh Whoop, oh Lord Jesus, we have been very good and tried our hearts out and stuff
The English-speaking world’s first embedded television journalist Lise Ducette, extremely famous Christian anarchist Alex Jones, Didn’t I Just C’est That? Memory-test dude Jimmy Carr, Benedict Cumberbatch’s heaps smarter younger sister and Taylor Swift walk into a bar1. First up Mr Jones makes an announcement to all concerning synchronicity, serendipity and lowers vocal tone a little, say 2 steps out of 10 ‘back’ towards the Hushed end of the scale God. What the f… happens next?
There will be a prize.
msn.com
I first and last read about USA commercial pop psychology’s NLP around 1979. Human services people and educators from the Jimmy Carter dcd. and Sesame St Childrens Television Workshop era will probably remember ‘Bio-rhythms’ – those PEI waves, yarda freaking yarda, too. – The self-education system or psychotherapeutic practitioners’ and teachers’ schema for authenic powerful self-esteem and human relationships building Carkhuff and Berenson’s Human Resource Development also emerged at the time. – I need to emphasise here that a million of us teachers and social workers around the world in that exciting period of technical research-based innovation with renewed professional schemata and discipline were doing it big-time and changing geo-communities forever and for good, and NOT doing it for any hairy guru, prophet, church, cult, bunch of anodyne Christian Sunday School “Peoplemaker” Virginia Satir or Margaret Kubler-Ross (also 1970’s) anodyne cliches or turgid – if not dead spooky like something out of Salt Lake City Utah – Win Friends & Influence People ‘Dork City with Jimmy Olsen cub reporter’ inspired by a Madison Avenue grunge-bag and ideological fascist like Professor Freud’s brother-in-law..
My only interest in ‘NLP’ emanated from the LCHS – RCHS quick eye movements indicating not crudely Lie or Truth but what i will ever be proud to report became study of ideation and conscious & unselfconscios task execution after I left Adelaide SA for a state government (cops and politicians – evidently the whole bang lot of them) enforced 14 year sabbatical over on our magnificent Great Australian Bight coast with a copy of Ernest Becker’s TLaDoM2 in my jeans hip pocket.
GEA and Olivetti Monkeys always try to keep the referencing rigorous so there follow..
~ Economics, History, Human (ising)-cultures, Education & Internet Reform
~ Devisor of post neoclassical 2 – 5 set Quantum-relations Thematics-logic urgently targeting 25,000 universities
~ Philosophy of Science
Dr Barry Boettcher urged me to study Phil. of Science not P of Psychology in 1969
1 Bar, ba.? Younger students would have to look that up. But never fear, young people your ‘Mad Sammy‘ and ‘Jumpy Jensen‘ internet will have you sorted in ‘no’ time. Onward a.. and after that the better-behaved among you may bathe in the blood of Jesus and of course come out whiter than white – with stern-but-fair avuncular Sundarajan Pichai and the marvellous Microsoft that’s spent millions promoting its @Copilot AI junk hardware’s Satya Nadella
THAT thinking, that ratiocination, that dumbarsed dialectics (โฃฟof the Damned author John Blundell writing for Three-continental distribution, reproduction, exchange, academic interest AND ONGOING MENTAL DEVELOPMENT as Green Economist newsletter, historical TIME 1993) is of no greater psychospiritual or sociocultural value to humanity than mediรฆval Columbus-Cortes-Henry VIII- โCardinal Pole*โ raison dโรจtat nation (C7) scaled tribal barbarism (ideological neo-liberalism after Margaret Thatcher ๐ฌ๐ง)
โฃ4 ME at the beginning of my adult career as an authentic prsn-plc-time-event-future (s) 5 set quantum relations logician – which would sure make me able to claim the public identity of philosopher if I could be bothered, medieval European philosophy being such a lost courageous argument against the august 1859 High Church of England Micro-objects & mechanomorphic relations muddled 180ยฐ off-the-pace-pitch-temper-mood pedantic anarchic indeed social darwinist AI word scramble โJust-make-stuff-upโ/ โHey Handel sure could write BANGERSโ (Genevieve Laing Australia @ABC NEWS โABC Classicโ radio station of even date say age seventeen not a Moo-vie Quean – call the Historic or Academic time 1967 – there was the Grand Inquistor chapter in Fyodor Dostoevskyโs TBK recommended by Nicholas Main Wilson, AND
Accreditation & Endorsement from the central Adelaide Hills of South Australia 9:21 AM Give us a date/ aarghh\ 20O72026
WITH MY THNKS AS WAY TOO OFTEN 2 the ancient & honourable grey-robed (NO SEPPO SPELLINGS HERE AARON WE MAY ONLY SURVIVE WITH early post WWII Australian ENGLISH โlandguageโ) Wkpd DRUIDSโ COLLECTIVE of Sacramento & Sherwood Forest late 12th and early 13th centuries, specifically during the reigns of King Richard the Lionheart and King John
Unking John ๐ฆ๐ฆ๐บ๐โก๐ซฅ๐
*Said by my bitterly poor County Cork 1856 emigrant Motherโs-side forebears or ancestors, in particular, my beloved orphaned dad to be one of their โfamilyโ ..
