Report – AI and Education

"In this report, we:

Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.
Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.
Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.
As an institution deeply identified with the birth of AI and known for its distinctively rigorous, hands-on education, designed to produce graduates unafraid of the world’s hardest problems, MIT has a unique role to play in this moment. We believe it also has a responsibility to lead."

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What to Say When You Suspect Students Are Misusing AI | Harvard Business Impact Education

"These hard conversations give students something they don’t get from avoidance or punishment: the chance to understand their own thinking, see where they may be over-relying on AI, and learn how to use it in ways that actually strengthen their work.

I’ve developed a simple framework that helps guide conversations about suspected AI misuse:

Name it: Share what you’ve noticed with the student.

Disrupt it: Ask a question that requires their own unique thinking.

Change it: Direct the student on how to move forward."

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Blog @CoopAlex | alex-bird.com | Co-operative Researcher & Activist

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Updating My Views About Netwar - by David Ronfeldt

"In 1994, after our informal paper on Cyberwar Is Coming (1993) had circulated, John Arquilla and I found we had an invitation to propose a formal project on cyberwar or other aspects of information-age conflict. In wondering what to do, I told John I felt unsuited to working on hard-core military matters, Besides, our key hypothesis — the information revolution will favor network forms of organization and unsettle hierarchies — is going to have plenty of effects in non-military areas of conflict affecting national security, such as terrorism, crime, and militancy. Happily for me, John agreed. So I further said we should have a name for it — something to distinguish it from military cyberwar. Thus we started voicing potential catch-words; and to my admiration, John coined “netwar” — the keeper.

As I recall, this discussion lasted about 15 minutes, But it was enough to set in motion our series of RAND reports on The Advent Of Netwar (1996), The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico (1998), Swarming and the Future of Conflict (2000), and Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (2001), plus an independent paper on “Networks, netwars and the fight for the future” (2001),

Along the way, we also wrote The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward An American Information Strategy (1999). It concerned the emergence of our planet’s noosphere (“realm of the mind” and “thinking circuit” atop our planet’s geosphere and biosphere, linking all people’s thoughts). It wasn’t focused on netwar, but still pointed out that “Some of the best exemplars of the emergence of noopolitik involve ‘social netwars’ waged by civil-society activists,” for “nonmilitary netwars may prove the archetypal conflicts of noopolitik” (pp. 47–48). Our examples included the Zapatista movement in Mexico (my favorite) and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (John’s favorite).

RETHINKING SOCIAL NETWAR AS NOÖPOLITICAL NETWAR

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2020s, I remained interested in social netwar. Plenty of cases arose: notably the two just mentioned, plus the Battle of Seattle, Color Revolutions, Arab Spring, and Occupy! movements, not to mention slews of other cases (including MAGA?).

I’m still interested today. But since 2024 I’ve used “noöpolitical netwar” instead of “social netwar” as a descriptor, thereby linking our ideas about the noosphere’s emergence with those about the spread of netwar. This conceptual shift has made increasing sense, since most social netwars are about gaining terrain in people’s “hearts and minds” — they’re more about ideational noopolitics more than physical geopolitics (though the latter still matters as well)."

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(163) Why Trotsky Lost Everything to Stalin (And It Was Not His Fault) - YouTube

"A revolution's heir is built up, then erased — and the answer is more complicated than a single order from Moscow. In this video we follow Leon Trotsky from the armored trains of the civil war to the exile in Mexico City, and trace the chain of decisions that handed the Soviet Union to a quieter, patienter man. Along the way we look at the February collapse, the creation of the Red Army from nothing, the strange partnership with Lenin, the split with Stalin over ideology and tactics, and the long, slow squeeze that turned a wartime hero into an outlaw in his own country. You will hear how Trotsky's brilliance with crowds and soldiers became a liability in a political machine built on paperwork, fear and quiet loyalty. If you want stories about power, ambition and how the wrong kind of intelligence can lose to the right kind of patience, subscribe and turn on the bell — new chapters drop every week."

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Why Trotsky Lost Everything to Stalin (And It Was Not His Fault) | Defend Democracy Press

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The AI Cold War and Its Threat to Flourishing - IAM

"drawing on Transcendental Realism, we ask not merely what flourishing looks like but what reality must be structured to enable it. What are the generative conditions without which integratively-plural flourishing cannot emerge, regardless of what other goods are in place?"

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The End of Rojava and the Crisis of Kurdish Nationalism: What the SDF’s Dissolution Reveals About Nationalism, Imperialism and the Left

"A large part of the left was drawn to the concept of “Democratic Confederalism“ and to the ideas of Abdullah Öcalan that influenced the Autonomous Administration as an alternative to the centralised nation-state. Practice on the ground, though, exposed a sharp contradiction. While the talk was of communes and grassroots popular democracy, military and financial decision-making was concentrated in the hands of unelected party and military cadres operating with a rigidly centralist mentality.

As for deploying the language of ecology, feminism and statelessness as a rhetorical cover, presented to Western and especially leftist public opinion, on behalf of a one-sided military authority working closely with American military and security institutions and receiving funding from them, my view is that this does no service to leftist thought. It empties that thought of its content and turns it into a force operating on behalf of those very institutions.

When movements that present themselves as revolutionary or liberationist come to depend on American financial and military resources, this is no passing tactical matter, since it gradually reshapes their internal nature. As the centre of gravity shifts from popular mobilisation to external funding, a movement changes from a social force rooted in a popular base into a military force dependent on external funding, and its survival becomes tied to the continuation of international support more than to the mass base that will ultimately decide its future.

The moment the backer’s priorities change, the structural fragility is exposed all at once."

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NON-CONSENT | DO NOT RECORD

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The AI Slop Backlash Is Actually Having an Impact | WIRED

"Platforms are finally recognizing that people don’t want to consume AI slop. A growing number of sites and apps now have tools and policies to flag, label, and ban AI-generated content."

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