Dagstuhl Workshop: "Climate Change: What is Computing’s Responsibility?"

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This past week me and 25 other researchers (see image above) attended a Dagstuhl workshop on the topic "Climate Change: What is Computing’s Responsibility?" (see the invitation below). My first thought was to think about this in terms of 1) what is computing's responsibility as to causing climate change and 2) what is computing's responsibility as to solving climate change.

The venue, "Schloss Dagstuhl, the Leibniz Center for Informatics was originally founded in 1990 to provide a retreat for world class research and training in computer science", and what they do is to host week-long scientific workshops all year round. This was my third visit to Dagstuhl and the set-up is very much like that of the Lorentz Center in Leiden, the Netherlands. Both Dagstuhl and the Lorentz Center provide infrastructure and support to organise really nice scientific workshops, and both organise two parallell workshops each week most weeks of the year. While I have attended three in-person workshop at each of these two centers, I have been the organiser of two Lorentz workshops (including this workshop in 2018), but have myself never been part of organising a Dagstuhl workshop.

Dagstuhl itself is situated "in the middle of nowhere", and it's not very easy to get there. I travelled from Stockholm by train together with my colleague, professor of environmental strategies and futures studies Mattias Höjer, passing by Frankfurt and then heading south-west towards the border between Germany, France and Belgium. The great thing about finding yourself in the middle of nowhere is however that there is nothing to do and nowhere to go. Except get to know and talk to the other workshop participants at meals, as part of the workshop activities and in the evening (over a beer or a glass of wine).

The workshop was organised by Bran Knowles at Lancaster University and Vicki Hanson of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and I knew about a quarter of the participants well and had previously met another quarter either at LIMITS workshops or at ICT4S conferences. It was however very unfortunate that Bran could not attend in person, but instead participated remotely through Zoom. That didn't always work very well, because it's hard to remotely lead 25 people when you are the only person who's not in the room, so things were a bit confused at times. Fortunately the people attending were driven, motivated and interested in the topic - but it was still not always easy. It would probably have been a good idea for Bran to have asked someone on-site to help out with practical aspects of leading the workshop in advance (including simple things like smoothly dividing people into group and just making sure the program flowed). The very first night Lenneke Kuijer and me talked about physically reorganising the furniture and the seating arrangements in the room and it was a pity I had forgotten all about it the next day. 

Apart from my previous two Dagstuhl workshop, this was not a week-long event but rather a three-day "perspectives workshop", and it's apparently a requirement that the workshop report to Dagstuhl includes a manifesto. We worked concretely with the manifesto on the last day of the workshop, but we didn't finish it and I suppose the heaviest burden now lies on the organisers to get it together. My personal contribution was taking copious notes and pasting some of them into the document we used for drafting the manifesto. I had a very nice talk (break-out session) with Birgit Penzenstadler and Colin Venters on day two and it resulted in this short summary (input to the manifesto):

• This is the problem:

• Computing (including AI) increases the speed at which we pursue (or reach) (societal) goals

• If we are moving in an unsustainable direction, computing and AI will help us get there faster

• Assuming this makes sense, what should go into the manifesto?

• We should not focus on specific technologies (like AI), but rather on changing incentive structures away from an economic growth paradigm.

I would have thought that this would be more or less uncontroversial, but many interesting divisions appeared when we sat down and started to pen the actual manifesto on the third and last day. One division within our group mirrors something that has repeatedly appeared inside European Green (political) parties, namely a tension between "fundamentalists" and  "realists", where the former are principled and the latter are more pragmatic and want to compromise in order to gain influence here and now. So if we are writing a manifesto about what computing's responsibility is and what computing could do, should we then (gloves-off) "tell it as it is", or should we for strategic reasons avoid controversial position ("economic growth is problematic") and instead aim for the largest possible audience by using milder, less pointed formulations? Can the current system be reformed from the inside or are more fundamental changes necessary? And what about capitalism, does it automatically leads to economic growth, increased carbon emissions and climate change, or is capitalism just a "vehicle" that could be utilised for other purposes, e.g. to decrease carbon emissions and the risk of climate change? These were some of the discussions that surfaced on the third and last day, and I myself thought it was very refreshing to understand the difference in participants' worldviews after we all had mostly agreed (e.g. avoided controversy) for several days. 

Since Bran was not present, she initially suggested all breakout group conversation should be recorded through our phones and uploaded to a shared folder where she/we could listen to the recordings. That suggestion did not go down well as some participants doubted the integrity of shared online folders on services that are hosted by US tech giants. That quickly turned into a discussion about privacy, surveillance and the situation for US researchers who work on "controversial" topics like climate change. A highlight in that discussion was when Vlad Coroama stood up and said that "as the only person in this room who grew up in a dictatorship" [in Ceaușescu's Romania], the greatest problem is when people start to censor themselves". I thought it was, well, hilarious that having personal experiences of growing up in a dictatorship now has become a hard currency that garners attention and ensures that your words will met with respect.

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Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 25122

Climate Change: What is Computing’s Responsibility?

( Mar 16 – Mar 19, 2025 )

This Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop aims to provide a forum for world-leading computer scientists and expert consultants on environmental policy and sustainable transition to engage in a critical and urgent conversation about computing’s responsibilities in addressing climate change. The workshop will consider the positive and negative climate impacts of a range branches of computing, including (but not limited to): AI and Machine Learning; Software and Mechanical Engineering; Internet Architectures; Large-scale, Distributed, and Cloud-based systems; Environmental Data Science and Climate Modelling; ICT Environmental Assessment and Energy-Aware Computing; Smart Cities, Smart Grid, and Transition Engineering; Safety and Security; and Human-Computer Interaction and ICT for Sustainability.

Day 1: Tracking and reducing computing’s emissions. Attendees will deliberate on the scale of carbon reductions needed within the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) sector, discuss technical advancements that can be deployed to rapidly reduce emissions, and consider how to develop and manage climate change compliance processes in the face of methodological challenges in measuring ICT emissions.

Day 2: Maximizing the net positive impact of computing. Discussion will focus on the ways computing can be applied to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis, including the harnessing of digital solutions to enable emissions reductions across the wider economy, and how the societal benefits of computing (e.g. enabling of other Sustainable Development Goals) can be maximized while seriously constraining carbon emissions.

Day 3: Creating a manifesto. Each year at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (commonly known as COP) countries pledge nationally determined contributions in the fight against climate change; at this workshop we will answer the question, “What is computing’s pledge?” Together, we will produce a Dagstuhl Manifesto that outlines a strategic plan for computing to materially contribute to the meeting of climate targets and specifies mechanisms for tracking and incentivizing progress.