Welome everyone to the internet involution – The Panopticonโs take โ
โIโve had a theory percolating in the back of my head that the state, which reconfigured itself from feudalism to capitalism as the new, evolving mode of power, is working itโs way toward totalizing power that no longer requires the capitalist configuration. I hope Iโm wrong, because this would mean a level of confidence in obedience to state authority on a level weโve not experienced before. The main driver of this theory is 2-fold. 1st, the rise of AI has a consumer paradox. If AI replaces labour, then there is no currency circulating, and no mechanism for the accumulation of capital. 2nd every move by virtually every aspect of the state over the last decade has focused on data collection. Put these two together, and you don’t have capitalists collecting data so they can sell you stuff, you have statists collecting data so they can control you directly without the intermediary of capital. And if they can complete the panopticon, then they wont have to exert any effort to control you.
โ They will simply manipulate perception to drive behaviour wherever they want.
โFor now this is just a theory in the back of my mind, but essays like this thoughtful one by @Black Lodges explore the rich philosophical analyses that probably wont help to dissuade my from my line of thinking.โ
When Mental Health is an illness (and neurodivergence a diagnostic category) donโt expect more than 5% to understand weather systems, the motive power of the sun, or indeed that the Earth rotates eastward..
Every summer, heatwaves are narrated as if they were disaster movies. We are shown maps turning red, temperature records being shattered, and endless survival tips on how to stay cool. But when heat is described only as weather, history gives way to fate.
Heat appears as a natural calamity to endure and adapt to, rather than as a socio-ecological crisis shaped by history.
The climate crisis is not a mere ecological accident of the Earth system, but the historical expression of a global regime of capitalist accumulation. Under fossil capitalism, accumulation has long relied on turning the atmosphere into a planetary waste dump.
The temperatures Europe is reaching today cannot be understood as purely natural. The same atmospheric pattern that decades ago might have produced 35โ37ยฐC can now generate 39โ43ยฐC because it operates on a much warmer climaticbaseline.
Responsibility is unequal because emissions accumulate over centuries. Todayโs heat is inseparable from generations of carbon emissions tied to fossil capitalism, extraction, colonial processes, and unequal ecological exchange.
This produces a profound asymmetry: those most historically responsible for the crisis โ above all the Global North โ are often best equipped to shield themselves from its effects, while those who contributed least will suffer the most.
Vulnerability is unequal because the ability to survive a heatwave depends on concrete material conditions: housing quality, insulation, access to air conditioning, and the ability to afford keeping it running amid rising energy costs. It depends on whether one can stop working when temperatures become dangerous, or whether survival itself requires remaining exposed.
Every heatwave becomes a social X-ray of capitalism: a map of class power, revealing who can buy protection and who is left exposed to suffering and death.
