Tag: speech acts
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Asilomar 1975 and 2025: Speech acts and the performance of responsibility
On 1 August 2026 Yonatan Chemla and Christopher A. Voigt published a report in Trends in Biotechnology, entitled “Responsible biotechnology: An analysis of the Asilomar 2025 entreaties”. This caught my attention, because, just over ten years ago, I wrote a blog post about the first Asilomar conference held in 1975 entitled ‘Ta(l)king responsibility’. And, of…
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How to do things with prompts: Magic words, speech acts and AI
Looking at what’s going on in AI sometimes makes me feel like the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, When he first visited the Trobriand Islands of then British New Guinea about a century ago, he became fascinated by the magic words that the islanders used and the actions they were believed to perform. Visiting the land of…
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Science, politics and certainty
I have recently begun to think about what it might mean to give scientific advice (or science-based advice or evidence-based advice or, even, expert advice), a topic that I have not thought about before. I know that there is a lot of literature on that topic and that many people have written about it, but…