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Sustainability and AI - public conversation about "Dark Machines" with author Victor Galaz

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This week I moderated a talk about a just-out book on sustainability and AI, "Dark Machines: How Artificial Intelligence, Digitalization and Automation is Changing our Living Planet". This activity is part of the KTH-housed cross-disciplinary research centre Digital Futures' reoccurring book conversations where authors are invited to present and talk about their books. Dark Machines is published by Routledge (which unfortunately means that it's quite expensive) and the book's own homepage can be found here.

The author, Victor Galaz is a political scientist and a climate scientist at the Stockholm Resilience Center. What I appreciate about the book is that it's a sustainability-first book about AI, and not an AI-first Pollyannish book about how AI can solve all environmental problems (past, present and future*). Galaz' instead believes that calls such as "AI for Good", "AI for Climate" and "AI for the Planet" mostly represents a very shallow views of what AI could do (perhaps, maybe, if we all just came together) and of the likely effects of AI in relation to sustainability (e.g. bordering on greenwashing). Galaz' book instead starts off with the state of the planet (not good), the direction we are going in (it's getting worse year-on-year), what AI already is used for today, the impacts on the living planet (usually quite or very problematic) and what AI could do and sometimes actually does (hopeful - but not enough). 

The book runs through different aspects of AI (and digitalisation and automation), but the definition of "AI" is broad and fuzzy and I would personally not refer to it as "AI" but rather just as "computing (including AI)". So computing (now-with-more-AI) changes agriculture and land-use, how we monitor and measure this-and-that (in the often misguided hope that things will change for the better just because we have more precise data), algorithmic bias, cryptocurrencies and blockchain (""blockchainification" of carbon offsets [is] the combination of two bad ideas, merged into one terrible [idea]"), how capital and financial markets shape the planet, how (unintentionally inaccurate) misinformation and (deliberately false or misleading) disinformation increases, how data about emotions are collected and mined and how polarisation in society increases. And how we use computing to seek increased control, optimisation, efficiency, and productivity, how black box models makes just about everything less transparent and harder to understand (decreasing the chances of (democratic) control) and how rewards and risks are redistributed (leading to increased inequality). And much more that is troubling and problematic. 

The book has ten chapters and the second to last chapter discusses resistance while the last chapter outlines what "planetary responsible AI" could be. The remainder of the book is a litania of problems and troubles. The discussion we had at the event was for the most part gloomy because while there are some really nice examples of AI being used for beneficial purposes, there are many more examples of AI being used to further current (unsustainable) goals in society. 

We organised the 10th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability (ICT4S) in Stockholm in June last year. I reached out to Victor at the time to invite him as a keynote speaker with the intention that he would talk about his (what I thought was his) just-to-be-published book. The conference unfortunately didn't fit his schedule, so it was very nice to (finally) have the opportunity not just to hear him talk about the book but to also read it and have the privilege to also talk to and query the author. 

Here's the blurb from the book's back cover:

This book offers a critical primer on how Artificial Intelligence and digitalization are shaping our planet and the risks posed to society and environmental sustainability.

As the pressure of human activities accelerates on Earth, so too does the hope that digital and artificially intelligent technologies will be able to help us deal with dangerous climate and environmental change. Technology giants, international think-tanks and policy-makers are increasingly keen to advance agendas that contribute to “AI for Good” or “AI for the Planet." Dark Machines explores why it is naïve and dangerous to assume converging forces of a growing climate crisis and technological change will act synergistically to the benefit of people and the planet. It explores why AI and associated digital technologies may lead to accelerated discrimination, automated inequality, and augmented diffusion of misinformation, while simultaneously amplifying risks for people and the planet. We face a profound challenge. We can either allow AI accelerate the loss of resilience of people and our planet, or we can decide to act forcefully in ways that redirects its destructive direction.

This urgent book will be of interest to students and researchers with an interest in Artificial Intelligence, digitalization and automation, social and political dimensions of science and technology, and sustainability sciences.

* That's obviously a joke, because however powerful AI is, it could hardly solve any problems in the past...

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Isak Stoddard about living in perilious times (ph.d. thesis)

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I attended two related events this past week. The first was a lunch seminar by world renowned climate scientist Kevin Anderson and the second was Isak Stoddard's dissertation dinner & party. These two events are related because Kevin Anderson is a co-supervisor of Isak's.

Kevin Anderson passed KTH by on the way to Uppsala and gave a 90-minute lunch talk (abstract below) entitled "“Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”: from Paris to Sweden without the denial". He is Professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester but he is also affiliated with the Centre for Sustainability and the Environment (CEMUS) at Uppsala University. 

While he is a professor and well-known (in some circles) for his research, I believe he is mostly known for his very frank, in-your-face talks about where we are and what lies ahead of us climate-wise. He is also well-known for never flying and based on this text it seems he took that decision almost 20 years ago... As apart from most other scientists (not to mention politicians) he doesn't hold back and tells it like it is:

On YouTube you can find a talk (90 minutes) that he gave at Uppsala University last month (Feb 12), "The New Denialism: Climate Change - from the Paris Agreement to Sweden" and a quick glance and the slides in the talk (video) indicates that it's similar to the talk I attended.

When I heard Kevin's talk, I put two and two together and realised Kevin was on his way to Uppsala to attend Isak Stoddard dissertation the following day. Isak is an acquaintance and our paths have crossed a few times over the years. Isak presented his Ph.D. thesis, "Perilous times: Carbon budgets and the cosmopolitics of climate mitigation" Friday this past week (March 7).

I had been invited to the public defence and the subsequent dinner, but had not reacted quick enough and thus missed the deadline. After having listened to Kevin's lunch talk, I however felt that while I couldn't with short notice spend the whole day in Uppsala, I could at least ask Isak if it was possible to join the dinner - perhaps there was a last-minute cancellation? I sent a mail directly after the lunch talk and lo and behold, I got a quick answer that it was indeed possible to attend the dinner. When I left KTH that same evening, I told my colleague Elina I was going to Uppsala and was surprised to see also her and her husband Jonas at the dinner (she asked even later than I did). 

Isak (as well as Kevin) also has strong ties to Uppsala University's "Centre for Sustainability and the Environment" (CEMUS). CEMUS is a student-initiated, transdisciplinary centre that offers undergraduate and masters level sustainability courses and many of the guests at the dinner had been or were currently active at CEMUS or had been active there five or ten years ago. I don't have a connection to CEMUS but still know upwards to 10 or possibly 15% of the 100+ guests at the dinner and had a great time there!