โAlexithymia Is Not One Story,โ by some Post-society unknowing 1987 women’s magazine Thatcherite billing herself for For-profit commercial or business purposes as The Cognitive Ecologist I Neurodivergent system builder I Author of .. I Omnisyntra Journal I 5.1K subscr…
โญ โMy most esteemed readers in 193 countries and in semi-autonomous regions excluded from world political affairs on the psycho-neurotically demented barbaric racist misogyne Age of Romance Abrahamic ‘faiths’ foundation myths and popular culture storytelling for the express and punitive purposes of neurocognitive regimentation and life-long hegemonic capture of senior primary and junior high youngsters who possess no developed mental capacity for relationship-, social-. environmental- or indeed macro-spiritual conversation with any significant other, being naturally and entirely healthily at the instantly or in athletics instantaneously) co-ordinated ‘LCQS’ most commonly Micro-quanta thoughts & actions and ‘RCQS’ (all hesitant contemplative ‘thoughtful’ or pensive macro (conceptual) ideation re person (s), place. event, environment and futures) mental development Professor Piaget’s 1934 and Twentieth-century Common Era Psychiatry’s Concrete-operational thinking or โObject-relations โโ
Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for moreMapping Minds, Reclaiming Systems: Notes from The Cognitive EcologistAlexithymia Is Not One StoryOn the single-cause stories we tell about not having words for feeling โ and why the truth is plural.The Cognitive EcologistJul 6READ IN APPAlexithymia gets handed around like a verdict. Difficulty naming and locating your own emotions โ thatโs the clinical shorthand โ and the moment the word lands on someone, a whole story tends to arrive with it, already finished. I want to slow that story down, because itโs usually two different flat ones, and neither is true for everyone.The first flat story is the deficit one: you donโt really have feelings. Youโre cold, or empty, or broken in the place an emotional life is supposed to be. It gets weaponized in relationships and misapplied in clinics, and itโs almost always wrong about whatโs actually happening inside the person.The second flat story is newer and gentler and just as total: alexithymia is a trauma response, full stop. For some people that is exactly, precisely true, and naming it is a relief that reorganizes a life. But said as the only story, it does its own quiet harm โ it tells the person whose wiring was simply always like this that they must be carrying a wound they canโt find, and it turns a description of terrain into an accusation about the past.The problem was never that any of these stories is false. The problem is telling one of them as if it were all of them.For a long stretch of my life I wondered if I had it โ and I wondered because of an excess, not an absence. My feelings arrived in such intense, layered waves that I couldnโt get a single clean word around any of them. I was feeling everything and nothing at once, a whole symphony playing with no sheet music I could read aloud. That isnโt the deficit story. And it wasnโt, in any simple sense, only the trauma story either. It was a translation problem: the feeling was fully present and completely real, and the machinery that turns feeling into a namable, speakable word was doing something other than what the world expected.Once I could see it as translation rather than absence, the shame lost its grip. I wasnโt missing an emotional language. I was fluent in one the dominant culture doesnโt read โ a language of sensation, image, pressure, and pattern that arrives long before, and sometimes instead of, the tidy sentence โI feel sad.โHereโs the fuller picture, the one that actually holds. Alexithymia is not a single condition with a single cause. Itโs a crossing that several different roads happen to arrive at. For some itโs constitutive โ a feature of how their nervous system reads its own interior, present from the start, no wound required, common among autistic people whose interoception simply works differently. For others itโs genuinely trauma-shaped, a protective distance the body learned. For others itโs a translation gap, like mine, where the feeling is loud and the word is slow. And for a great many people itโs more than one of these at once, braided so tightly that arguing over the single true cause misses the whole texture of it.This is what cognitive ecology asks everywhere: describe the terrain, donโt diagnose the person from across the room. The useful question is never โwhatโs the one thing wrong here.โ Itโs โwhat is this particular mind actually doing, in this particular body, shaped by this history and environment โ and what would help?