Category: AI

  • Do We Already Think AIs Are Conscious?

    When an AI Agent wrote a hit piece about a human, the press paid attention. But they didn’t look at the user comments. Here’s what they missed. When it comes to AI, my writerly beat is how human behavior changes in the face of AI. While I am interested in existential questions around AI, I’m…

  • Interpersonalization

    Does the marketing dream of AI-generated ads for every person make sense? Digital advertising uses all the data it has about you (which is a lot) to draw conclusions about the things you want and then place ads about those things in front of you. My friend (and media deep thinker) Jim Meskauskas describes the worst-case scenario…

  • Thought Flavors

    Different tools can unleash different kinds of thinking, including fountain pens (a recent interest). Lately, I’ve gotten into fountain pens. A couple years back, my friend Rob gave me a nice Pilot. Then, after they went to Paris on a long-delayed mother/daughter trip, Kathi and Helena brought back a Waterman for me. I had an…

  • Will Teach for Food: a Mini Memoir

    Today’s job market for recent college grads eerily resembles the academic job market in the 1990s: what are the lessons? The great graduate job drought, a dejecting article by Anjli Raval from the Financial Times ($) arrested my attention this week. Recent college graduates face long and difficult job searches. In the U.K., there are 140 applicants…

  • Leaps of Faith (but not that kind)

    How can we escape closed-loop thinking? (Hint: it’s not logic.) La Profesora turned me onto a recent episode of Your Undivided Attention, a podcast by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of The Center for Humane Technology. In “What Would It Take to Actually Trust Each Other? The Game Theory Dilemma,” Harris and Raskin talk with Professor…

  • The AI Lies We Tell Ourselves

    We have to get real about when human skills are better than AI… and if anybody cares. I’m reluctant to loan out nonfiction books because I fill my books with marginalia arguments with authors. I worry that if people read these marked up books they’ll think I’ve slipped a cog. The same worry overtakes me…

  • Not-Safe-For-Work AI Deepfake Review

    I look at fake Pixar previews, allegedly “banned” dirty song recordings, and a disturbingly-convincing Star Trek blooper. How long can reality last?  Trigger Warning (yes, I said it): Humor is subjective and always at least a bit mean. Malice, as Lady Sneerwell says in Sheridan’s School for Scandal, is “the barb that makes wit stick.”* Also, anytime…

  • Am I Becoming an iPhone Recluse?

    I started experiencing profound relief every night when I powered down my smartphone. Why is that? Overture: What follows is an atypical piece from me. It’s a lightly-edited journal entry that explores territory adjacent to “My Quest to be Whelmed” from a month ago.  Soundtrack: I’ve never suggested music to have playing when reading one…

  • Off the Grid: Is it Possible?

    Until recently, evading some forms of digital surveillance was as easy as leaving your phone at home. That’s no longer the case. Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called The Ride about a CEO who needed to get closer to one of her board members, and the elaborate…

  • Retro Futures and Who Counts as Human

    What lessons does a 1985 Isaac Asimov novel have to teach us about AI and algorithmic bias today?  After months of failed attempts and carting the book around the planet, I finished reading Yuval Noah Harari’s magnificent and challenging Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. (Don’t take the word…