Archive for May 2025

A phone holder hangs in a classroom at Delta High School… in Delta, Utah. At the rural Utah school, like in schools across the country, there is a strict policy requiring students to check their phones at the door when entering every class.

Woke culture emerged from elite shifts in identity politics, abandoning the economic roots of social justice.

An open letter signed by more than 75 health organisations and others is urging the Irish government to guarantee that the introduction of alcohol health labelling goes ahead next year. The signatories want to make sure that the planned introduction is not ‘derailed or delayed by alcohol industry lobbying’, says the Alcohol Action Ireland (AAI) charity.

Most people generally are more concerned about the immediate risks of artificial intelligence than they are about a theoretical future in which AI threatens humanity. A new study reveals that respondents draw clear distinctions between abstract scenarios and specific tangible problems and particularly take the latter very seriously.

Pragmatism offers answers to many of the questions that have interested philosophers since Plato. There is, though, no single programme or set of tenets around which every pragmatist unites, and the tradition contains very different and sometimes conflicting ideas. In what follows, I set out some ideas that I think are particularly useful.

By ingesting billions of creations, chatbots learn to talk, and image synthesizers learn to draw. Along the way, the AI companies behind them treat our shared culture like an inexhaustible resource to be strip-mined, with little thought for the consequences…. Today, the AI industry’s business models unintentionally echo the ways in which early industrialists approached forests and fisheries—as free inputs to exploit without considering ecological limits…. If we let AI systems deplete or pollute the human outputs they depend on, what happens to AI models—and ultimately to human society—over the long term?