It was hard to get a world in edgewise with Isak as many others wanted to talk to him, so I don't know what's next for him. I do however wish him the best and expect that our paths will continue to cross now and then also in the future...

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Kevin Anderson, “Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will”: from Paris to Sweden without the denial (lunch talk)

Abstract:

The saccharine headlines of recent COPs barely disguise the deliberate failure of national leaders, whether in politics, business or indeed journalism, to address the climate emergency. But peer a little deeper and the cossetted realm of academia is also revealed to be have been a crucial player in this endemic failure. From normalising deeply fraudulent technical futures to embedding neo-colonial norms in virtually all IPCC scenarios, our fingerprints are evident. Some of us have actively engaged in this systemic bias, whilst others have lent it legitimacy through our expedient silence. In 2025, wilful ignorance can no-longer be a defence.

Set against this damning indictment, Kevin Anderson will seek to lay bare the sheer quantitative scale of the gaping void between the rhetoric and the reality of our Paris Commitments. Unpicking the technical utopias and methodical avoidance of anything that would question existing power structures, Kevin will demonstrate that there are now no non-radical futures. The choice is between a profound but organised shake-up of structural and technical norms and societal values, or waiting a little longer for chaotic and violent social change.

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Isak Stoddard, "Perilous times: Carbon budgets and the cosmopolitics of climate mitigation" (ph.d. dissertation)

Abstract:

Increasingly emphatic warnings from scientists about the dire consequences of global climate change has contributed to the establishment of an international governance regime and a world-wide proliferation of policies and actions that in different ways attempt to mitigate the problem. However, the decades that have passed since the publication of the first IPCC report in 1990, have been beset by an inexorable rise in global greenhouse gas emissions, with more fossil carbon anthropogenically released into the atmosphere than previously throughout history. With the cumulative nature of emissions and rapidly dwindling size of global carbon budgets, achieving mitigation at rates concomitant with the Paris Agreement becomes increasingly urgent and challenging as time passes. This thesis explores the imaginaries, temporalities and practices involved in historical and ongoing efforts to mitigate climate change at global as well as national, regional and local levels in Sweden. The climate policy framework of Sweden is first analysed and found to fall far short of delivering on the temperature and equity commitments of the Paris Agreement. Factors contributing to the absence of a globally proportionate response are then reviewed, where a key impediment to mitigation is found to reside in various forms of power – from a dogmatic political-economic hegemony and influential vested interests to narrow techno-economic mindsets and ideologies of control. Attention is then shifted to the Swedish counties of Uppsala and Gotland, where the temporalities of urgency and acceleration accompanying emerging (net) zero carbon imaginaries are seen to have the paradoxical effect of raising fundamental and difficult questions for regional planning while also risking to undermine its capacity for envisioning alternative futures. Moving closer to the ground, a series of walking interviews reveals everyday possibilities for escaping ineffective and extractive responses to the climate crisis amongst practitioners involved in the ongoing urban development of Ulleråker, in the city of Uppsala. The findings of this thesis collectively suggest that our times are perilous in at least three ways: In the escalating effects of the climate crisis, in the responses conceived to address the problem, and in the forms of attention that the accompanying temporalities give rise to

Sociocracy

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I went to a two-hour Sociocracy workshop in October, and Sociocracy is as well all know 😀 a "peer governance system based on consent". Can't say I know too much about it, but I found it to be an interesting form of governance and decision-making somewhere in-between top-down hierarchies and flat organisations. 

While we enter discussions with a clear idea of "this is what I want", Sociocracy askes "what you are willing to..." - what you can work with and what you can live with?. That shift in perspective expands the area of possible consent and increases the chance that we can find ways of moving forward that all parties can live with - even if they don't love it. And there additionally needs to be consent before a decision is taken, and objections are taken seriously and seen as a gift. If you really really object to a decision, that means it needs to be further discussed and possibly revised/altered in ways that takes the objection into account. Here's an example of Sociocratic principles at work:

"I have five children. [...] If I ask them, "what do you want for lunch?", then I lost already. [...] Instead, I need to ask for ideas for lunch. Out of those ideas, I pick something and propose it. Let's say I want to propose burritos. The question I need to ask is not: Do you want burritos for lunch?". The question is: "Is there any reason not to have burritos for lunch?". That way, now the family member that has a reason not to eat burritos will be able to say so. But if one child really wanted noodles but is willing to go for burritos, we can still make a decisions. I've set the expectation to what people are willing to do, not what they want to do."

Ok, that's the short version and there's a lot more to it. And the Swedish Transition Network (Omställningsnätverket) had asked one of their partners, Holma Folkhögskola [Holma folk high school/adult education center], to organise a course in Sociocracy that was tailored to their needs - and I wanted in and tagged along. I went to Holma with the intention of learning more about Sociocracy (I in fact read a book just to prepare for the weekend), but the joke was on me as all the other 20 participants were there not just to learn about Sociocracy, but to also reshape the way the Swedish Transition Network itself functions, based on Sociocratic principles. So while I just wanted to lean back and learn, and had definitely not planned to take on any commitments (too busy), everyone else wanted action and were prepared to roll up their sleeves and find their place and their role in the new governance structure for the Swedish Transition Network. 

At one point early in the weekend there was a round, and people stated what they were ready and willing to contribute with. I wasn't prepared and didn't know what I was willing to do, but fortunately Sofie from Gothenburg (a new acquaintance, lots of bantering, front row, second from the left) said that me and her should work on setting up a "humor group". That sounded like a terrific idea and discussing and shaping what such a group could contribute to the larger movement became my personal entry point to the remainder of the weekend. And so for me personally, it turned out there are two roles that I'm willing to do for the Transition Network. 

Both of there roles support the Event "circle" (Sociocracy lingo for group), which is a sub-circle to the General circle. And the Event circle has sub-circles of its own of which the most important is the Annual Conference (that I want to in October and where I first learned about Sociocracy). So the "boring" role that I'm prepared to play is to help with the conference, and I'm especially interested in creating a structure (a memory) that can help transfer knowledge between conferences, since the annual conferences are organised by a new team in a different part of the country each year. The more "exciting" role is to help shape a sub-circle to the Event circle that I proposed should be called "The resource group". That is a very anonymous name (by design), and it doesn't say anything about what that group is and what it is supposed to do. I am however thinking of this group as a "traveling circus" or a "travelling theatre company" that will help liven up events by bringing fun to them. So the resource group could contain any and all of the following; a clown, a buffoon, a mime artist, a ventriloquist, a puppeteer, a jester, a juggler, a stand-up artist, improvisational theatre, and of course musicians. Four persons were willing to help out with different parts of what the Event circle plans to do, but I believe the resource group currently consists of only Sofie and me, although I have two named persons I would like to recruit (AA, a clown/actor and AL, a poet/actor/musician). 