โ Two people can carry the same word and need almost opposite things. One needs the grief of an old wound witnessed. Another needs to be told, firmly and kindly, that nothing broke โ this is just how theyโre built, and it was never a deficit.Why does the single story matter? Because people organize their whole self-understanding around the story theyโre handed. Give someone the deficit story and theyโll spend years apologizing for a coldness they donโt have. Give someone the universal-trauma story and theyโll hunt for a wound that isnโt there, or feel like a fraud because healing didnโt hand them the fluency it promised. The kindest, most rigorous thing we can do with a word like this is refuse to let it flatten โ hold it open long enough for the actual person to appear inside it.Iโve written about this more than once over the years, and Iโve held it differently at different times, because I keep learning. Thatโs allowed. Understanding is supposed to move. Alexithymia is not one story. Itโs a place several different roads arrive โ and the person standing at that crossing deserves to be met as themselves, not as the ending someone else already wrote for them.Some of what pushed me to write this came from a reader who felt my book, Cognitive Ecology: Mapping Your Mind for Self-Understanding, leaned too hard on the trauma story for alexithymia. They were right to raise it. I take feedback seriously, even when some of it stings โ and sometimes it stings rightfully so. You donโt have to leave it anonymously in a review, either; you can always come straight to me.I wrote that book with almost no money, from exactly where I stood at the time writing through burnout โ my own mind, my own words, years of mapping the terrain as it unfolded in me. Thatโs what it is: the raw unfolding of one mind. It was never meant to hand you my map and make it yours. It was meant to be a doorway โ one doorway โ into the work of mapping your own. A second edition is coming soon in digital, shaped in part by exactly this kind of feedback, and you can order it directly from me. If something lands wrong, tell me. Feedback is how the work stays honest.โ SherKaleidoscope Systems opens soon โ a home for this way of thinking. You can leave your name at kaleidoscopesystems.org.Consider becoming a paid subscriber.Upgrade to paidThis space is rooted in reflection, reclamation, and relational truth. If this work resonates with you, consider supporting it by sharing or gifting a subscription. Your support helps nourish this evolving frameworkโand extends it to others seeking gentler systems, deeper belonging, and a map that makes room for their whole mind.Give a gift subscriptionShareLikeCommentRestack ยฉ 2026 Sher Griffin 4213 SW Huber St, Portland, OR 97219 Unsubscribe
Raison Drive Littlehampton South Australia was my home-patch for 4 5/12 – the bizarrerie of the f_cker !
John Blundell
the genuinine organic fresh & dry person busted by the ALP, the LPA and LUNATIC CENTRISTSno less than 30 years ago and still propertyless, personal assets-freeแต & entirely parsimonious – a good day to you (all)
Immediate Reform of 25,000 universities retiring rhetoricians, psycho-babblers, polemicists and misanthropes
Immediate introduction to all other educational facilities and publicly funded or ‘tax-breaked’ human SERVICES of the new Neurocognitive Health and 2 to 5 set series quantum relations logic
The prosecution of all major organised crime operatives, ‘godfathers’ and THEIR politicians in congresses and governments
^prowed, prahu’ ed or contumaceously proud owner of about $1,200 worth of household stuff & B through D litbooks (libraries & all business records stolen 17/4/1998, 1/7/1999 and in the first two decades of the 21st Cwhen i apparently ‘belonged’ to cops and gangsters in a remote rural town yeehaarghghghghgh)
The future may not be redistribution. It may be surveillance, control, repression
MIT has come out with a paper on AI and government repression that uses a rigorous model to show what most of us already knew through lived experience, intuition and pattern recognition. The abstract concludes:
[C]apital accumulation and thus greater automation encourages the capitalists to support a coup against democracy and set up a repressive system.
It conveniently doesnโt seem to offer any solutions. But it is validating to see the technical reasoning behind the phenomenon weโre witnessing.
Milan professor, Valerio Capraro, summarizes it like this.
As automation shifts income from labor to capital, workers become poorer, revolt becomes more likely, and elites face a choice: redistribute, slow automation, or repress.
But here is the issue: redistribution becomes more expensive precisely when automation makes labor less necessary.
Repression, by contrast, becomes relatively more attractive.
Therefore, elites may prefer repression to slowing down automation or redistributing its gains. This is the dark political economy of AI.
So far, much of the debate has been about: โAI may take your job.โ
But economistar Daron Acemoglu, and colleagues Arda Gitmez, and Mehdi Shadmehr make a deeper point: AI may reduce the political need to care whether you have a job.
