Category: Culture

  • Why You Should Read “Chokepoint Capitalism”

    A new book explains how we got to our age of giant culture companies shaking down artists, why it matters to the rest of us, and what we can do about it. It baffles me that Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s book Chokepoint Capitalism isn’t on top of The New York Times bestseller list. It’s an important book…

  • The Start of the English Major

    In the A.I. revolution, figuring out the contours of our human intelligence has never been more important. Who is best equipped to do this work? I give keynote addresses all over the planet about digital transformation and sharpest-edged technology trends. One of my themes is that anything that can be digital will be digital. The counterintuitive corollary to this is that…

  • Retro Futures: AI and Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

    Older sci fi can help us see the difference between where we are as a culture and where we thought we’d be. A look back at Isaac Asimov’s 1940s robot stories can help us make sense of AI today. Some science fiction is a potpourri of lasers and explosions and aliens popping out, but the better sort…

  • Microsoft’s New A.I.-Powered Bing and Shakespeare

    Pundits panicked last week when oddball chats with the new Bing pushed back the frontiers of weirdness, but were those conversations a fair test in the first place? Last week, columnists and analysts took to their fainting couches (limply dragging their laptops with them) and described surreal and disturbing conversations with Microsoft’s new chat-driven Bing…

  • Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories

    What makes people believe nonsense for which there is no evidence? As I first wrote a year ago, you can see the elements of persuasion in this simple quadrant: Mostly, people decide with their hearts and then justify with their heads. They’re also more keen to avoid loss than to pursue gain. Knowing where your argument…

  • Retro Futures: “Looker” (1981), Looking Back, Looking Forward

    42 years ago, a murder mystery predicted digital twins and deep fakes: what did this howlingly bad movie get right and wrong? Writing science fiction is a what if? exercise that tells us a lot about the moment when the writer first posed the question. Looking at where those predictions went awry can help us to understand…

  • Retro futures and how they can help us  to see what’s next (from 2018)

    Science fiction ranging from Disneyland’s Tomorrowland to Star Wars and Star Trek and beyond contains lessons for how we got here and where we’re going. [Note: this piece originally ran on the Center’s website of February 14, 2018, but I strangely neglected to cross-post it here at the time. I have updated the now-defunct links…

  • Retro Futures, ChatGPT, & More

     In this short post, I dig into why a podcast about a teacher using (rather than banning) OpenAI’s ChatGPT program seemed eerily familiar… If you have a stack of dishes to do or face a 30 minute drive, then don’t miss the January 13th episode of Hard Fork a podcast from The New York Times…

  • Artisanal Crap

    As generative AI makes first-pass creation faster and easier, an unintended consequence is that humans may become less able to make great things. Let me start by stipulating that generative AI (ChatGPT, DALL-E) will change how we do what we do, taking the heavy lifting off much human endeavor. This will be true whether it’s…

  • My 2023 Prediction… or Prayer

    Many thinkers end each year with a cluster of predictions for the next year. I have just one—and it’s more of a prayer than a prediction—about trust. The pressing question of our age isn’t new. The Marx Brothers asked it in Duck Soup (1933): “who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” In a recent Los Angeles…