There were a lot of creative suggestions proposed during the weekend and it could be that the newly formed Event group will plan and organise not just the annual conference, but also additional events (two persons in this group had in fact worked as event planners). 

Each group (circle) got a form to fill out and here's a subset of what I formulated for the "humor group":

• "Goal (and how does it relate to our vision, our mission and our principles?)": Work with humour, playfulness, events, embodied exercises, interventions and performances.
• "Domain (what do we make autonomous decisions about, when do we need to transfer things back to the General circle?)": Shape a new role for our group that will include making the annual conference more fun and alive.
• "Roles, policies (what roles, policies and routines does the circuit take care of?)": Develop (anti-) rites, rituals and ceremonies, support local organisations with structure and content, support the board with using the annual conference (and other events) "strategically". 
• "Influence (what do we need from other circles, what do other circles need from us?)" We drew a blank here and it's empty for now.

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Announcing a new strategic partnership with the Rite Agency

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Invitation to a dinner with "Friends of the Court Jester" (October 2024)

I've had an interest in the role of the court jester for years and invited others (researchers, artists, whistleblowers and more) with whom I have discussed this ("friends of the court jester") to a dinner in October last year. Someone gave me a tip to check out this artist, Lars Noväng, and I found his website "Frihetsförmedlingen" ("Swedish Public Freedom Service"), which is a hilarious upside-down inside-out version of "Arbetsförmedlingen" ("Swedish Public Employment Service", see image below). 

"The Swedish Public Freedom Service provides an interactive internet platform as well as temporary offices, where ritualistic and bureaucratic behavior in pursuit of freedom can be performed. 

In this way the Freedom Service offers Swedish citizens a useful alternative to the mandatory search for non-existent or imaginary jobs on today’s shrinking labour market they otherwise are required to perform.

Besides supplying and mediating freedom, the Freedom Service runs a R&D Program and also has an obligation to influence the public opinion. 

From 2019 the Swedish Public Freedom Service also has the mandate to oversee and control the level of freedom in Swedish companies and organisations, as well as in public places"

For an English-speaking audience, do check our this project/website, "The Farewell Bureau", where farewell undertakers "help individuals and organizations liberate themselves from codependency with dysfunctional cultural artifacts in society, like belief systems, mindsets and institutions:"

"A ceremonial last farewell of such obstacles is a first important step towards taking a more active role in the coming transition. So, when a person or organization has reached a decision to let go of something, Ars Moriendi can help arrange unique, dignified and memorable farewell ceremonies in order to facilitate the process. The Farewell bureau’s product portfolio also includes grief processing, consulting services on closure management, system and institution liquidation, and – when called upon – specialized palliative care for institutions."

So I invited Lars to join the dinner and he graciously accepted despite knowing basically nothing about who I am and what the dinner was about (he was in fact the only guest that I had not met beforehand). We didn't really have time to talk at the dinner and decided to meet up later (and this belatedly happened only a month ago) and have met twice more since then - including this past week. Lars and I have so many shared interests, but we also inhabit/play different roles in our daily lives (researcher vs artist) and at times also have different perspectives on the same phenomenon. Even when we both want to explore the same phenomenon, we might have very different start points and fall back on different methods.

Lars has however recently started a new project (together with fellow artist Johan Forsman), "Ritkontoret" (Rite Agency), with a focus on making institutionalized behaviors (that can be seen/framed as rites and rituals) visible, understand how they affect and limit us, develop ways of seeing the world from new perspectives, and explore other ways of living (by inventing new rites and rituals). The Rite Agency is an artistic initiative that examines how art can drive societal change through rites and rituals (both unveiling those that exist around us but that aren't recognised as such) and by inventing new rites and rituals that make us think and question that which is taken for granted.

So after a very stimulating meeting at a café a month ago, I got a lot of new ideas and sent over a list with half a dozen concrete suggestions for how we could cooperate. Since me and my colleague Elina now have a platform (a research group, SF Lab (homepage, blog that will migrate elsewhere soon), a master's programme and several different courses), we have several things we can bring to the table, including collaborating in some form around a course. We have just started to explore how we could cooperate, and the discussions themselves are very stimulating - so I'm personally totally content already as-is!

One possibility would be to recruit one or more students who would do their master's thesis with the Rite Agency as client a year from now (equivalent to how many KTH students have companies as clients for their master's theses). Exactly what such a thesis would investigate remains to be seen/specified (and it could be that we can't figure it out and nothing will come of it). But that's just one of several ideas and I'm pretty sure something will be realised this year. What's great with a thesis is that (from my perspective) the Rite Agency would be a client and a site where a student could write a very interesting thesis. The fact that a student would do a thesis with the Rite Agency and whatever comes out of it would be folded into their art project and be presented as "results", so it's a win-win for both us and them. 

So this blog post is basically just a teaser for thing to come - since we are currently exploring different ideas and trying to figure out if/how they could be realised and how each party could benefit from such a cooperation. The great thing here is that the Rite Agency (Lars and Johan) have funding from a call, "Creativity, fantasy and imagination", that allows them to (as far as I understand), do pretty much whatever they deem to be interesting to their project without having specified it in advance. This allows them a large degree of freedom to decide how and where to explore rites and rituals (for example at KTH and in cooperation with us). It also seems to be totally ok for them to take risks and to fail when they explore something - as long as they fail in interesting (unexpected, unpredictable) ways - and make something out of it. Like documenting the failure and tying the outcome back into their artistic work, or using failure as input to explore whatever it was that was revealed in the process - which then perhaps turns out not to have been a failure at all, but the only thing that could have happened... 

Lars often creates something that doesn't exist - except he pretends it does and then makes it happen (like creating the Swedish Public Freedom Service or like me announcing a new strategic partnership with the Rite Agency). When something that has been magicked-into-existence (for example an agency) meets, interacts or possibly collides with people, their ideas, their feelings and with various structures in society, the artistic explorations start. How do people react, what do they think and what do they make out of it? Instead of asking for permission or trying to get a permit, you just make it so and observes what happens (which bears similarities to a Research through Design approach). Or something like that - that's just my interpretation and I have surely misunderstood or misrepresented something since this all doesn't come to me intuitively because I might be too much of a researcher, craving more structure even when I think/fantasise/innovate. This is also why it's interesting to continue to work with and try to understand artistic practices in general and Lars' ideas and methods in particular. 

