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.
Is AI the greatest art heist in history?
New technologies of reproduction are plundering the art world – and getting away with it
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.
The Future of AI Should Serve People, Not Platforms - The Liquid Frontier
AI has begun to reshape every part of our digital experience. I keep coming back to Kranzberg’s first law of technology: “Technology is neither good nor bad;…
Will AI spark a scientific renaissance — or a diffuse monoculture?
Artificial intelligence’s ability to enrich science will depend not only on model capability, but also on whether researchers, reviewers and funders reward originality over speed.
Artificial intelligence and future of capitalism from a Marxist, and a neoclassical, point of view
What would be the likely effects of massive introduction of artificial intelligence in the economy, from the Marxist point of view?
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!).
AI Science Fiction Versus Reality
A Collectivist, Economic Vision for AI
Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word “intelligence” is being used as a North Star for the development of this technology, with human cognition viewed as a baseline. This view neglects the fact that humans are social animals and that much of our intelligence is social and cultural in origin. Moreover, failing to properly situate aspects of intelligence at the social level contributes to the treatment of the societal consequences of technology as an afterthought. The path forward is not merely more data and compute, and not merely more attention paid to cognitive or symbolic representations, but a thorough blending of economic and social concepts with computational and inferential concepts at the level of algorithm design. , The recent focus of AI has been on the exploitation of massive data to mimic and augment human cognitive capabilities. A complementary focus is provided by the social and economic aspects of intelligence.
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
AI as Social Technology: Astor Lecture by Professor Henry Farrell