Each week the college hosts a community dinner called Ration Club. It's open to anyone who'd like to find out more about the college and its work. To find out more or if you'd like to attend, please register.

The Autonomy Institute’s CADA event series continues with us welcoming our Research Affiliate, James Muldoon, to talk us through his latest book Love Machines.

Friends. Lovers. Therapists. ‘Deathbots’. Artificial intelligence is now fulfilling new roles for millions of us every single day. How are these new ‘relationships’ changing how we view technology – and each other?

Beyond those who are using AI chatbots for administrative tasks, some people are now preparing to adopt children with their AI partners; others are reaching out to companies offering services to ‘resurrect’ deceased loved ones; others still look to bots to find treatment for their mental health issues.

In Love Machines, James Muldoon guides through these new forms of love, intimacy and connection, drawing on compelling interviews with users, developers and chatbots themselves. Along the way, he sheds light on the social conditions which have led to the exponential rise of the use of AI companions, and the unregulated corporations behind these technologies seeking to profit from users.

Dr. James Muldoon is a sociologist whose work explores the human side of artificial intelligence and other technologies. His new book, Love Machines, investigates how people form relationships with AI — as friends, intimate partners, therapists and even with digital versions of deceased loved ones.

He is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and an Affiliated Fellow at Yale Law School.

His broader research reveals the hidden human labour and global supply chains that make artificial intelligence possible, and how digital work is transforming sectors from ride-hailing and food delivery to childcare and domestic work.

Please join us for our 10th event - Demo Night edition.

​This is an unofficial, community organized event from Hacker News readers for Hacker News readers.

​Come along and meet new people from a variety of backgrounds, and engage in the vibrant community of Hacker News readers from London and the surrounding area!

​7:00 PM - 7:30 PM Demos (2 minutes + 1 minute questions each)

​Please consider to demo even if what you’re building isn’t 100% finished yet. You can demo both tech and non tech products (like a community etc.)

​To demo, fill out the form during signup or click the ‘Contact Host’ button below.

​Please contact the organizer (Stefan) if you have any other feedback / questions.

​Welcome back for the 21st Feeling of Computing London!! yay

We had a little summer holiday, but now let’s get together again. Let’s get inspired and figure out how to make the computer feel so cute 💞

​come along, we’ll share some demos, works in progress, research, ideas, dash water and yard sale pizza. 🍕

schedule

​18:00: arrive, say howdy, get drinks, hang out
​18:30: first round of speakers
​19:30: we’ll take a break, eat a little pizza, have a little chitchat 🍕🍕🍕
​20:00: a second round of speakers
​20:30: onwards: more drinks, ask speakers questions, hang out
21:30: pub

​we’ll wrap up by 9:30pm and maybe continue the chitter-chatter at the pub :))

​want to do a demo? Submit a little demo at feelingof.london/demo and maybe share a thing with us that you did on the computer :))

​✨ SUPPORT THESE EVENTS! ✨

​we run this community event without corporate sponsorship - if you would like to help support it, you can put some money in the kitty! 💛🩷 thank you so much, you’re a wee dote.

​if you’re new to FoC, you can learn more about the history and ideas on the website and podcast.

​london has a housing crisis, the data to understand it, and argue for fixing it already exists

​house london! is a one-day data sprint bringing together data scientists, urban planners, and policy thinkers to do one thing. take london’s planning and housing data, and tell the most compelling and well-evidenced story you can with it

​no toy problems. ​real datasets, real inquiry and real answers. we’re shaping policy briefs, dashboards and models that could actually shape how london gets built. cash prizes to the best projects, as voted by your fellow hackers

What is Cognitive Security

​Cognitive Security or CogSec is an emerging interdisciplinary field studying mental self-defense against mind manipulation, social engineering and persuasion techniques.

