Particularly with the advent of the handheld device, digital games now seem a ubiquitous part of our culture ...
Tag: Technology
Ted Chiang: Realist of a Larger Reality
What is science fiction for? A good friend says that in imagining other worlds, science fiction helps us understand our own. Such work addresses scientific ...
Disrupting the “Startup Hustle”: An Interview with Margaret O’Mara
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Jeff Bezos ...
Understanding Race with AI
Racial categories are, by definition, unequal categories. They reflect not universal truths but historical processes that have linked racial status to ...
Disrupting the “Startup Hustle”: An Interview with Margaret O’Mara
Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, John Doerr, Jeff Bezos ...
Designing AI with Justice
I will discuss three concepts in this talk: first, the idea of design justice; second, how people are already resisting oppressive AI; and third, the ten principles of design justice ...
Can Fair Use Make for Fairer AI?
Artificial intelligence has a copyright problem, and this problem is deeply related to questions of ethics and justice. Increasingly, AI is adopted by our banks ...
Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech, and Book Tattoos
Readers today believe that they are living through unprecedented changes in how ...
Gig Authoritarians
In 2015, Stephen Colbert asked cofounder and then CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick how the company’s heavy investment in driverless car technology squared with its purported “commitment” to its “driver ...
Idleness as Flourishing
It is hard work to write a book, so there is unavoidable irony in fashioning a volume on the value of being idle. There is a paradox, too: to praise idleness is to suggest that there is some point to ...
Counter-histories of the Internet
What could the internet have been? We’ve grown so used to our digital networks that they can seem like a force of nature, with laws as immutable as the laws of physics ...
A History of Reading: Alan Marshall and Helen Keller
On May 9, 1933, the day before the Nazis burned her book as part of their action ...
Building Utopia in Space
Utopianism is having a moment. Everything from the box office success of big-budget science fiction films like Interstellar and The Martian to the groundswell of support for the Green New Deal ...
Ted Chiang: Realist of a Larger Reality
What is science fiction for? A good friend says that in imagining other worlds, science fiction helps us understand our own. Such work addresses scientific ...
Authorship After AI
Authorship attribution is helpful if you suspect fraud: for instance, if you believe that Shakespeare wasn’t educated enough to write the plays, or that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was really ...
AI: Machines or Magic?
AI has always only partially been about the actual future of probable developments and base-rate outcomes; it has also been singularly productive of philosophical speculation, fantasy, and arguments about ourselves and the future ...
Machine Learning Is a Co-opting Machine
We are using human activity as an example from which to learn, and that becomes the basis upon which we then develop automated solutions to all sorts of ...
Letting Go of Technochauvinism
In my talk for the Co-Opting AI series, I spoke about my book, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, which looks ...
Co-Opting AI
Today, almost 70 years after Alan Turing famously asked, “Can machines think?,” what we call “artificial intelligence,” or AI, has seemingly come to penetrate our everyday life. It is in our phones ...
Global Cities and Their Discontents: Saskia Sassen and Teresa Caldeira in Conversation
In a moment in which the populist right wing is ascendant globally, cities can serve as beacons of hope ...
