Stefaan Verhulst
Report by the Centre for Collective Intelligence (CCI): “How do people feel about devices that can read data from our brains, and about who gets to use the data they collect? Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence, commissioned by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), brought together a citizens’ jury to find out.
Neurotechnologies are devices that record signals from, or send signals to, the brain and nervous system. For years, neurotechnology has mostly been limited to medical uses such as cochlear implants or EEGs. Neurotechnology devices are increasingly moving beyond healthcare into consumer products for wellbeing, the workplace and education.
As this happens, it raises difficult questions about how the data derived from our brains should be protected. Developers currently face an uncertain regulatory landscape, and without clear guidance there is a risk of controversial practices or public backlash that could undermine trust in the technology.
What we did
Over two weeks in March 2026, 20 members of the UK public met for three online sessions. Guided by expert facilitators, they watched short informational videos, heard from experts, and, most importantly, deliberated together. The sessions moved from jurors’ first impressions to what they expect of regulators and developers, guided throughout by a single question: how do we make the most of the benefits of neurotechnology while managing the risks?
A citizens’ jury is well suited to a topic that is both technically complex and ethically contested. By giving a diverse group the time, information and space to deliberate, it produces considered judgements…(More)”.
Article by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen: “We are releasing a revised version of “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts About the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence.” Using payroll data from ADP, we document six facts about how employment has evolved since the release of ChatGPT, with particular attention to differences by age and AI exposure.
The updated data strengthen several patterns we first documented in August 2025. Most notably, the employment gap for young workers in highly AI-exposed occupations has continued to widen through mid-2026.
Our six main facts
- We do not see widespread, economy-wide job displacement associated with AI.
- However, young workers in AI-exposed occupations are increasingly falling behind their less-exposed peers. Employment among workers ages 22–25 in highly AI-exposed occupations now stands about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with employment among similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations. Experienced workers show no comparable gap.
- This divergence has widened steadily since we first documented it in August 2025: by this same measure, the shortfall was 15% at the July 2025 data vintage and is 19% as of June 2026.
- The adjustment appears to operate primarily through reduced hiring of young workers rather than increased separations.
- The declines are concentrated in occupations where AI usage tends to automate human tasks. In occupations where AI is used more to complement workers, employment is flat or rising, particularly among more experienced workers.
- So far, adjustment is showing up primarily in employment rather than base pay…(More)”.
Paper by Jasper Roe and Mike Perkins: “Conversations regarding the societal implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and its integration into educational processes are ongoing. An area of great significance in this regard is agency, including how the use of AI technologies impacts an individual’s ability to exercise autonomy. In educational contexts, this remains a relatively unexplored yet vital subject. To shed light on this subject, this paper provides an exploratory thematic review of works which investigate the relationship between generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and agency in education, mapping and interpreting the available literature through the lens of critical digital pedagogy (CDP). The findings suggest that while GenAI may enhance learner agency through personalisation and support, it also risks exacerbating educational inequalities and diminishing learner autonomy in certain contexts. This review also contributes to new sociotechnical perspectives on AI, highlighting how GenAI technologies may shape and be shaped by power dynamics and pedagogical ideologies. This review contributes to the existing debate on how AI technologies can be deployed in education and society responsibly by exposing how the use of these technologies may lead to unintended impacts, including the entrenchment of inequality and the reshaping of concepts of individual agency, authorship, and autonomy…(More)”.
Collected Essays by Moshe Maor: “…explains the phenomenon of sustained policy overinvestment or overreaction over extended periods. These long-term patterns of policy overproduction, known as policy bubbles, arise from psychological dynamics, institutional routines, and deliberate strategic action that generate positive feedback loops and lock policymakers into persistent overinvestment.
Leading expert Moshe Maor underscores the need to examine policy bubbles across their full life cycle: emergence, maturation, and termination or incorporation. Drawing on diverse case studies — including the NATO expansion foreign policy bubble, the corresponding political bubble in the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. crime policy bubble — the book traces the full life cycle of real-world policy bubbles and outlines how governments can better detect, understand, and respond to them. Through this analysis, Maor provides a comprehensive account of how policy bubbles persist and why uncovering their underlying drivers is essential for designing proportionate, evidence-aligned, and resilient policies.
Investigating a highly relevant policy anomaly, Policy Bubbles is an essential resource for scholars and students of public policy, public administration, and public management. Economists studying financial and asset bubbles, as well as government analysts, will likewise benefit from its groundbreaking insights…(More)”
Report by UNDP: “This report draws on workshops, stakeholder sessions, and in-country engagements with eleven countries and territories conducted through UNDP’s AI Trust & Safety Re-imagination Programme. It does not rank countries or propose a universal regulatory model. It surfaces what is already happening: the decisions being made, the risks materializing, and the governance approaches that are working under real institutional constraints.