The future may not be redistribution. It may be surveillance, control, repression.
Full Paper โhttps://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-06/Automation%20and%20Repression.pdf
Invoking AIโs harm to critical thinking is a weak defence for universities
Calls to ditch AI because it is destroying studentsโ analytical skills ignore institutionsโ questionable record at developing complex reasoning, says Ian Richardson
A historical pattern has emerged in higher education when it comes to new technology. Something arrives. Institutions recoil. Arguments are voiced about standards, about the sacred nature of knowledge, about the irreplaceable human element of learning. In time, the technology is accepted and the arguments are quietly retired. Until the next thing arrives โ when the same reassuringly familiar laments can be aired once again.
Itโs interesting to question where we might have been if only weโd managed to resist the tide of technological โprogressโ. The printing press wouldnโt have debased the authority of texts by disintermediating venerable and learned hands. The photocopier wouldnโt have allowed accumulation of vast quantities of text without proper engagement. Scientific calculators wouldnโt have hollowed out numerical intuition. Searchable databases wouldnโt have stripped away contextual judgement by preventing us from spending years thumbing card indexes and scouring dog-eared journals. Word processors wouldnโt have produced sprawling, undisciplined prose. The internet wouldnโt have degraded research quality and distracted lazy students with a swamp of unreliable content.
Each generation of educators has convinced itself that new technology poses a unique threat to authentic learning, intellectual rigour and human connection โ only for those fears to fade as the technology becomes normalised. Itโs a pattern that reveals a principled and cautious engagement with technological change and, more discreetly, a near-perfect record of confusing intellectual virtue with institutional and parochial self-interest.
In aย Guardianย article published on 10ย March, a dozen humanities professors describe mostly despairing experiences at the arrival ofย artificial intelligenceย in their classrooms. โItโs driving so many of us up the wall,โ confided one. Another described it as โthe bane of [her] existenceโ and wished she could โpush ChatGPT off a cliffโ. Elsewhere, the question of what it would do for us as a species reflected broader existential concerns at AIโs emergence ..
These are not fringe voices. Theyโre senior academics at Stanford, Berkeley and Penn State, among others. And the argument theyโre making is, at its heart, a straightforward one: AI threatens critical thinking, and critical thinking is what universities exist to cultivate.
Itโs a powerful argument, and one that has become a rallying cry within the sector. Itโs also, when held up to even modest scrutiny, one that many institutions are making with little support beyond fine words and good intentions.
Itโs 15 years since Richard Arum and Josipa Roksaโs Academically Adrift was dropped on an unsuspecting sector, highlighting the roughly 45 per cent of US undergraduates who demonstrated no significant improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing skills during their first two years of college โ findings that were later extended to all years of college life and, the authors claimed, left graduates poorly prepared for workforce transition.
Not everyone agreed, of course. Some suggested flawed methods could account for the findings, while others pointed to differences between disciplines. Elsewhere, studies were produced showing higher levels of gain. Nevertheless, the central criticism landed, and the sector was clearly on the defensive. Outcome-based learning approaches were embedded, writing across the curriculum programmes were expanded, โhigh-impact practicesโ were formalised, and the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA/CLA+) was adopted by many as a measure of value-added learning. These developments, initiated in the US, have significantly influenced international approaches โ notably through quality assurance and accreditation frameworks designed to address rising demands for accountability.
However, a decade later, the 2022 OECD report Does Higher Education Teach Students to Think Critically?, which assessed more than 120,000 students across six countries, found only a modest improvement in studentsโ abilities. Given โthe importance that most higher education programmes attach to promoting critical thinking skills, the learning gain is smaller than could be expectedโ, it reported. With half of all exiting students performing at the two lowest levels of mastery, the conclusion was unequivocal: a university qualification is not a reliable measure of critical thinking expected by the global marketplace.