Cognitive security can be thought of as the opposite of mind manipulation. Mind manipulation seeks to bypass a person’s critical thinking and influence a person’s behaviour or beliefs via psychological vulnerabilities. Cognitive Security aims to protect our mental autonomy in forming beliefs and making decisions as well as understand ways in which human minds are vulnerable in order to build resilience against various forms of manipulation and persuasion. 

​Cognitive Security as a field is certainly concerned with “conventional” bad actors such as charismatic individuals, private corporations, public organisations and governments manipulating cognition — be it intentionally or unintentionally. But the overall scope is more broad: it also aims to protect individual minds against hostile memes (self-replicating units of cultural information), hostile egregores (distributed thought entities), emergent social media dynamics and hypothetical future threats like superpersuasive AI.

​There is also US-based group focused on CogSec, you can read their definition on their website.

​Meetup Structure

​The meetup will start with an in-person 45-min talk on “Psychedelics — Opening the Mind or Expanding the Attack Surface?” by Sasha Putilin (the meetup host & organiser), writer of the blog Psychotechnology.

Psychedelics can open the mind and make it more plastic. But the flip side of this is making the mind more vulnerable to external influence — for better or worse. This talk will discuss models of psychedelic actions in the brains: ReBUS (relaxed beliefs), neural annealing, ego dissolution, no-self, ontological shifts, iterating your ”epistemic aesthetic”, vasocomputation.

​Psychedelics (and meditation) are the closest thing we have to the root access to our own mind. The talk will also examine how can this “root access” be used by malicious actors. When we are freed from rigid beliefs, in what ways does this make us vulnerable to new ones?

​The frame will generally be pro-psychedelic and equip you with mental models that would help you understand how mind updates itself on psychedelics. But we will also examine case studies of psychedelic brainwashing and psychedelics use in various cults.

​Some relevant posts from my blog:

• Neural Annealing: Directing Psychedelic Trips Towards Healing
• DIY Psychological Parts-Work: A Hacker’s Guide to IFS and Entactogens
• Near-Instantly Aborting the Worst Pain Imaginable with Psychedelics
• On Trying Two Dozen Different Psychedelics
• ​Meditation as Wakeful Relaxation: Unclenching Smooth Muscle

​Unconference

​​The talk will be followed by unconference, a participant-driven conference with write-in schedule on the wall. Anyone who wants to initiate a discussion on a topic can claim a time and a space. We had several unconferences in the last few months at Newspeak House, so might’ve been to one already — this one will have a similar format.

​​That said, you can also simply come and hang out with people — unconference is there to give some structure and help like-minded people find each other.

​Schedule

​7:00 PM Doors open
7:30 PM Psychedelics — Opening the Mind or Expanding the Attack Surface? (Sasha Putilin)
8:30 PM Break: discussion and socialising, proposing unconference topics
9:00 PM Unconference until late

​Potential Discussion Topics

​You are very much welcome to propose your own discussion topics not listed here. These topics are provided for reference.

• What counts as manipulation? How is it different from normal attempts to influence minds? How can we best defend against it? Why defend against it at all?
• Group Dynamics & Cognitive Security. How group psychology affects individual thinking? Collective defense against manipulation
• Psychedelics. Nowadays they are often used as therapeutic tools that help people overcome emotional challenges and gain mental flexibility, but in the past CIA was attempting to use them for mind control (Project MKUltra). What do psychedelics say about human mind’s ability to process information? How psychedelics help or hurt personal epistemology?
• Future Challenges. Potential impacts of advanced AI on human cognition. Preparing for increased sophistication in persuasion technology.
• Memes & Thought Patterns. Identifying and analyzing harmful thought patterns. How ideas spread and self-replicate.
• Social media’s impact on cognitive autonomy. Information overload & building healthy information consumption habits
• Your personal stories of getting manipulated and resisting manipulation. What did you learn about it?

​​​​​Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

Join us for our bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.

​​​​​Snacks and drinks are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop. You can also participate remotely via zoom link.

​​​​​All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left.

