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Consciousness, Creativity, and Understanding Are not Obstacles to Machine Intelligence forthcoming in Synthese
Helsingin Sanomat recently interviewed me about AI, and we ended up talking about what AI teaches us about human intelligence.
Some of the reasoning behind those quotes can be found here, and a recently accepted research article (in English) here.
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Emergence of Computational Social Science published in Quantitative Science Studies
I happened to check the latest issue of Quantitative Science Studies and was happy to see that our paper The emergence of computational social science: Intellectual integration or persistent fragmentation? has been published. We (Juho Pääkkönen, Matti Nelimarkka, and I) had been working on this project for several years, on and off, so great to see it’s out there, finally. And it’s open access
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Diverse intelligences, alien intelligences
Last Wednesday (2026-05-06) I gave a short presentation at DIVSOL, the Diversity in Society and Life research community at the University of Helsinki. In the talk I explain how the research I’ve done over the past decade or so relates to the general theme of diversity in science and society.
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Objectivity is misunderstood in new academic recruitment policies
In a short article recently published in Tietessä Tapahtuu, a science-policy journal, Jaakko Kuorikoski and I argue that two policies recently introduced in Finnish higher education compromise academic autonomy.
These policies outsource researcher evaluation to extra-academic agents, and result in absurd demands on academic review panels. If implemented, they can lead to significant harm to the quality of Finnish research and self-regulation of the academic community.
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Interviewed by The Reasoner
Lorenzo Casini from The Reasoner recently interviewed Dunja Seselja, Matteo Michelini and me on agent-based modeling in the philosophy of science and social epistemology. Dunja has organized this amazing series of workshops called Simulations of Scientific Inquiry, and Lorenzo joined us as one of the keynote speakers at the latest workshop.
Here’s the link to the interview.
“If I had to pick one hypothesis to be tested in a real-world setting, I’d go with my work on bias and laziness” - says Matteo. Better find out what he’s talking about!
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Perspective on diversity in Mustread
My short perspective piece on the value of diversity and DEI policies was just published in Mustread. This one is in Finnish.
A manuscript version here
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Opinion. Inheritance tax debate needs attention on values (HS)
A short opinion piece in Helsingin Sanomat on inheritance tax, with Säde Hormio
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Opinion. Public authorities should leave X (SK)
My opinion piece “Public authorities should leave X” published in Suomen Kuvalehti.
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Unpopular ideas on AI and epistemic humility
In this preprint Renne Pesonen and I argue that often arguments against machine intelligence are actually motivated by intuitions against machine agency.
In our view, the striking thing about LLMs is that they are an existence proof of structurally simple (but large!) systems that can perform many of the tasks we think require intelligence. The fact that they might do those things in a “wrong”, non-human, way is beside the point: Something we thought could only be brought about by the (so far) unexplained powers of the human mind is now done by a shallow system. This should give us pause, some epistemic humility and antidote to human cognitive exceptionalism.
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Why we all should care about the Fediverse
(This post started out as a fediverse reading list on 2024-09-30. It’s still an unfinished notebook where I try to figure out why I think fediverse matters)
I’ve become increasingly interested in the fediverse. Thinking in terms of protocols instead of privately owned platforms could give us ways to address some of the epistemic challenges associated with the new AI-structured information landscape. My plan is to write something on this later on, but I’ll start by gradually compiling a reading list on both technical and more conceptual thinking on the fediverse. I’ve been asking people for recommendations on what to read.
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