If humanism was born with the alphabet in a literate environment and was reborn with the printing press, what becomes of it when digital technology becomes the dominant symbolic technology?
Intelligence Rising
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is expected to be one of the most transformative technologies in human history.
Anthropomorphism Is Breaking Our Ability to Judge AI
Tech Policy Press fellow James Ball asks, how should we interact with a technology designed to ‘speak’ with us on what appear to be human terms?
AI as Social Technology
Our debates about ‘AI’ grow out of 1990s science fiction. Back then, Vinge (1993) wrote essays and novels urging us to face up to the oncoming “Singularity”: a moment of rapid change that would fundamentally transform the human condition. On that day, AI would rapidly evolve from merely human-level intelligence, what some now call ‘artificial general intelligence’ (AGI), into something super-intelligent with its own interests and goals. Humanity would then either be casually eliminated by out-of-control machines, or humans would become as gods, with super-human servitors at our command.
The Thoughts The Civilized Keep
The hype around a new AI language generator reveals the sterility of mainstream thinking on AI today — and indeed on how we think about thinking itself.
The Consumer AI Revolution Won’t Be Technical. It’ll Be Emotional.
In technology, the obvious revolutions often come last.
Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion
For decades, the artificial intelligence (AI) “singularity” has been heralded as a single, titanic mind bootstrapping itself to godlike intelligence, consolidating all cognition into a cold silicon point. But this vision is almost certainly wrong in its most fundamental assumption. If AI development follows the path of previous major evolutionary transitions or “intelligence explosions,” our current step-change in computational intelligence will be plural, social, and deeply entangled with its forebears (us!).
Care at the Edge of Automation – Topos Institute
Technologies don’t just solve problems, they change us. We invent technologies, and they invent us in turn, shaping our lives and worlds. This is the phenomenon that Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, in Understanding Computers and Cognition (1986), called “ontological design.” It matters now more than ever—along with a second lesson they saw clearly. Technological research is always guided (and sometimes misguided) by deep ontological assumptions about, e.g., the nature of cognition, agency, and communication. If we are to create technologies that truly serve human flourishing and care, we must bring these hidden assumptions into the open and question them at their roots.
AI as Social Technology: Astor Lecture by Professor Henry Farrell
ETCH
We believe technology should serve humanity and that human creativity is essential and irreplaceable. We support the ethical development and deployment of AI by funding protective technologies and translating research into real-world tools for creative communities.
AI Slop and the End of Knowledge
As an early fan of the internet, I was amazed that all the knowledge of the world was becoming available to everyone, everywhere, all the time. But things have changed.
Knowing less about AI makes people more open to having it in their lives – new research
People with less AI literacy often see the technology as ‘magical’ and awe-inspiring.
Knowing less about AI makes people more open to having it in their lives – new research
People with less AI literacy often see the technology as ‘magical’ and awe-inspiring.
On working machines
In part one, on thinking machines, I explored two facets of the philosophy of artificial intelligence: “intelligence”, and consciousness. That left an important topic to consider for this post: the...
“The internet represents a closing of the parenthesis and a return to older models of understanding. Human consciousness in the digital age, which de-emphasizes the categorization that marked the age of print, makes us think in a way that is reminiscent of a medieval peasant.”
The Gutenberg Parenthesis
web.mit.eduread the article making this argument and it just reinforced the 3d printing analogy. the industry hype with AI is 100x larger, but the pattern was a similar "this is going to change humanity" to "this is going to revolutionize specific industries" to "this will be a fun hobby for eccentrics"
Adam Conover
I’m sorry but “everyone is going to use AI to code their own apps” sounds like “everyone is going to learn HTML and code their own websites.“ like … have you met people? no they’re not