Dinner with "Friends of the Court Jester" (October last year)

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Monthly report for special freedom to start over 

("månadsredovisning för särskild nystartsfrihet")

Books I've read (Dec - mid-Feb)

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I read books. I exclusively spend the time on my daily commute reading books, and I on average read between two and three non-fiction books per month (my performance goal is to read 25 pages (or more) per weekday and another 25 pages per weekend, for a minimum of 150 pages per week). 

I usually cluster 3-5 books that touch on some specific topic into a "batch", because reading books that relate to a topic and to each other creates a "conversation" between the books I read and it enhances my experience and my learning. The topic of the batch of books I write about below is "collapse" (or the threat/spectre of societal collapse). 

I've in fact published more than 55 blog posts about "books I've read". They used to be a regular feature on the blog and the first such post was published in December 2010 and the latest concerned books I read during the first half of 2017 (but the blog post was published one year later, so I had a year-long backlog of writing about books that I had read). Each blog post always refers back to the previous such blog post so it should be possible to track them all down by following a daisy-chain that travels backwards in time.

Let's say I published all of these 55 blog posts between 2011-2017 (a 7-year long period) and that I published no such blog posts between 2018-2024 (again a 7-year long period). Let's further assume that I on average reported on reading four books in each blog post. That would mean that I read ≈ 220 books during a period of 7 years, or around (or possibly slightly more than) 30 books per year. It could also be that I have read upwards to another 200 books since 2018. I could probably track all or most of them down since I carefully note what day I started and what day I finished reading a book inside the book itself. I might do that - but I'm not going to write blog posts about all books that I have read during the last 7 years! I will however write about books that I read from now on, starting with these four books about "collapse":

Ugo Bardi's book "Before the Collapse: A guide to the other side of growth" (2020) treats a serious topic but does so with wit, wisdom and humor. The starting point of the book is the "Seneca curve" (or the "Seneca effect" or the "Seneca cliff"), i.e. the idea that growth is slow, but collapse is rapid :

    

     

Roman Philosopher Seneca stated that "It would be some consolation [...] if all things would perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid". So "collapse" is "a rapid, uncontrolled, unexpected, and ruinous decline of something that had been going well before" (p.x). Bardi's book is a contribution to the under-researched questions of how things fall apart (a relationship, a company, a nation or a civilisation), i.e. it's a contribution to the non-existent "science of collapse". Over time, most things fall apart and when it's time, one problem leads to another, many things gang up and go bad all at once and collapse ensues. But collapse does not always need to be something that is only bad:

"The basic idea of the Seneca strategy is that the attempts to stave off collapse tend to worsen it. [A] useful skill derived from the Seneca strategy is how collapse can be exploited to get rid of old and useless structures, and organisations. [...] You probably have in mind your government, but it is also possible to think of much smaller systems: plenty of people try to keep their marriage together beyond what's reasonable to do and in many cases divorce, the collapse of a marriage, is the best options. But a company may also become unfit to survive in the market, burdened by obsolete products, outdated strategy, and unmanaged organisation. Bankruptcy is the way we call collapse in this case and, again, it is a way to start again from scratch." (pp.xii-xiii).

The book is full of witty, clever ideas and formulations and it's a treat to read it! Instead of raving about the book, I'll just add a few more quotes from it. If these don't convince you to read the book, then nothing I say will:

"Compulsive gamblers face [a Seneca cliff that] may start from one of the windows of an upper floor of the casino building." 

"Typically, models telling people that they have to change their ways are the most likely to be disbelieved or ignored."

"Monetary insolvency is just a quantified version of breaking a promise."

"Fictionalized catastrophes are surely less threatening than those that are described as likely to happen for real. [...] it may be that the only way for our mind to cope with possible catastrophes to come is to see them as fairy tales."

"The reason why depletion [is] neglected in the debate is [...] the human tendency to discount the future, in other worlds to think that an egg today is better than a chicken in the future."

I thought I would like Jim Bendell's "Breaking together: A freedom-loving response to collapse" (2023) since I very much liked his previous (edited) book "Deep Adaptation: Navigating the Realities of Climate Chaos". But I didn't like it very much and it has something to do with the author's voice and his tone throughout the book. As apart of Bardi (above), Bendell takes himself very seriously and it at times feels like he is a zealot and that he believes he is the only person who knows the truth. 

That doesn't mean there aren't many things that are interesting in the book and the first half (chapters 1-7) discuss economic collapse, monetary collapse, energy collapse, biosphere collapse, climate collapse, food collapse and societal collapse. I found the chapter about food collapse particularly frightening with it's enumeration of six global trends that work in parallell, that strengthens each other and that spell bad news for humanity (all 8.2 billion of us); 1) we are hitting biophysical limits of food production, 2) we are poisoning or destroying the biosphere that agriculture depends on, 3) current food production relies on declining fossil fuels, 4) climate chaos is constraining food production, 5) food demand is growing rapidly (and can't easily be reduced) and 6) the industrial food system prioritises efficiency and profits over residence and equity. 

"Many people who have been working on sustainability topics have their income and self-respect enmeshed in the story that they are helping to change organsiations and societies for the better. The possibility that such efforts have failed is a challenge to their identity. [...] Desire to avoid difficult emotions explains why people don't want to accept that we are in an era of collapse. [...] as middle-class professionals we are statistically far more likely to be apologists for the established societal order than working classes or less educated persons" (pp.264-265).

This quote is also about Bendell himself and about his previous career - about a time when he believed that benevolent companies would save the world by adopting and working towards attaining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or some other such top-down framework. But the quote is also worrying because it implies that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". A lot of knowledge (and a pinch or two of wisdom) is good, but perhaps it's better to know nothing than to know some, but believe you know enough or a lot? This puts a lot of responsibility on me as a university teacher. Am I preaching false hope if I imply that we can fix problems facing humanity? And are my colleagues preaching false hope because they can't handle (their own) difficult emotions of fears for their own and their children's future?

I bought Thomas Homer-Dixon's "Commanding hope: The power we have to renew a world in peril" (2020) because I liked his previous book "The upside of down" (2006) very much. But then I for some reason put it aside and didn't read it for several years. 