Despite this, critical thinking appears prominently in institutional mission statements, quality frameworks, programme descriptions and learning outcomes across the sector. But the gap between aspiration and evidenced attainment remains wide โ and itโs clear that institutions have been evasive in this area when it comes to comparative measures. The OECDโs Ahelo project, for instance, was abandoned in 2015 because of insufficient institutional support โ notably from elite universities. As Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD, said at the time, the biggest resistance had come โfrom those institutions that fear they will never do as well as their reputation suggestsโ.
So what is actually being defended in the Guardian article?
The professors interviewed are intelligent people grappling with a genuine disruption. AI does present real challenges to meaningful assessment. The case for preserving the productive difficulty of unaided thought โ the struggle with a text, the construction of an argument from scratch โ is defensible and important. The argument that universities must move towards metacognition, teaching students to interrogate their own reasoning rather than merely deploying it, reflects serious engagement.
But the framing โ seriously? โSelf-lobotomisation.โ Students deliberately made โhelplessโ by tech companies. โIntellectual ravages.โ AI threatening us โas a speciesโ. Beneath the intellectual veneer lies an emotional texture entirely familiar from the history of technological resistance: the language of desecration, of theft, of an irreplaceable thing in jeopardy.
And what is this irreplaceable thing, exactly โ unaided human cognition, or something else entirely? For many, the concerns are sincere: a genuine belief that something important about how humans learn and reason is being bypassed, and a commitment to students that deserves to be taken seriously. But sincerity and self-interest are not mutually exclusive.
Resistance to technology has never really been about technology โ it is about what technology does to existing structures of power and privilege. Those structures depend on control, and technology has a habit of loosening it.
Each transformation has been resisted most fiercely by those with most to lose. AI threatens to perform functions that have long conferred authority and status on those who perform them โ and it is doing so at the very moment when institutional performance is being questioned like never before.
None of this argues against taking AIโs risks seriously, but it does argue that we need to be driven more by a sense of what weโre trying to achieve than by what weโre trying to defend (not least because the thing weโre defending is on rather shaky ground). Responses to AI within the sector โ for instance, oral examinations, competency-based assessment, explicit instruction in critical reasoning โ are frequently presented in opposition to the technology when in fact, they all can be facilitated rather than undermined by AI. AIโs broader potentialities must be seriously explored โ the flat suggestion that the technology is antithetical to the development of critical enquiry is emotional, oversimplistic nonsense.
Professors are asking their students to trust that the struggle is worth it โ that the friction of unaided thought produces something no machine can replicate. They may well be right. But a sector that has spent 15 years evading serious measurement in this area, and 500 years resisting technologies that threatened its authority, cannot demand that trust on faith alone.
The critical thinking stance is available to higher education, but it has to be earned โ and not by pushing technology off a cliff.
Ian Richardson is a faculty member and director of executive education at Stockholm Business School atย Stockholm University. He is co-founder of the national Swedish programme AI for Executives, which seeks to drive board-level understanding and organisational adoption of AI across industries and sectors
Rather than resisted by those with mot to use another view is that the “transformation” have been most resisted by those with the greatest understanding of what is at stake. Deeply disappointing to read another advertisement masquerading as an article. If the critical thinking stand has to be earned perhaps the author could be hoist on their own petard.
#2 Submitted by oliver…. on April 15, 2026 – 7:41am
This piece is upside down. Universities are now the only source of critical thinking really, and new tech seems to be now linked to oligarchy and authoritarianism. Students and academics are right to distrust it.
#3 Submitted by m.o…. on April 15, 2026 – 10:04am
The best students strive to develop critical thinking and this is evident in their contributions to discussion, oral presentations, in dissertation supervision meetings and written work. Such students tend to be wary of AI and are are able to justify their distrust of it. Importantly, the student’s critical thinking is consistent and can be tested at any time including via impromptu questioning about a text or their own work. They are a joy to teach. AI cannot beat this.
#4 Submitted by t…. on April 15, 2026 – 2:40pm
“He is co-founder of the national Swedish programme AI for Executives” ’nuff said
#5 Submitted by … on April 15, 2026 – 3:55pm
In fairness, just because he has a role to perform, does not mean he does not believe in the values of that role. People who strongly believe in EDI for example, often take up roles in that sector, people who believe in education, become teachers.
