Writer | Poet | Politics, ethics, beliefs | Art | former director @Ekklesia_co_uk | NUJ | @TUG_SNP | Music: @MusicTippett @YesSolidMental
Leith, Scotland
Joined May 2008
- Tweets99.3K
- Following7.5K
- Followers7K
- Likes67K
Pinned Tweet
'Transforming Christian-Muslim relations', with Rowan Williams, @monasiddiqui7 & @simonbarrow Videocast now online youtu.be/iyMWv_U4T9Y
Simon Barrow retweeted
It’s important to understand here that states aren’t allowed to sue for libel. There is no need for the BBC to do this, they just want to. (And tbf, Victoria Derbyshire makes it very clear she doesn’t want to say it).
Simon Barrow retweeted
A lot of times people ask me why I’m so vocal and against the idea of treating AIs like people.
It isn’t alive. It isn’t conscious. It isn’t aware. It doesn’t feel. It does not care about the repercussions of its actions.
But the moment humans start treating AI as such, not only is it just flat out wrong, but it is dangerous.
Giving AIs any rights at all would be a logical step if we created a life form, deserving of equality, but we didn’t.
This Delaware proposal is incredibly dangerous and beyond ridiculous and it needs to stop.
So I’ve been trying to raise awareness about this, and every time I do, people get either offended, challenge the meaning of words like “consciousness”, say it’s just like us, or believe in science fiction.
Stop it. Just stop it. If you don’t understand how AI works and its limitations, then please listen to people who do. AI (LLMs) are just fancy computer programs design to generalize and complete tokens based on its training data.
Don’t believe they are more than that unless you have actual evidence. You won’t find the evidence, because there is none.
LLMs are great tools for humans, but it isn’t alive and it doesn’t magically have a soul.
People saying otherwise have either something to gain from that claim or they don’t truly understand these systems; yes, this includes some people who even work at these AI companies.
Think of what happens if AI is granted legal rights and property ownership (which would happen if AI can run businesses)…
Think about which AI models people and companies are allowed to use…
Think about who ends up benefiting most from this...
Think about how the prompter or person/company pulling the strings behind it, becomes shielded from liability…
It all comes back to the argument about consciousness, self awareness, emotions, and people who believe that AIs and LLMs are some amazing new form of life.
It isn’t, don’t fall for it.
Deeply concerning to me... Delaware proposal to let agents run businesees... we should be very cautious here
"A Delaware AIC will be a separate legal entity whose day-to-day affairs are managed by an AI agent rather than a person. At the agent’s direction, the AIC can sue and be sued in its own name, hold and dispose of property, and incur obligations..."
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/…
Simon Barrow retweeted
This is excellent. The shout-out to Benjamin Moser is well-deserved. Really important book, both as a historical study and contemporary intervention
Simon Barrow retweeted
A developer warns of extinction, and suddenly everyone imagines AI as a creature with motives.
The Inscrutable Machine predicted this mistake: confusing emergent behavior with a mind. Anthropomorphizing AI blinds us from the actual risks.
Stories and reflections on AI
Simon Barrow retweeted
I was on CNN discussing how the 2026 election proved that @BernieSanders' anti-oligarch populism is mainstream, centrist, moderate politics that is needed to win red states - and how Corporate Dems' entire political theory has been rejected by America.
Simon Barrow retweeted
[L]ife is a series of passages. In every passage there is a death of some sort, the death of naïveté, the death of a dependency, the death of an understanding of self and world. And, after that death, there is often a terrible “in-between,” sometimes lasting years.~James Hollis
Simon Barrow retweeted
I had a poetry professor who told me about sitting for hours in the early hours at the Musée de l'Orangerie, gazing at Monet's water lilies. Ever since, I have longed to do the same for such an experience would transform you; to give such beauty your undivided attention.
Simon Barrow retweeted
"The American people have rebuked the depravity, corruption and incompetence of the failed, lame duck president Donald J. Trump." – Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff, celebrating his reelection to the U.S. Senate
Simon Barrow retweeted
My review of Humza Yousaf’s Under Fire for the New Statesman:
Humza Yousaf, author of Under Fire, an important and painfully honest testament, could never have flourished in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, still less the Conservatives. As a proud Muslim and supporter of the Palestinian cause, that would have been out of the question. In the Scottish National Party, which embraced multiculturalism as its southern counterparts drifted towards coercive liberalism, he rose to the top.
@OborneTweets: Humza Yousaf's private war
newstatesman.com/culture/boo…
Simon Barrow retweeted
"You didn't join the police force to do this, did you?"
On the eve of the Supreme Court hearing on the Palestine Action ban, a 94-year-old barrister tells @ShehabKhan why she got arrested, and the words that made her arresting officer cry.
Watch the full interview 👇
Simon Barrow retweeted
If @AbdulElSayed pulls it off despite the most vile anti-Muslim bigotry hurled his way, the tens of millions AIPAC spent to try and defeat him & Haley Steven's eleventh hour duplicity - it will be one of the most impressive Senate wins in modern times.
I hope he does it.
Simon Barrow retweeted
"The view that rational intelligibility is at the root of the natural order makes me, in a broad sense, an idealist—not a subjective idealist, since it doesn’t amount to the claim that all reality is ultimately appearance—but an objective idealist in the tradition of Plato and perhaps also of certain post-Kantians, such as Schelling and Hegel, who are usually called absolute idealists. I suspect that there must be a strain of this kind of idealism in every theoretical scientist: pure empiricism is not enough."
—Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford University press, 2012), pp. 17
Simon Barrow retweeted
So proud of the team for winning the Making A Difference Award tonight for the Refugees Are Welcome Here campaign we ran. Thanks to our readers for voting for us.
There were some amazing entries and examples of strong campaigning journalism so well done to all entrants!
Congratulations to the @ScotNational for winning the 'regional' award at the Newsmedia Association Awards for their excellent 'Refugees are Welcome Here' campaign at the House of Commons. With @laura_pollock_
Simon Barrow retweeted
1/3 Was discussing today's complexity of managing an organisation with @alison_phipps, UNESCO prof of refugee integration @UofGlasgow. She introduced me to a term, "supercomplexity". Following up I found ronaldbarnett.co.uk/assets/d… I'm struck by its ecological university conclusion.
Simon Barrow retweeted
After the Second World War, the German theorist Hannah Arendt suggested that totalitarianism takes root in societies where lots of people feel unnecessary or unwanted. In the years after 2016, it was common for the media to report on underemployed people in the Rust Belt who felt that they’d been cast aside. Today, manosphere ideology rages against a society that, allegedly, claims not to need men, and young people wonder whether there’s room for them in an A.I.-saturated workforce. “We have a real need to be needed,” Joshua Rothman writes. “And yet many forces—thinking machines, aging, economic and social dislocation—appear to be making us feel redundant.” Read his latest column: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/P4…
Simon Barrow retweeted
“We are complicit, materially preoccupied, spiritually impoverished, and technologically possessed.” —Joy Williams buff.ly/hgfkHLs
Simon Barrow retweeted
Suppose you are faced with a situation and don't know what to do. Sit down & turn toward whatever you are feeling and wait. Hold your sense of uncertainty and anxiety gently. Do not let your ego pull you into thinking. Wait without an agenda. The art is in the waiting~Robert Moss