​Following a successful initial meeting there seems to be a great need to come together on this area of massive importance. So we are holding a second larger get together. Please share the details with people and networks that may be interested. Towards the end of the evening we will talk about the various pathways that are now getting to create a new mass movement around these themes.

​So what is going on?

​The age of secular materialism is condemning our living planet to death, and the Left is failing to define a vision of humanity that reclaims the spirit of life and the future. The deafening silence of liberalism and the transparent spectre of “the woke” are accomplices to techno-fascism’s rise as we hurtle towards extinction.

​What will it take for us to reclaim our care for this world? For each other? To draw a line in the sand against the same stale ideologies that have bought us to this point of global suicide, and to work together towards something rooted in our love for life?

​Our age can be defined by a war of the ‘human’ vs the ‘anti-human’. This war has various fronts - the battle over AI, the battle against big tech’s erosion of democracy, and the battle over the destruction of the biosphere. The world is dying, and core to it all is political corruption married to extreme concentrations of wealth. It is a system that holds infinite growth at all cost to be sacred, and the human to be profane.

​This event is not about rehashing some secular reformist left “concern”, or getting lost in an endless post-modernist sludge of constipated critique. It is about exploding into a new passionate love for the human - in all our fullness and glory. It seeks to wage an attack on the dead ideological flatlands of ‘technology as god, instrumentalism as god, and power as god’. It seeks instead to build a new reenchanted way of being.

​This evening’s event consists of 3 provocations on what it means to be human. This is followed by responses, before splitting into break-out groups and discussing among ourselves, then feedback. This will be followed by networking and discussion.

​And as mentioned - things do not end there. This event is bought to you by a coalition of groups explicitly working for revolutionary change in the face of extinction. We will take feedback on new concrete ideas on how we resist the end times, imagine a future worth living for, and provide pathways to collective action.

​​​​​Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

Join us for our bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.

​​​​​Snacks and drinks are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop. You can also participate remotely via zoom link.

​​​​​All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left.

​​​​​Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

Join us for our bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.

​​​​​Snacks and drinks are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop. You can also participate remotely via zoom link.

​​​​​All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left.

Ben Whitelaw, founder and writer of Everything in Moderation and Georgia Iacovou, writer of Horrific/Terrific, are teaming up again for an evening event on November 5th.

​The United Kingdom has decided to follow Australia in imposing a kid-focused social media ban. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

​There’s no doubt protecting children online has become a political hot potato, and a central concern for parents and policymakers, alike.

​But does removing children from the likes of TikTok and Instagram lead to harm reduction and the creation of safe online spaces? And how will companies and regulators tackle such a complex digital policy topic at a time of heightened domestic and international political uncertainty?

​The event will bring together leading voices, on both sides of the argument, for a frank and honest conversation about children’s online safety and what will likely come next as the UK moves ahead with its social media ban.

​The event will also provide an informal opportunity to catch up with others from the UK’s tech policy community over a drink or two!

​Come for the online safety chat, and stay for the free drinks.

​TIMINGS:

​18:30 – 19:00: Doors open; grab a drink, chat, find a seat
​19:00 – 19:45: Intros, followed by lightning talks
​19:45 – 20:30: Q&A
​20:30 – 22:00: Networking — drinks and conversation to continue until close

​​​​​Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

Join us for our bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.

​​​​​Snacks and drinks are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop. You can also participate remotely via zoom link.

​​​​​All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left.

​​​​​Campaign Lab is a community of politically-minded progressive data scientists, researchers and activists who are working together to build new election tools and change the way we analyse and understand political election campaigning.

Join us for our bi-weekly Campaign Lab Hack Night - a regular session to work on your tech side projects to help the progressive left campaign more effectively. You can either bring your own project or help out on one of our ongoing ones.

​​​​​Snacks and drinks are provided, all you need is to bring yourself and a laptop. You can also participate remotely via zoom link.

​​​​​All technologists, activists, organisers and campaigners are welcome. We also welcome any new people who are interested in politics, technology and evidence based campaign innovation on the left.