#6 Submitted by tom…. on April 23, 2026 – 3:49am
Fair critique but what I feel is missed is that AI is not just another technological innovation. Word processing is a replacement technology, not a disrupting technology as AI is.
#7 Submitted by mlarsen… on April 24, 2026 – 1:00am
Those joining the unconstrained AI fan club seem to have lost sight of the purpose of higher education. Although there’s no doubt students will use AI professionally, I believe we have a moral and ethical obligation to ensure they retain the critical thinking and communication skills to productively participate in society and the economy. Redefining learning to match the products released by Silicon Valley is the very definition of cognitive surrender
Trouble at Mill with our Sans Culottes (sans-culottes meaning “without knee breeches” -the radical and militant working-class people of late 18th-century France. As the driving force of the French Revolution, they distinguished themselves from the wealthy elite by wearing long trousers instead of the fashionable, aristocratic silk knee breeches (culottes)).
April 20, 2009, during an address to the State Library of South Australia in Adelaide. [1]
A two-speed future?
We set to work, we announced a plan, we said we were going to have a National Broadband Network, we said we’d invest up to $43 billion, we actually believe this is the infrastructure of the 21st century, just as railways, roads and the rest, telegraph, were in the 19th century and in the 20th century..
The challenge of managing two-speed economies both nationally and at a global level is to find a compromise..
This is an important investment for the future, from which each of the businesses represented in this room will benefit enormously, in ways which the economy at large hasn’t by and large thought through yet. New ways of doing business, new ways in which you can actually sell products across the tyranny of distance which has so far haunted so much of our small business community, or those which are geographically isolated from major markets both here and abroad. This is a fantastic innovation. Also for the way in which Government does business in delivering basic and efficient services and saving public finance, for example in simply the ability to transfer electronically and at speed, patient controlled electronic health records..
A holistic approach, looking at supply and demand both on a local and national scale, and in terms of interconnected economies, will always be necessary for those making decisions at the level of economic policy..
The aim must be to stimulate growth in areas facing economic slowdown whilst trying to avoid over inflation during an unexpected resource boom. This requires a dynamic approach, and one that must be fine-tuned constantly..
This article was originally published 9th June 2017 by ICAS. You can read the article and see the full editionย here.
NEWS
In June 2026, Annaโs new Quarterly Essay ‘The God we Made: The Threat and Promise of Artificial Intelligence’ is released..
Prime Minister Speech to the Business Council of Australia Canberra 22 June 2010..
This is a turbo-charging piece of infrastructure which this Government has brought about and is important because unless we have infrastructure at global standards, unless we have skills at global standards, we will not have productivity growth at global standards..
The Cartesian psycho-babblers..
Sweden’s contribution to Age of Romance raison d’etat Philosophy (Warrior-prince European adventurer scientist explorer poet & ‘maiden-deflowerer’ psychopathology 1492 – 1509 to the beginning of the 21st century of the common era noted to have been Rene Descartes contracting pneumonia and obligingly dying and at this precious moment in Ten-thousand years of humanity organised in highly soil-and-garden-management productive FOOD-SECURE lands with recognisably representative citizen-participatory pre liberal-democratic central administrations I’ve momentarily lost track & sign & aegis – my goat-skin, my kabarlic masonic or Royal & Ancient Order of Mental Juvenile Bidden Buffaloes Goat-skin – my Kingdom for my goat’s-kin, man – of the @Substack Cartesian Randite male-ego youkneeverse crappola contributor here but am sure we’ll catch up ..
Lastly Metaphysics.. around 1400. Genoa perhaps. A Jewish dude.
