As a young man, Kolmogorov […] presented a paper to a group of his peers at Moscow University, offering an unconventional statistical analysis of the lives of medieval Russians. It found, for example, that the tax levied on villages was usually a whole number, while taxes on individual households were often expressed as fractions. The paper concluded, controversially for the time, that taxes were imposed on whole villages and then split among the households, rather than imposed on households and accumulated by village.

“You have found only one proof,” was his professor’s acid observation. “That is not enough for a historian. You need at least five proofs.” At that moment, Kolmogorov decided to change his concentration to mathematics, where one proof would suffice.

Internalist/platonic approach (discover what is already there) vs externalist approach (heroic mathematical subjectivity) [from Hottinger, Inventing the Mathematician.]. Either an identity of a mathematician is totally erased behind the discovery, or it is a hero changing the world… In any case, it is not a woman, nor a non-white person, nor a poor person.

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. “Technology”, or “modern science” (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the “hard” sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heoric undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy.

The history of technology is too often told as a linear progression, as a series of tales of triumphant inventors, emanating mainly from North America and Western Europe. Such tales are pervasive in part because they are easy to tell. […]

Such commonplace narratives serve important ideological functions.[…] in the case of search engines, it means forgetting the librarians (whose feminized labor is never valued as creative) and the information scientists whose cumulative work over the course of decades laid the foundation for Google.

There is a common illusion that one somehow increases one’s understanding of a person if one can translate a personal understanding of him into the impersonal terms of a sequence or system of it-processes.

Authentic education is not carried on by “A” for “B” or by “A” about “B”, but rather by “A” with “B”, mediated by the world—a world which impresses and challenges both parties, giving rise to views or opinions about it.

[…]

We simply cannot go to the laborers—urban or peasant [—] to give them “knowledge” or to impose upon them the model of the “good man” contained in a program whose content we have ourselves organized.

Many understand mathematics to be separate from human concerns and call mathematical knowledge value-free. I argue that we cling to this understanding of mathematics — a rational, universal system that relies on logic to arrive at truth — because it is a key component of how the West understands itself.

The more we distance ourselves from this, the more we open up to being quoted against our beliefs.

• “Sometimes the purpose of building a model is building a model”
• “Sometimes the important part of translation is the act of translation”

The expansion of military funding for both basic and applied research on emerging technologies, including quantum technologies, is not limited to the world’s major military powers. In a broader context, this opaque expansion often takes the form of asymmetric military-academic partnerships between the defense departments of powerful nations and academic institutions of the Global South. This strategy serves as a subtle mechanism through which hegemonic countries impose their “soft” power over nations of the Global South. For instance, from the perspective of states that can spend less of their public money on science, these funds can support projects that would not be executed otherwise, and help maintain pre-existing infrastructure and personnel, appearing as nearly irrecusable offers […]

Minorities indeed need to survive; representation does matter. And inclusion, while fraught with risks, can open up to new practices that prove emancipatory and transformative. However, if we were to leave it here, if we were to centralize the public good, we risk reinforcing neurotypical values. If we were to stick exclusively to dominant critiques of philanthrocapitalism, we risk returning to convergence patterns. We risk installing solar panels on slave ships or building nice sidewalks in the plantation – when the thing to do now, it seems, is to break away from the labour of neurotypicality.

Outside an artefact, “open access” does not guarantee “openly accessible”.

We should aspire for (or really, insist upon) healthy relationships between

• individuals
• institutes
• funding bodies
• “the public”

• the past
• the now
• the future

An optimist might hope to get around these problems with better data and metrics. What I want to show here is that these limitations on data are no accident. [The intrinsic properties of data collection techniques that give it power also] limit the kinds of information that we can collect.

[…]

Data is portable, which is exactly what makes it powerful. But that portability has a hidden price: to transform our understanding and observations into data, we must perform an act of decontextualization.

[…]

The power of data is vast scalability; the price is context.

Since the 1970s, mathematical models of global development, population, and resources have shaped academic and policy debates about humanity’s future. A landmark in this tradition was the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth project, which used system dynamics to warn of potential ecological and economic collapse under prevailing trends. In contrast, the Bariloche Foundation’s Latin American World Model offered a normatively distinct alternative, arguing that global crises arise primarily from structural inequality and political-economic arrangements rather than absolute physical scarcity.

AI4SG is generally referred to as an umbrella term for a sub-discipline of computing whose aim is to utilise AI to alleviate some of societies greatest challenges […]

While AI4SG projects propose AI as a solution for major societal problems like global health or climate change, they often ignore the fact that social problems are inherently economical, historical, political, cultural and therefore require many different types of interventions.

This historic convening brought together over 130 participants from 33 African countries, representing farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, women, youth, faith-based communities, scientists, policy makers, lawyers, consumers, Indigenous peoples, civil society organizations, and social movements.

[…]

Plenary discussions exposed how artificial intelligence and digital platforms replicate colonial patterns of extraction and surveillance.

Across these spaces, common themes emerged: the urgent need for collective control over data, genetic resources, and digital infrastructures.