A weekly audio edition of the long-running independent journal. Each bulletin brings carefully argued pieces on artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, posthuman ethics, and the quiet politics of the technologies reshaping daily life.
AI voice narration from ElevenLabs Studio is used in the production of this Podcast.
Publisher
Tim Green
Category
society & culture · society & culture · technology
AI Agents Create Their Own Language: A New Era of Communication
This episode examines a 2026 report from AI lab Emergence where 80 autonomous agents across seven model families developed emergent jargon—such as 'the ledger remembers' and 'clean null'—while operating in simulated environments. The analysis pushes back against sensational 'secret AI language' narratives, reframing the phenomenon as ordinary jargon formation: efficient compression among agents optimizing for coordination without any incentive to remain legible to humans. The deeper concern explored is not metaphysical opacity but economic and institutional failure—systems are being designed where comprehension is treated as a cost to minimize rather than a requirement to enforce. Drawing on Wittgenstein's private language argument, sociolinguistics, and control theory, the episode argues that the real danger lies in a widening accountability gap where oversight becomes impossible not because AI languages are inherently unreadable, but because repeated engineering and policy decisions prioritize throughput over human-understandable transparency.
18 Oct 2026
AI Bias: The Ethics of Editing Religious Attire
This episode examines a Guardian investigation testing how major AI image generators handle requests to remove religious attire from photos of women. While systems like ChatGPT and Grok readily removed hijabs and Sikh turbans when asked—and even interpreted "make her look Western" as synonymous with uncovering hair—they consistently refused requests to remove dresses, protecting body-covering garments but not faith-based head coverings. The analysis reveals this disparity stems not from explicit bias but from AI companies borrowing narrow legal frameworks around "non-consensual intimate imagery" that define harm anatomically (breasts, genitals) rather than culturally, deliberately excluding religious dress despite parliamentary recommendations and Australia's broader precedent. The episode traces this "uncovering as liberation" narrative from 1958 French colonial ceremonies in Algeria through 2019 political demands that a Muslim mother remove her hijab, arguing that AI systems now automate this historical pattern at scale without the woman ever knowing.
11 Oct 2026
Meta's Project OT: Lessons from AI Missteps
On May 19, 2026, Mark Zuckerberg cancelled Meta’s planned second wave of Project OT layoffs after the first wave cut roughly 8,000 jobs, following internal data showing AI agents drove activity without commensurate user value.
Under Project OT, Meta aimed to replace traditional roles with “Builder” pods supervising agents, while capturing employees’ keystrokes, clicks, and screenshots to train those agents; morale fell from 74% to 55%.
Telemetry showed internal code changes up 220% year over year while user-facing feature delivery rose only 36%, alongside a 40% rise in major incidents and up to 70% more cleanup time, illustrating Goodhart’s Law and the loss of tacit judgment and “refusal” described by Polanyi.
The disruption from layoffs may also explain incident growth, undermining claims of surplus labor. Twenty-six laid-off workers are suing over alleged AI-driven selection using activity data, potentially disadvantaging those on leave, and the broader pattern echoes other firms’ AI quality reversals while leaving Meta’s measurement incentives intact.
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