It occurred to me when in a virtual exile from madmen and politicians in my own country in 1999 – having taken one book with me when i fled my home city early in May the year before, Ernest Becker deceasedโs Birth & Death of Meaning, a fairly lame but valid jumping-off point for a study now a 28 year neurocognitive health and post post Socratic thematics logic tour de force and intellectual triumph for all humanity and immediate reform of education at ALL ages & stages of Mental Development (((for that is patently now the only proper sane coherent and comprehensive study not of Man or ANY other stilted 180ยฐ off-course (the distances & time vexation of say 1905), -direction (quantum nextness, in everyday language Futures) or -purpose ((Governments everywhere MUST WITH THE UTMOST URGENCY disconfuse, discombobulate & DISCONFLATE cause & effect (โดโต : โตโด) and so deactivate the Illichian global civil society AI catastrophe))) that took me to mentally grasp myself that commonly Left cerebral QUADRI-sphere thought IS unselfconscious task execution MICRO (behavioural) thought-action RECALL; BUT WAIT, ye psychically embattled AND at most moments clear-thinking Hegel-Stalin line of clahncking binary relations of stuff ((material objects or depersonalised if not commodified -as-objects-of-trade, CIVIL RIGHTS bereft – if NOT indeed violated-trafficked-enslaved-killed-commodotised and HUMAN Rights bereft)) theoreticians and like us all of course wanting to in the ontos-telos instant partnership say 0.1 seconds to 36 hours (do, be and) become theorematicians THAT BEING TRUE the commonly RHS CQ is a comprehensively alert Other-, social group-, societally AND environmentally responsive cultural-ecological conceptualiser rememberer and bear with โโmeโ yet one futher moment a repository some 2,350 years of recent human history gave e the name Platoโs Race-memory, notionally singular thinking, contemplative, hesitant, ideational DEFINITIONALLY SELF CONSCIOUS operations macro metaphysical by definition.
I discovered the MM FIRST logic THEN various branches maths LAST metaphysics some 7yrs ago and the โ9th C Baghdad algebraแต trope say 37yrs back..
Maybe thriving is what emerges when relationships, communities, institutions, cultures, and environments become life-giving enough for human beings to flourish.
And honestly?
The more I study psychology, systems theory, complexity, neurodiversity, social change, and human development, the more I find myself arriving at a surprisingly ancient conclusion:
The individual was never the whole story.
The ecosystem was.
Iโm pretty sure my Indigenous ancestors would be looking at our obsession with individual self-actualization and quietly saying:
โWell thereโs your problem.โ
Because they understood something modern Western culture keeps forgetting.
You donโt heal apart from the ecosystem.
You heal within it.
You donโt belong apart from the ecosystem.
You belong within it.
You donโt thrive apart from the ecosystem.
You thrive within it.
The river matters.
The soil matters.
The community matters.
The relationships matter.
The stories matter.
The ecosystem matters.
Maybe thriving was never a pyramid.
Maybe thriving was always a living system.
And maybe the future of human flourishing isnโt waiting for us at the top of Maslowโs hierarchy.
Maybe itโs waiting for us to remember that we were never standing outside the web of life in the first place.
Edina Monsoon (Saunders) is the middle-aged owner of a failing PR firm in London’s Holland Parkneighbourhood. Her best friend is Patsy Stone (Lumley), an ageing former fashion model who holds a sinecureposition at a top British magazine. The two women use their considerable financial resources to indulge in cigarettes, alcohol (most notably Bollinger Champagne) and recreational drugs and to chase the latest fads in an attempt to maintain their youth and recapture their glory days as Modsin swinging London. The partnership is driven mainly by Patsy, who is both co-dependent and an enabler to Edina.
Their lifestyle inevitably leads to various personal crises, which are invariably resolved by Edina’s daughter, Saffron Monsoon (Sawalha), whose constant involvement in their exploits has left her increasingly bitter and cynical. Edina’s unnamed mother (Whitfield) visits the Monsoon home frequently to keep Saffron company, help with chores and, quite often, taking Edina’s possessions to sell at off car boot sales. The relationship between Edina and mother is strained, as they disagree on virtually everything and are rarely alone together, a relationship with which they are both keen to antagonise each other. Meanwhile, Edina’s affairs are handled, usually very badly, by Bubble (Horrocks), an incompetent, immature and neurotic personal assistant, whose antics frequently lead to further complications for Edina’s business and personal life.
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This space is rooted in reflection, reclamation, and relational truth.
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Billionaire-๐๐๐๐s with Olivettis 