Imko Meyenburg

You cannot go from the universal possibility of illusion to the possibility of universal illusion!

This is wild. 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon. They were actually building one of the largest real-world visual datasets in AI history. Niantic just disclosed that photos and AR scans collected through Pokémon Go have produced a dataset of over 30 billion real-world images. The company is now using that data to power visual navigation AI for delivery robots. Players didn't just walk around with their phones. They scanned landmarks, storefronts, parks, and sidewalks from every angle, at every time of day, in lighting and weather conditions that staged photography would never capture. They documented the physical world at a scale no mapping company with a fleet of vehicles could have replicated on the same timeline or budget. Niantic collected this systematically, data point by data point, across eight years, while users thought the only thing at stake was catching a rare Charizard. The most valuable AI training datasets in the world aren't being assembled in data centers. They're being built by people who have no idea they're building them.

Full article: Neoliberalism and Right-Wing Populism–A Love Story tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Latest paper is out! tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Full article: From a realist epistemology to ecosocialism: an interview with Ted Benton, Part 2 tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Once again the Econ Nobel is announced just in time for the week in @devikadutt & my module where we study the dev of capitalism. And once again it confirms to students that prevailing understandings of growth in Econ are thoroughly Eurocentric (esp Mokyr in most blatant way)!

Philosopher John Searle has died. dailynous.com/2025/09/28/joh…

Join us for a discussion in Johannesburg next week :) zoom.us/meeting/regist…

What makes Israel powerful is not its military. It’s the story that surrounds it. A story in which all its violence is either retaliation or prevention. A story in which Palestinians only appear as threats, not people. A story in which every home is a hiding place, every child is a shield, and every funeral is a security concern. Without that story, the weapons are just weapons. But with it, they become absolution. And that is why empire fights so hard to keep the story alive. Because without it, the truth is unbearable.

Highly interesting interview in the Journal of Critical Realism, worth a read/listen: The road to Social Ecological Economics: an interview with Clive Spash, part 1 doi.org/10.1080/147674…

Important interview on the AI fascism of the Silicon Valley tech bros: Cadwalladr - Broligarchs, AI, and a Techno-Authoritarian Surveill... youtu.be/vG7CvbccdVM?si… via @YouTube

Part of a report by Alex Rossi on the ethnic cleansing of the occupied West Bank.

Book Review: Handbook of Teaching Ethics to Economists: A Plurality of Perspectives, Edited by Ioana Negru, Craig Duckworth, and Imko Meyenburg independent.org/tir/2024-25-wi…

Doctoring a journal article and inserting fake data (confirmed by journal editor) to be used for and cited in an undergraduate dissertation is still going an extra mile, isn't it?

A fully-funded 3-year PhD scholarship is available at the Doctorate in Urban and Regional Development (@PoliTOnews and @unito). The scholarship is devoted to the analysis of the territorial dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian question. Info: lessisless.it/wp-content/upl…

“We’re killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.” “The IDF really is fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza’.”

"For those who recognise the 'beauty' of mathematics, especially when it helps make sense of the delightful chaos of US trade tariffs. After all, nothing says 'global strategy' like a few well-placed formulas to navigate the madness."

US chose fair way to calculate the reciprocal Tariffs. I think this formulae does not take care of the Barriers/subsidies and some currency manipulations of some countries. US should increase tariffs, the current caps as of April2nd are generous and kind. @POTUS @howardlutnick

"Social positioning, which you defend so strenuously does not take into the emergent properties of people working in groups, which is one of the strong points of collective intentionality theory and an important background behind the metaphor of collective (or corporate) mind."

If you know someone who knows someone who knows someone!

IWD at the @BristolUniEcon @BristolUni