The central finding is straightforward. Many of the most consequential AI governance decisions are not being made in policy frameworks. They are being made in procurement offices, vendor contracts, software update cycles, and the informal decisions of civil servants and institutional teams navigating AI use without clear guidance, approval processes, or accountability pathways. Getting governance right means embedding it in these operational settings, not treating it as a separate layer above them…(More)”
The Economist: “…the British state’s ability to function is about to get dramatically worse—a warning to rich democracies everywhere. Citizens frustrated by the poor deal they get from the authorities are turning to artificial intelligence to file objections and appeals, and claim their dues. The resulting deluge of complaints, and demands, will overwhelm bureaucracies built for the age of the post and the telephone. Too little is being done to prevent the state from drowning.
This inundation has been dubbed “agentic flooding”, and its tides are lapping at bureaucracies everywhere, from tax appeals to welfare claims to parking tickets. The waters are rising alarmingly fast in Britain. As we report this week, while worries about AI dwell on the threats to safety and jobs, the backlog in employment tribunals has quietly risen by 55% in a year, in large part due to AI-fuelled claims. Demand for emergency injunctions has surged 100-fold. And the AI tide has only just begun to come in….
At first sight this looks like a cracking result for fed-up citizens. No one likes parking tickets. The poor could exercise their lawful rights as successfully as the sharp-elbowed middle classes do today. Yet it threatens to become a tragedy of the commons. If the state is overwhelmed and cannot function, everyone loses. When 20th-century governments created broad rights, they had the noble ideal of making citizenship meaningful. The public would be heard in consultations, get information under transparency laws and win redress for maladministration from a panoply of ombudsmen, tribunals, commissioners and judges. But these analogue systems assumed that few people would have the time or temperament to pursue their rights to the bitter end; and that of those who did, few would have the money to pay for a lawyer…(More)”.
Book by Gil Durán: “When Silicon Valley says it is ‘‘moving fast and breaking things,’’ the world interprets the chaos as a necessary cost of innovation. Gil Durán reveals something far more sinister: a decades-long campaign to replace elected governments with corporate rule.
Drawing on insider political experience and new investigations, Durán traces this ideology from its philosophical roots in The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. He introduces its modern apostles—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Elon Musk—and shows how the promise of technological liberation has transformed into a global movement for digital feudalism, powered by cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic propaganda of social media.
The Nerd Reich explains the origins, strategies, and ambitions of Silicon Valley’s war on democracy for the first time. From San Francisco’s weaponized elections and secret billionaire projects to the White House, Durán exposes how the world’s richest men are building a new political order.
The Nerd Reich is more than a hidden history, it’s an urgent warning: democracy is being dismantled not by coups or tanks, but by code, capital, and the illusion of innovation. Durán insists there is still time to fight back—if we act now…(More)”.
Essay by Anne Lawrence-Mathers: “Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.
Its complex diagrams were at the center of its appeal. Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Nor do they act as models to be replicated in three-dimensional form as pieces of magical equipment. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters.3 Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.
Several factors made the Ars notoria fundamentally different from other magical texts. First, this is not a text in conflict with the church. In fact, the rituals framing and shaping usage of the images are presented as extremely pious, and the texts to be recited are identified as prayers. The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”, and are claimed to preserve both the names of angels and words used to communicate with them. Second, the advantages offered are relatively virtuous: contact with spiritual beings and full knowledge of the subjects taught in medieval universities. Such claims cut little ice with thirteenth-century theologians, however, who saw clear links to things condemned as superstitious and demonic by St Augustine, despite the text’s assertion that it contains wisdom revealed to King Solomon…(More)”.
Paper by Alberto Bitonti and Sergiu Gherghina: “This article reviews the literature on deliberative quality, a key concept used in deliberative democracy scholarship to assess how closely actual deliberation approximates normative ideals. It traces the development of deliberative theory from early models through to more inclusive and systemic approaches. The review maps the main empirical tools developed to measure deliberative quality, which differ in their normative assumptions, methodological designs, and levels of analysis. While the proliferation of approaches reflects the richness of the field, it also creates challenges regarding empirical comparability and theoretical clarity. The article concludes with a section highlighting a research agenda calling for conceptual alignment and methodological refinement to support future research on deliberation, especially in contexts where deliberative processes are becoming increasingly institutionalised and often proposed as responses to political polarisation and democratic distrust. We provide a comprehensive and systematic overview for scholars interested in deliberative processes and their normative and empirical evaluation…(More)”.
Project by AidData: “… has compiled an inventory of key development data assets, which will feed into future work to track funding to this data ecosystem.
Our interactive Data Asset Inventory provides granular detail on 496 assets published by 230 organizations across 7 of the most important sectors for development: agriculture and food security, disaster response, education, environment, gender, governance, and health.
Explore the public beta, and share your feedback to inform the next phase of this effort. Are there important data assets you work with that are missing from our inventory?…(More)”.