Stefaan Verhulst
Book by Josh Tyrangiel: “AI is often framed as a force of radical transformation, either catapulting us into a utopian future or dragging us toward existential ruin. But this book tells a different story. It’s not about high-profile tech CEOs who want to use AI to “break shit,” but about a bunch of smart pragmatists using AI to make the world better.
Josh Tyrangiel’s journey into AI began with a late-night YouTube video featuring General Gustave Perna, the retired four-star general who orchestrated the distribution of Covid vaccines during Operation Warp Speed. Perna’s success—and the end of the pandemic—depended on AI’s practical ability to synthesize and standardize vast amounts of logistical data. AI wasn’t the hero of the story—it was the tool that helped real people get things done.
This book follows those people, who make up a kind of AI counterculture. It explores AI’s quiet revolution in government services, medicine, education, and human connection—places where it’s being used to amplify human judgment rather than replace it. It tells the stories of teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats who often stumbled into AI as a means to solve specific, tangible problems, often with no prior software expertise.
While the loudest voices in AI debate doomsday scenarios and trillion-dollar market opportunities, this book focuses on those working in the messy, incremental, but deeply impactful space of AI practice. However, there is one big caveat—success is not guaranteed. Change is hard. Institutions move slowly. But even in failure there are lessons for everyone who’s interested in using AI—carefully, thoughtfully—to build a better world today…(More)”.
Essay by Henry Farrell & Cosma Rohilla Shalizi: “…. LLMs create social relations between their users and the authors of the text in their training corpora. With the right access to the model and the corpus, one can trace the connections from system output back to individual source texts and their authors (Grosse et al., 2023). These social relations are mechanically mediated, giving users the illusion that they are interacting with just the machine and not an assemblage of people. But mediated social relationships and their illusions are a common fact of modern life. The social relations created by LLMs in turn cut across, and interact with, other social relations, including those shaped by other social technologies.
Our goal here is to clear a common space where the social sciences and computer science and engineering can discuss the social consequences of AI. We draw heavily on the ideas of Simon (1996), who saw AI, political science, administration, economics, computer science, and cognitive psychology as so many branches of the “sciences of the artificial,” studying how human beings create “artifacts” that model, and act on, their environment. From this perspective, AI models are another means of “complex information processing” (Newell and Simon, 1956). As Simon emphasizes, such systems encompass both information technologies, as studied and built by computer scientists and engineers, and social information systems such as markets, bureaucracy, and, although Simon himself does not stress this, democracy (Lindblom, 1965). All such systems process information by reducing complex realities into more tractable ‘coarse-grainings’ or abstractions that (hopefully) capture important features of the data. Producing coarse-grainings is not all that large-scale social institutions do, but it is quite important. Economic, administrative, and political coordination simply cannot work at scale if complex social relationships are not compressed into visible, tractable representations…(More)”.
Book by Turi Munthe: “Our opinions – whether we believe in God or in ghosts, our views on sex or animal rights or immigration, our basic sense of what’s good or fair – are shaped by a breathtaking web of hidden forces. The age-old idea that our views are forged by reason and evidence alone is wrong: we are influenced by everything from the quirks of distant history, through the geology of where we grew up, to the lines of our genetic code.
This astounding book takes us through culture, biology, geography, history, psychology and much more to uncover the hidden DNA of our opinions. It reveals:
- why the descendants of rice farmers have different values to the descendants of grain farmers
- how our physical appearance shapes the way we see the world – and why conventionally attractive people tend to support the free market
- why liberals think pineapple should go on pizza, and why conservatives prefer smooth peanut butter to crunchy
- why hot and humid countries favour authoritarian leaders, and drought-prone ones prefer authoritarian gods
Packed with extraordinary stories and counterintuitive discoveries, Why We Think What We Think asks a fundamental question of ourselves. If we are predisposed to our beliefs, how can we escape the bounds of our own perspective? The answer lies in disagreement. Argument is how we reason, how we think our way to a better world. To thrive, as individuals and societies, we need the other side…(More)”.
Book by John Kampfner: “At a time when democracies seem paralyzed by fear and populations are turning inward, award-winning journalist John Kampfner travels to ten countries confronting our shared challenges with bravery and imagination.
– Taiwan’s health system achieves 90% patient satisfaction at a fraction of the cost of the NHS.
– Moroccan solar panels in the Sahara produce enough clean energy to power two million homes.
– Estonia has transformed itself into a digital pioneer in a single generation – becoming the world’s first fully digital government where 97.6% of citizens access state services online.
– Costa Rica has tripled its economy while doubling its forest cover, proving that green policies can pay direct dividends.
What unites these countries, and more, is a refusal to accept that difficult problems are unsolvable. The places showing true innovation are often those with their backs against the wall – not wealthy nations assuming they have all the answers. Braver New World is an urgent reminder that solutions exist. The question is whether we have the courage to learn…(More)”.
Book by Henry Snow: “Whether on Caribbean plantations in the seventeenth century or in Amazon warehouses today, the powerful have constantly developed new techniques to control workers—and new justifications for doing so. Ideas of control perfected on the factory floor have expanded to dictate our personal lives, political rights, national policy, and the global economy.