Homer-Dixon is a very good writer (not all researchers are), and it was a pleasure to read his book as he weaves different stories together, including the story of Stephanie May, who campaigned against nuclear testing at the end of the 1950's and in the 1960's. She worked tirelessly against all odds because she was convinced she was doing the right thing for her country, her children and all children in the world. So the story of Stephanie May, and a central message of Homer-Dixon's book, is how to find / carve out / create a space that is both "feasible" and "enough" and to work towards what you believe is right even when success seems implausible. And we know we can change the world because it has been done before (lex Stephanie May):

"Instead of giving up on hope, or losing it, we need to find it again, reimagine it, and reinvigorate it as a potential source of strength [but] It should be honest, not delusional; passionate, not weak; astute, not naive, and brave, not timid. Most importantly, if we're going to avoid thet downward spiral of resignation and loss of agency, it must be powerful, not passive. It must give us a real sense of purpose for positive action" (p.60).

I in particular thought that Homer-Dixon's thinking about the connection between uncertainty and hope were surprising, counterintuitive and therefore refreshing:

"While uncertainty can quite reasonably provoke fear - fear of the unknown - it can also give us grounds for hope, because it creates a mental space in which we can imagine positive possibilities" (p.75).

If nothing is pre-determined and if there is uncertainty, then there is also hope - even when things look bleak! 

David Fleming's book "Surviving the future: Culture, carnival and capital in the aftermath of the market economy" (2016) is a curious choice of book, because I have no idea of why I bought it. I must have read about it and become impressed by it, but I have no recollection of where I read about it nor what impressed me. When I read the foreword, I learned that Fleming died in 2010 and that the book was edited and published posthumously. 

Despite the fact that I don't know why I bought it, it was an interesting read. It sings the praise of localism and it's thus not a coincidence that Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition Network, has written the foreword. From the back of the book:

"Surviving the future [...] lays out a powerfully different vision for a new economics in a post-growth world. The subtitle - Culture, carnival and capital in the aftermath of the market economy - hints at Fleming's vision. He believed that the market economy will not survive its inherent flaws beyond the early decades of this century and that its failure will bring great challenges, but he did not dwell on this: "We know what we need to do. We need to build the sequel, to draw on inspiration which has lain dormant, like the seed beneath the snow." 

Fleming also assumes that the end (collapse) is not very far away, although he refers to it as "descent", but he doesn't dwell on it because he is already thinking about what comes after. Since Fleming has such an alternative view of the world and of what will become of it, he arrives at and elaborates on many interesting but (again) counterintuitive conclusions of his, which could be disturbing to anyone who is steeped in the current social and economic system and who has problems imagining alternatives:

"The question to consider, therefore, is not whether the crash will happen, but how to develop the skills, the will and the resources necessary to recapture the initiative and build the resilient sequel to our present society. It will be the decentralised, low-impact human ecology which has always taken the human story forward from the closing down of civilisations: small-scale community, closed-loop systems, and a strong culture" (p.8). 

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On finding the balance between imparting despair and hope

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The results of "freak" flash floods in Valencia at the end of October last year.

All in all I'm very happy about my course DM2573 "Sustainability and Media Technology". It could equally well have been called "Sustainability and Computing", but since it's a compulsory course in the Media Technology engineering programme, it's has the name it has. It's also my main teaching commitment every year, and the number of students taking the course has risen over time; last year (Nov-Dec) 135 students took the course - up from 110 the year before. Also, the course has been taught every year since 2012. And while the course evolves and changes every year, it hasn't changed fast enough to keep up with the pace of change in the world and in the student population.

We have a concluding panel debate in the course every year where five invited guests discuss "Images of the future" (e.g. anything and everything sustainability). Some years ago a student asked a difficult question; "knowing what you know, how do you get up in the morning?" and one of the panelist answered:

”I have little hope we can fix the problems, but I still wake up every day and act as if we can change the world. And who knows, perhaps we really can change the world if enough people act this way?” 

I immedately noted down this quote and have it on a slide that I show the students every year. And I love the answer because it starts by establishing a low point ("there is no hope") but opens up to the possibility that there might, in fact, be hope ("perhaps we can change the world [if we work hard together]"). 

So when we started to give the course in 2012, we felt we needed to shake the students up. We were afraid there would be one or more climate deniers (or climate sceptics) in the classroom who would derail the course, and we didn't want to get embroiled in endless discussions about whether climate change was real, whether it was anthropogenic (man-made) or whether it was serious. So our strategy was to hit the students over the head with a flood of unassailable facts that would convince even the most hard-headed student that this was indeed real, that this was indeed serious and that sustainability (including climate change) is the major challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. And we succeeded, but perhaps too well. Perhaps you do need to hit rock bottom to really understand (and feel) that this is real, that this is serious and that this is scary - but you also need to see what your own role could be in making positive changes happen in the world. So lately I have come to believe that we have been successful in getting students to understand the seriousness of the situation, but that we have failed them but making despair convincing - without making hope practical. 

The world has changed and so have the students. While we have toned down the gloominess, the course still hasn't changed enough to meet current students where they are. We don’t really need to convince students anymore that climate change and climate-related environmental disasters are real and that they are serious. Every year there's one or two new disaster right before or during the course. This year it was the catastrophic flash floods in Valencia just as the course started (see image above) and the catastrophic fires in LA. just as the course winded down (see image below).

So if we don't need to convince students that "shit just got real", what then is our task? The scholar and public intellectual Raymond Williams has said that "It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must resume and change and extend our campaigns" (in his book "Resources of Hope" (1989)). My own take-away version of this is that “It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must… extend our [teaching in this course]”.

Humanity is in bad spot, we are surely in overshoot and there is a risk that as we wake up to "the century of declines", there will be much suffering in decades to come. But this still doesn't answer the crucial question that I face as a researcher and as an educator and teacher, e.g. “taking all of that into account, what do we do now?”.

So to me as a researcher and teacher who want to do my bit in the transition to a sustainable society, I think my teaching is a better bet in terms of "impact" than my research. I educate engineering students who will start their careers a few years down the road, and I can't think of a task that is more important than to make them care about sustainability - and for at least some of them to care enough to also want to work towards the transition to a sustainable society. And this course (with 135 students) is my single best bet for changing the world, So how do we maximise the chance that taking this course has Positive Effects in the world? More concretely, how should the course be remade to increase the chance that as many students as possible, after they have finished the course, will feel (realistic) hope and a will to act on this hope (rather than, say, despair and passivity)? And what then needs to change in the course to help facilitate such a shift?

This is the starting point of a remake of the course before the next course round starts in a little less than nine months from now. This coming week I will meet up with colleagues who led seminar groups in the course for a two-hour brainstorming session, and I've also invited other people who are familiar with the course - including students who just finished taking it. 

