I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
Mark Bernstein
That seems an arbitrary ruling that’s bound to have deleterious effects.
First, Moore’s Law means that 5-year-old phone will be dreadfully obsolete. If carriers need to engineer phones and networks in order to support 3 generations of Moore’s Law, then you’ll always be well behind the state of the art.
Second, cell phones aren’t major appliances. You carry them around. You drop them. You CAN build them to last, or you can build them to be light, or you can build them to be inexpensive. Choose two: you can’t have all three.
Thomas
You would expect something you paid 200-500 US$ for to last more than two years?
I know we live in a use and throw society but this is certainly an environmentally unfriendly policy that it should be a good thing to slow down.
I just read about how mobile phones now are a major risk to the environment because they are not disposed of in a manner that recycles and takes care of the dangerous substances in the phone. I would say that anything that makes phones last longer and makes phonemakers more responsible are a good thing.
Jill
I sort of agree, Mark, that phones are not much like fridges in that you do carry them around, but whether they’re obsolete or not entirely depends on what you want to use it for – if you simply want to make calls and send SMSes a five year old phone is absolutely fine – and I certainly want to use my phone for more than two years.
On the other hand, I would assume this also should mean that cameras and ipods and so on would be expected to last for more than two years too?
Martin
In general I think that it’s just silly that objects aren’t built to last. When I
lived in the US when I was 14, we bought this can opener. It was big, cost almost nothing, and made out of plastic and it broke after two weeks (as did everything we bought at K-Mart). My parents have had another can opener for the past forty years (and I actually think they inherited it. ). It’s a slab of metal with a sort of knife blade attached. It requires precisely the same amount of force as any other kind, and opens cans faster, most of the time. And it lasts for forty years. Why is this model not the leading model? Because it is fairly inexpensive, and you never have to buy one again.
Personally, I’d pay more for the model that lasts forever.
I know you can’t make technology last that long, but I get upset every time my stuff breaks after three years, and everyone says that I should have expected it. I really shouldn’t. People shouldn’t need to upgrade every 2 years, if nothing else then because it’s unenviromental, and Moore’s law will just have to deal with it. Unless we can find some way of having stable, solid casings for technology, and then changing the contents for it every now and then. Gibson, as always, had a thing about this in Idoru. That’s one of the reasons I like the iPod, by the way.
But I still have the distinct feeling that’s not going to last more than another year (it’s third).
Martin
I meant *information* technology.