Seventeenth-century intellectuals such as William Petty and John Locke argued that human beings were selfish machines who had to be controlled for their own good. A century later, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham tried to do exactly that with their infamous Panopticon prison. When nineteenth-century Japanese elites imported European factory technologies, they came up with new theories of political control to justify this development. After the Second World War, the General Electric Corporation created an internal propaganda department to fight unions, then pitched that propaganda to the country with the help of an actor, the future President Ronald Reagan. Extending these practices, billionaires today dream of extending the algorithmic control of Amazon warehouses into every corner of our lives.
Blending intellectual, economic, and labor history, Control Science is a thrilling and lucid work of history. Henry Snow reveals how common sense about work, the economy, and human nature was fabricated and must now be challenged…(More)”.
Book by Edward Jones-Imhotep: “…explores the intertwined histories of breaking machines, social order, and the self in the modern Atlantic World. Edward Jones-Imhotep reveals how breakdowns are not the kinds of objects we imagine. More than just material failures or social disruptions, since the 18th century, breakdowns served as moments for defining a modern technological self and the core values of social order in Western democracies: what kinds of people belonged to it, what virtues they should possess, and who stood outside it.
Tracing this politics of breakdown and belonging across two centuries and two continents, the book rewrites five well-known episodes in the history of technology, influential histories that we thought we knew: the politics of the guillotine during the French Revolution, the causes of railway accidents and the rise of “systems” as a tool of self-responsibility and self-governance in Victorian Britain, the surprising antebellum history of breakdown in American slave cultures, the Gantt chart’s origins as a Progressive Era tool for linking failure as a condition of industrial machinery to failure as a kind of person in the US, and, finally, the electronic malfunctions during the Cold War that helped define the rational selves underpinning Western democracy…(More)”.
Index by Reporters Without Borders (RSF): “For the first time in the history of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index, over half of the world’s countries now fall into the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low. Since 2001, the expansion of increasingly restrictive legal arsenals — particularly those linked to national security policies — has been steadily eroding the right to information, even in democratic countries. The Index’s legal indicator has declined the most over the past year, a clear sign that journalism is increasingly criminalised worldwide. In the Americas, the situation has evolved significantly, with the United States dropping seven places and several Latin American countries sliding deeper into a spiral of violence and repression…(More)”.
Article by Manije Kelkar: “A CEO of a mid-sized nonprofit recently shared her frustration: after nearly two years of trying to hire for data roles, her organisation had little to show for it. Candidates were either unaffordable, inexperienced, or simply unavailable.
It’s an increasingly familiar story…
Before asking how to solve the talent gap, it’s worth unpacking what we mean by “data talent”. Data talent is not a single role—it is a spectrum of capabilities required to design, manage, and use data effectively.
At one end are Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) professionals who define what data should be collected and how it aligns with programme design and decision-making. Then there are analysts who interpret this data—building dashboards, generating insights, and supporting reviews. Behind the scenes are those who build and maintain data systems: MIS platforms, databases, and pipelines. At more advanced stages, organisations may engage data scientists to explore deeper patterns and predictive insights.
Expecting a single hire to cover this entire spectrum is unrealistic. Yet many organisations implicitly do exactly this—hiring “a data person” and hoping it will solve all their data-related challenges. Across nonprofits at different stages of data maturity, a clear pattern emerges: the challenge is not just a shortage of talent, but how narrowly the problem is defined. It is often viewed as a hiring gap rather than an organisational one.
Even where organisations are able to hire, the impact of that hire is often limited in the absence of complementary investments. Becoming data-driven is less about a single role and more about building an enabling environment.
Here are five shifts organisations can make alongside hiring…(More)”.
Book by Cornelia C. Walther: “In an age where algorithms shape our every move, this book offers an inspiring reframe: What if AI could amplify what makes us both human—and humane?
Artificial Intelligence for Inspired Action explores how natural intelligence can guide ProSocial AI. Drawing on the POZE paradigm, Cornelia C. Walther weaves global stories and systemic insights to spotlight hybrid intelligence—where human values and machine power meet. As reliance on AI risks slipping into dependence, she proposes double literacy—human and algorithmic—to reclaim agency. A wake-up call and guide in one, this book invites changemakers to lead with integrity and design a future worth living…(More)”.
Paper by Fatih Kansoyn and Yuhao Huo: “Artificial intelligence makes data more productive, but it also makes data more costly to govern. This paper asks where that governance cost shows up in firms’ own risk disclosures. Using roughly 84000 firm-years of SEC annual filings for US listed firms from 1994 to 2023, the paper builds layered text and LLM measures to separate AI invention from AI adoption and relates both to disclosed attention to data breach risk. AI adoption is associated with roughly 5 per cent higher breach-risk attention relative to the sample mean; AI invention is economically negligible once both margins enter the same specification. The wedge survives an explicit non-AI digitisation placebo built from the same filings. Among adopters, breach-risk attention is highest where deployment is customer-facing. Firms that explicitly connect AI to breach vulnerability describe it as expanding exposure in 101 of 103 directional statements. Supplementary evidence from staggered state Data Breach Notification laws is directionally consistent with the disclosure results…(More)”.