Category: Culture
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…