Bateson on depersonifying: “To liken the mountain to a man and talk of its “humor” or “rage” does little harm. But to liken the man to the mountain proposes that all human relationships are what Martin Buber might have called I-it or perhaps it-it relations. 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.
When you’re enamoured of a technology and someone points out important ethical challenges, a typical reflex is to seek permission: yeah, but what about this use? If you find yourself seeking permission, one useful thing to do is to step back and inspect the underlying value conflict. What does your own moral compass say? Centering values leads to mindful choices. As you move from a tech-first to a values-first perspective, the question shifts from “won’t you give me permission?” to “how do I do the best science possible?”. And that, to me, is a question worth asking.
Some thoughts on generative AI, reproducibility, and why the praxis of slow and reproducible science provides a useful lesson for navigating the lures of “AI”.
Succinct argument for scientific publishers to adopt a clear and unequivocal policy that discourages authors from submitting synthetically generated text, and that invites them to uphold basic standards and core values of research integrity.
Jobs! If you are interested in fundamental research at the intersection of language, interaction and technology, have a look at the PhD and postdoc positions we are advertising. We look forward to growing the Futures of Language team.
TL;DR for English readers: Dutch labour unions representing university workers negotiated with UNL, representing universities’ top management levels. The latter…
For Kurzweil, singularity is the point at which machine intelligence would be more powerful than human intelligence. I’m coming to think it may be near just by the sheer amount of mindnumbing bullshit we are forced to contend with, which is making us all more stupid.
Start your blog with an exultant tone, pompous words, and gratuitous alliterations and I know we’re in for a rapid descent into the wastelands of utter mediocrity. I recently came across some obvious LLM-generated slop on science blogging aggregator Rogue Scholar. Here I write up why synthetic text has no place in scholarly blogging.
Oxford University Press is going full surveillance capitalist mode. They don’t do author offprints anymore because authors sharing their work equals “piracy”; want nothing more dearly than tracking their users’ every move; and would rather you didn’t even email your work to students and colleagues. God forbid anyone actually read your publicly funded scholarly work.
Van eind 2018 tot halverwege 2024 had ik het voorrecht om onderzoeksleider te zijn van het Vidi-project “Elementaire deeltjes van de taal” met een Vidi-talentbeurs van NWO, de Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek. Dit zijn enkele notities uit de eindrapportage.
New paper! McLean & Dingemanse 2025, A multi-methods toolkit for documentary research on ideophones. In which we review a diversity of methods and analytical approaches to the documentation of ideophones.
GPT based text generators like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot have rapidly become a “cultural sensation”. Here I provide scientific background and guidance on how to think critically and mindfully about these tools in academic writing and research.