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The Right Question
“I feel especially in the West, there is a lot more of like, ‘Oh, my God, what will happen because of this A.I.?’” Mr. Nadella said. “And it’s better to sort of really…
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ChatGPT: Friend or Foe?
ChatGPT has made waves over the last few weeks because it’s the most high-performing AI-powered chatbot yet created. Able to produce natural, human-sounding prose, it’s raised alarms in the academic world because students…
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Incrementalism
As regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and propoganda… What…
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The Collective
It is not a question of causing the human being to disappear, but of making him capitulate, of inducing him to accommodate himself to techniques and not to experience personal feelings and reactions.…
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Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel probing our ambivalent relationship with artificial intelligence reminded me of something a favorite college professor once said about Emily Dickinson’s poems: she places her subjects under a microscope and examines…
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“The Real Thing At Last”
“I think,” said Mark, “that James touched on the most important point when he said it would have its own legal staff and its own police. . . The real thing is that…
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Being Harmonized
A recent read I’ve neglected to review is this book about China’s surveillance system and its advancement of the totalitarian regime. The book details how the surveillance state has developed in China, how…
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Smarts, Big Tech, and Faustian bargains
Do digital tools make us smarter? It’s a question raised by some who study technology and its effects on cognition. In my freshman writing classes, we usually explore this topic through essays like…
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Good or bad? Time will tell.
This week, my daughter asked, “What would we have done during the shutdowns without technology? How would you still teach college? How would people work remotely? How would kids do school? How would…
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Outsourcing compassion
Last week I heard an article about Amazon’s recent tweaking of its A.I. “Alexa.” The changes Amazon has made are targeted specifically at young children, whose parents are being encouraged to place the…
