Stephen Downes

This page contains Microsoft's Humanist AI Code of Conduct (38 page PDF), an analogy I guess to the Claude Soul document, and codifies Their "approach to developing and deploying Humanist AI, and contains the intended behaviors, values and guardrails for our models." It is motivated by the assertion that "humans must retain meaningful control over AI so that it can help people live healthier, happier, and more productive lives." That feels a bit loose to me - I would rather define for myself the purpose of my life, rather than have AI acting as though I should be productive. This looseness characterizes the document; there are numerous places where I would want to limit what AI should assume about people. I also found it interesting that Microsoft back in 2025 said it was "working towards Humanist Superintelligence (HSI)". 

This is an abstract identity and authority model and one-target resolution semantics for an Identity Passport. It's detailed opaque and it doesn't have a working implementation behind it. It's an outcome of the now (apparently) defunct Aardworlf project, which was intended to be a federated version of Facebook (you can still find some forks online). "The draft separates five questions: who authenticated, which Account association is current, which exact identity is targeted, whether this operation is authorized now, and what the consumer may learn." I'm not sure this will go anywhere, but it's going in the right direction. The fediverse needs to start with identity first, platforms (if ever) later.

This article is worthwhile mostly for the links to various arguments and accounts around consciousness (be sure to follow them) and especially for its link to the different models of consciousness page on Scholarpedia, which is a daunting list of the alternatives to consider when pondering this question. Here's my take: the only way there could be a distinctly human consciousness would be if, because of physical limitations, it lacks something that a full-fledged consciousness would possess. 

Mike Caulfield channels Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush in his argument (with a demonstration) that people can (and will?) now search using descriptions with AI producing a set of relevant results. The demo posits rough movie descriptions, like "A low-budget social fable that uses an alien outsider as a lens on an otherwise intact, realistically observed urban community" and the query is sent to Google, which uses its AI to come up with a series of five recommendations. Except - who searches for movies that way? So step two is that you pick a movie you already like, the AI generates these short descriptions, and you click on the one that appeals to you the most. So we're back to the recommender system. The obvious next step is to monetize it and to only show movies offered by your current provider.

This looks like a really useful set of tools: "Free online tools with no signup: line counter, image resizer, compressor, PDF converter, QR generator, percentage calculator and more. Everything runs in your browser, so your files never leave your device." What's funny is that I found them while looking through what I think is a bit of a boondoggle, a website advertsing the 'top 2 percent' of researchers. I was following certificates posted by Aras Bozkurt and Christian Stracke offered by (?) Elsevier and Stanford. I hope they didn't pay any money for this listing.

I just want to say, I absolutely love the drawings in Jon Dron's presentation, Entangled Cognitions and AI: a Complexivist Perspective on AI and Learning, "an attempt to situate generative AI in the context of complexivist approaches to learning such as Connectivism, Rhizomatic Learning, Landscapes of Practice, Entanglement, Enactivism, and many other theoretical models that treat learning as a complex phenomenon." I'm not sure I buy into the new terminology of 'complexitivism', which to me looks an awful lot like connectivism, but that doesn't impact the value of this presentation, which I heartily recommend. And in fairness, I may be missing some nuance, since I don't see a recording or transcript (why people don't record their presentations remains a mystery to me)..