One of the starting points will be the seven questions we spent time discussing at the very last seminar in the course. Students in eight different seminar groups each wrote multiple post-it notes to answer the following questions: 

1) What have you learned in this course about sustainability?

2) What have you learned in this course about yourself?

3) What is the single most important lesson you take away from this course?

4) As the course winds down, what do you feel most optimistic about?

5) As the course winds down, what do you feel most pessimistic about

6) Looking back, what advice would you like to give your younger self two months ago?

7) Looking back, what advice would you like to give your younger self two or five years ago?

So we have collected several 100s of post-it notes that will serve as a starting point for our discussions, and while my colleagues (and students) will help kick this off (there will be ≈ 10 of us), the responsibility to follow through and work with the results, and later to implement changes in the course, falls on me (with input and help from my colleague Elina Eriksson). And I'm ready to take responsibility for this task and hope the changes will make a difference for hundreds of our students in years to come.

#[informative-hashtag], #[motivational-hashtag], #[humblebrag-hashtag]

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Leadership course from hell

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I read a (Swedish-language) essay/article almost two years ago (March 2023) about a "leadership course from hell". It referred to an experiment that was conducted 15 years ago when managers who applied to a leadership course were randomly divided into two different groups. One group attended a traditional leadership course, while the other group were exposed to strong aesthetic experiences that made demands on them and that were hard to understand and take in; texts that were shocking and that clashed with each other, musical performances that complemented or enhanced the texts that that stirred up strong feelings in the audience. The performances were followed by space for discussions between the participants, but with very little guidance and leadership. Some people were disgusted, others were angry and many were confused. The performances forced these managers (who were anonymous to each other) to confront difficult feelings in themselves, like what does it mean to be a leader and what does it mean to be a human being? What would I have done had I been in that situation (as, say, a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp - or one of the guards in that camp)? What guides me in my everyday life, and what is my purpose in life? 

As it turned out, the people who took the traditional leadership course had their pre-existing beliefs reinforced; felt selected and special and distanced themselves from the employees they were meant to lead. They in fact became worse leaders by disengaging and caring less for their employees compared to before they took the course, while those who took the alternate course and experienced the "Shibboleth" performances instead became better leaders. How do we know they became better or worse leaders? We know that because the medial researcher who led the experiment, Julia Romanowska, made before-and-after measurements of a hormone, DHEA-S, that protects people from stress. Her research established that stress levels of both leaders and their employees dropped when the leaders had taken the Shibboleth "leadership course from hell", while they instad rose among employees whose leaders had taken the traditional leadership course. 

All of this happened not because, but despite the participants own experiences of taking these two courses. Those who had taken the traditional leadership course believed they had become more self-confident, as well as humbler and better listeners, while the Shibboleth group became more self-critical, more aware of their responsibility and more unsure about their ability to live up to what their conscience demanded of them.

All of this was extremely intriguing and I therefore bought the book, "Schibbolet-effekten: Ledarskap, konsten och människans ansvar" (2021) ["The Shibboleth effect: Leadership, art and human responsibility"] and read it half a year ago. I had met Julia Romanowska a year earlier and I got in touch with her to invite her to give a guest talk at KTH during the autumn, but it didn't work out for various reasons, and not the least because she has become very busy as of lately (after her book was published). She did mention that she would give a Shibboleth course during the first half of 2024 and that it had become fully booked only two hours after she had announced it on LinkedIn. Fortunately there was a selection process based on a personal application letter, and I felt that I had a good opportunity to write a good letter after I had read her book (and worked with related leadership concepts through Art of Hosting). The course started this past week and I attend it together with a colleague of mine from KTH, Anders Rosén (who also incidentally is responsible for teaching the pedagogical course I started this past week - the topic of my previous blog post!). I have thus been to the first of six meet-ups during the spring and look forward to attend the remainder at the pace of about one per month. 

One difference between taking the course now (compared to the experiments she writes about in the book) is that people back then had no idea what they had signed up for. People were very confused and wondered when the course would start, who had put together this disconcerting performance and what the heck this performance was about? It is different now, I don't think it's possible to attend the course I'm taking without knowing pretty well what you have signed up for in advance. 

All in all, the first day was characterised by three main activities; a Shibboleth performance, repeated solo reflections/journaling, and whole-group discussions (sitting in a large circle). The performance we experienced led to wide-ranging discussions about good and evil, efficiency and dehumanisation, responsibility and moral preparedness, complexity and control, means and ends, perpetrators and victims, forgiveness and reconciliation, life and death, love and hate, friends and enemies, cooperation and competition, collaborators and objectors, secularisation and faith, facts and feelings, body and soul, right and wrong. I look forward to the next time we meet in the course!

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Challenge Driven Education

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Me and my colleague Elina Eriksson started a new course this week, "Teaching and Learning for Challenge Driven Education in a Global Context" (LH233V) - a pedagogical course for teachers that is given by a friend our ours, Anders Rosén. While the course is given by our university and a large majority of the participants are teachers at KTH, some come form other universities in the Stockholm area (e.g. Stockholm University and Karolinska Institute), but also from different universities in Africa, e.g. Strathmore University (Kenya), University of Eswatini (Eswatini - formerly known as Swaziland) and Botho University (Botswana).

"Challenge-driven" implies that students will work with real-world challenges rather than "toy problems" that are chosen just for them to learn something (but possibly with few real-world implications). The course stresses collaborative learning an co-creation and thus fits well with what we do in our new master's programme in Sustainable Digitalisation. 

We have in fact planned to give a larger (15 ECTS) challenge-driven project course in our programme during the third term and taking this pedagogical course is our way of learning more about challenge-driven education while simultaneously developing our course. Our course is called "Transformative Change in Complex Systems" (DM2803) and it will be given at 50% pace throughout this coming autumn term (August - December) and this is the short version of what students will do in our course:

"In this challenge driven project course, students will get the possibility to analyse and handle “wicked”, complex sustainability problems in collaboration with the surrounding society. The students learn to identify and analyse needs, challenges and goal conflicts and to design interventions that intend to achieve change. The projects will be based on sustainability-related problems that stakeholders in the surrounding society have formulated. In the course students also get to evaluate interventions, to ensure they favour the society in general, organisations, individuals, other species and whole ecosystems locally as well as globally, in the short and long term. The students will also be given tools to lead trans-disciplinary co-creative processes, where also transformative learning can be identified and developed."

