Reminder: Over a month on, the Delhi High Court has yet to deliver its bail verdict (reserved on 9 July) for anti‑CAA activists—Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Sharjeel Imam, Khalid  Saifi & others—jailed for close to/more than 5 years without trial in a Delhi riots case

Because I am angry I will share this again. One of the reasons that Israel is able to target individuals so precisely is that it collects every phone call in Gaza and stores the recordings in Microsoft Azure, then uses AI to analyze and pick targets.

BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen has confirmed that the entire Al Jazeera team in Gaza City has been killed.

Barely an hour ago, Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif warned us all:

“If this madness doesn’t end, Gaza will be reduced to ruins, its people’s voices silenced, their faces erased — and history will remember you as silent witnesses to a genocide you chose not to stop.”

Israel just killed him.

The implicit threat behind the AI hype is the paradigm of Modernity; behind the relentless chiding to use AI for everything is that if you don't, you will no longer be civilised, no longer be part of a fully developed humanity.

Is everyone just rewatching Anthony Bourdain this August?

In an attempt to escape the haze of work -which is how I am describing my weeknights these days- a dear friend and I watched Sister Midnight yesterday and it was just so good. Absurd and hilarious.

The Jammu and Kashmir administration has banned 25 books. The 25 books should actually be on everyone’s to-read list. I’m going to make my way through the ones I haven’t read yet, and so should you.

thewire.in/government/j...

This has disproportionately impacted already marginalized communities and individuals, in particular people with disabilities and older people.

This report looks at how the UK's Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)’s constant testing, rolling out, and rolling back of costly artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies fo social security schemes has created an inaccessible system for people who are at risk of poverty in the UK.

New Report: Amnesty Tech’s Algorithmic Accountability Lab have launched a new research report today, ‘Too Much Technology, Not Enough Empathy’: How the UK’s push to digitalize social security harms human rights.

www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

NO. AI. FOR. WAR. CRIMES!!!

This must have been incredibly stressful. Really happy you were able to deliver it despite just outrageous treatment by organisers.

a couple of hours before my keynote, I went through an intense negotiation with the organisers (for over a hour) where we went through my slides and had to remove anything that mentions 'Palestine' 'Israel' and replace 'genocide' with 'war crimes'

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New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance

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This latest shameful US veto – one in a long list – gives Israel the green light to continue its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. It allows Israel to continue starving Palestinian civilians and creating conditions of life meant to bring about their destruction.

www.amnesty.org/en/latest/ne...

Look forward to getting stuck in. Such important work by @ainowinstitute.bsky.social

The report is available in Danish, Arabic, and English.

Developing an easy-to-read version of the report is a first for Amnesty Tech and reflects our continued commitment to finding ways to make our work more accessible. Read more:

www.amnesty.org/en/documents...

New! If you are curious about how automation in welfare services effects people’s rights in Denmark, check out the easy-to-read version of Amnesty International’s investigation "Coded Injustice: Surveillance and Discrimination in Denmark’s automated welfare state".

We are deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

A leading light of African and world literature, he was a distinguished Kenyan writer, scholar, and playwright, who served on Wasafiri's Advisory Board for several years.

Please join us in remembrance 🕊️

The politics of personal enrichment cannot be fought with the politics of personal self-aggrandizing.

This was just posted by @tbretc.bsky.social on another platform. The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a ‘summer reads’ feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?

“This moratorium would mean that even if a company deliberately designs an algorithm that causes foreseeable harm — regardless of how intentional or egregious the misconduct or how devastating the consequences — the company making that bad tech would be unaccountable to lawmakers and the public…”

Going insane reading this Politico story about Musk's AI servers poisoning the air of a 90% Black community in Memphis followed immediately by this Washington Post story about states lining up their own communities to host the next ones