Hello. Welcome to AI Skeptics Reading Group.

Now that we've finished The AI Con, our next book will be Resisting AI by Dan McQuillan. We'll start January 12, so you'll have about a month to acquire the book.

The publisher, Bristol University Press, is a good option (but bookshop.org is also a good aggregator of lots of independent bookstores).

It'll take a bit of time for everyone to acquire the book and stuff, so let's spend a few weeks getting ourselves lined up to start in a few weeks. In the meantime, let's read a few essays and other shorter pieces, and talk about whatever we've read from week to week.

You might think of this as something like an intersession period with a couple of loosely connected readings (and a more casual vibe).

Readings for this week

Organizers at the University of Michigan have published a petition calling on the university to stop their datacenter proposal in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratories, and end all collaborations with the weapons research lab. The petition has amassed more than 600 signatures.

If you're affiliated with the University of Michigan (ie student, staff, faculty, or alumnus), please consider signing the petition.

On Thursday, let's talk about the petition and about some of the articles they link to in the footnotes. Specifically, I'm looking at these:

• 404media article about the movement against the datacenter
• this op-ed by Nathan Kim in The Michigan Daily
• Feel free to poke around in the footnotes of the petition text and read whatever articles you find yourself interested in

There are various ways to participate:

• this newsletter: obviously you'll get emails if you subscribe. I usually send emails on Mondays and Thursdays.
• video chats: on Thursdays at 8pm ET at https://al2.in/ReadingGroupRoom
• signal group chat for people who would like to chat about the content from this week's readings over text, or who can't participate in video chats. You can join the signal chat here.
• social media: I'm on twitter/x, bluesky, mastodon, etc... and I'll post about reading group stuff sometimes.

Okay, that's all for now; hope to chat on signal, or see you on Thursday.

(PS: if you've read, watched, or listened to something that you think would be good to share, please feel free to suggest it for one of these weeks.)