AI and Religion – Mind Your Golems

When a Grok-driven autonomous weapon kills a person, so do Elon and his shareholders. When ChatGPT advises your teenager to take her own life, so do Sam Altman, OpenAI, and their employees. And when you train or prompt a network of autonomous agents to hack a bank, you share that responsibility, accountability, and culpability with the humans that run your favourite AI platform. The AI itself is just a number running on a machine. It has no real knowledge of good and evil, other than its human-provided training.

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I’m Leaving WhatsApp

I’m leaving WhatsApp. It’s an integral part of the Meta / Facebook empire, which is currently being sued by 29 states for the harm that it causes to children. While WhatsApp claims end-to-end encryption, they retain your metadata, which forms part of your social graph which they then use as part of their marketing efforts….

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What’s an unconference?

I’m facilitating two unconferences in the next six weeks, one for the Global Entrepreneurship Network NZ, and the other for Re:Shape. They’re going to be epic events. But what is an unconference? An unconference is a dynamic, participant-driven gathering where the traditional event hierarchy is flipped. There are no pre-planned agendas, rigid keynotes, or passive…

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My Linux Desktop 2025

screenshot of desktop, showing a bunch of icons down the left, some small icons in the panel on top, and a picture from APOD on the desktop itself

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS I recently upgraded my laptop to the most recent version of the most popular Linux operating system, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. It’s free software, costing $0. With Ubuntu’s free Expanded Security Maintenance, it will be supported until April 2034, at which point it can be easily upgraded at no cost. It offers the…

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Armchair climatology: Wellington

Most of us acknowledge that catastrophic global warming is one of the most significant existential issues ever to face our species. But we tend to talk about it in the abstract, basing our information on international research, which seems distant from our home in New Zealand. The good old Kiwi “she’ll be right” can kick…

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Yiddish poetry from the Holocaust

I gave a talk at the Holocaust Centre NZ last month on Yiddish poetry from the holocaust, as translated by my mother, Dr Sarah Traister Moskovitz (z”l). The presentation discusses the history of the Poetry in Hell and The Song Remains collections, and readings of several of the poems in English and Yiddish. You can…

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