So our project course exists "on paper", but we need to develop it and fill the DM2803 "container" with content - and that's the project we will work on during the spring as we take the KTH course for teachers. It's all very nifty.

But back to the pedagogical course we are taking, LH233V. That a course is "challenge-driven" means that it is far away from the traditional "conduit metaphor" where the job of the teacher is to "package" and "transmit" knowledge to the student. Challenge-driven courses instead start with a case - a complex real-world problem that is open-ended (has no one right solution), and project outcomes and learning outcomes are equally important, where "project outcomes" can lead to change in society and "learning outcomes" can lead to change in people. 

The course also emphasises complex, "wicked problems" and sustainability, both which fit us well very and where traditional engineering education instead usually only address complicated problems (and might in fact reduce complex problems into complicated problems to make them addressable (thereby missing out on the complexity and messiness of the real world at the risk of making the solution partial and irrelevant). 

Building on a paper by Sterling (2011), "Transformative Learning and Sustainability", there was an interesting image that stated that traditional (engineering) education usually addresses only 1st order change/learning, e.g. doing things better in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and optimisation. Addressing 2nd order change/learning also examines and changes norms and assumptions and 3rd order change/learning also has the potential to challenge and change values, beliefs and worldviews. Challenge-driven education thus has the potential to address the need for transformative systemic change in society. Discussing challenges of car society, 1st order solutions might emphasise driverless or electric cars to make travel more efficient and less polluting. 2nd order change might instead emphasise car manufacturers taking responsibility for the whole lifecycle of a car, alternatives to car-centric city planning and improved public transport while 3rd order (paradigm) change might questions assumptions and come up with suggestions such as prioritising self-powered vehicles (e.g. bicycles) or creating walkable cities that reduces the need for transports. 

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Notebook LM

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These podcasters aren’t real: Our AI experiment with Google’s Notebook LM

I think my colleague Björn Hedin told me about a new AI tool from Google, Notebook LM, sometime in (possibly the second half of) October. Someone had notified him about the tool and Björn had then created an audio file that summarised a phd thesis into a 30-minute long "podcast". We both tried Notebook LM some and thought it was extremely interesting; you can upload a pdf file of a scientific article to Notebook LM and it will generate a "podcast" (sound file/audio overview) where two podcasters who know each other well together walk you through the main results of the article and also, well, banter in such a way that the walk-through can become quite entertaining (but for some instead "too chatty"). And it only takes a few minutes for Notebook LM to generate such an podcast out of thin air. There are of course no real podcasters, rather "just" an AI that "has listened to" (been trained on data from) a zillion hours of TV, radio and podcast hosts who talk to each other. This very powerful tool can however basically create a "podcast" out of any file so that you can listen to an audio summary that highlights the main points of an article, a bunch of articles, a powerpoint presentation or a whole phd thesis:

"The idea behind the “Audio Overviews” feature is simple: take a bunch of documents, websites, YouTube videos, etc, and generate a podcast out of them."

Not long thereafter (on November 1), a student sent me a mail and asked me to make my lecture slides available before the lecture or at least directly after the lecture so that he could use Notebook LM to create a podcast that he could listen to on his way to the lecture or at least on his way back home. It just so happened that Björn would give a guest lecture in my course just 10 days later and part of the literature for that lecture was a systematic literature review that Björn, me and our colleagues Cecilia Katzeff and Elina Eriksson have written:

Hedin, B., Katzeff, C., Eriksson, E., Pargman, D. (2019). "A Systematic Review of Digital Behaviour Change Interventions for More Sustainable Food Consumption". Sustainability 2019, Vol. 11, Page 2638, 11(9), 2638 (available online)

As is the case for all systematic literature reviews, this review is quite boring but very useful, so we decided to do an experiment. We created a 13 minutes long Notebook LM podcast of the paper (available here) and made it available together with the article itself. We unfortunately didn't think about following it up by for example asking the 135 students who took the course if they had listened to the podcast and/or read the article and what they thought about them. 

What did happen though was that I immediately followed up the lecture with a message to all the students in the course where I encouraged them to get in touch with me if they were interested in writing a Notebook LM-related thesis during the spring term. There was a lot of interest and now, 10 weeks later, it is clear that I will lead a supervision group where eight students will work in pairs (at a 50% pace) throughout the spring term and write their bachelor's theses about Notebook LM. I'm really excited about this and think the results could be very interesting. I will also continue to do my own experiments with Notebook LM (as will Björn) independently of what "my" thesis students will do during the spring. 

One of the issues we are interested in is the accuracy of the podcasts that Notebook LM generates and we will therefore reach out to researchers in different disciplines with an offer, so if you happen to be a researcher and you are interested in being served with podcasts of scientific articles (we are primarily thinking about podcasts that are based on your own texts!), then by all means feel free to reach out to me by mail.

It might sound as if I'm super positive about Notebook LM, but that is however not  the case. I'm quite worried about vario us possible or plausible negative effects of using the tool. While it's extremely powerful, it's not clear what the effects of using it will be, and that might then be part of what we want to explore during the spring. My uneasiness with the tool is not shared by my colleague Björn who has more charitable view of human beings (including of students) than I have. I worry about whether students will stop reading articles – since it's much easier to listen to a 10-15 minutes long podcast than to struggle with a text that it might one or two hours to read. When then might be the consequences of that be? Well, see for example my text about Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains" that I wrote about (on this blog) 14 years ago:

"When deep reading gives way to shallow reading - involving skimming texts, following links and skitting from text to text and channel to channel - Carr also worries about deep thinking giving way to shallow thinking. [...] In Carr's words we become "pancake people" who know little about much."

Perhaps I worry too much, but then again perhaps I don't worry enough...? The only thing I'm sure of at the moment is that I will have a better grounding for being worried/not being worried four or five months from now... and I will certainly get back to this subject later this spring when these investigations are finished!

Here a few links to resources about Notebook LM (from Wikipedia):

• Latent Space (65 minutes long podcast), "How NotebookLM Was Made" (October 25, 2024)
• Levy, Steven, "Google’s NotebookLM Aims to Be the Ultimate Writing Assistant" (Wired, Dec 8, 2023)
• Wang, Biao (product manager at Google Labs), "NotebookLM now lets you listen to a conversation about your sources" (Sept 11, 2024)
• Boran, Marie, "Five Productivity Hacks Using Google's New AI Podcast Creator" (Newsweek, Sept 23, 2024)
• Orland, Kyle, "Fake AI “podcasters” are reviewing my book and it’s freaking me out" (Ars Technica, Sept 23, 2024)

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