Sci-fi author/tech journalist Cory Doctorow on his new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.
Automate the C-Suite - The Ideas Letter
Weatherby argues that Benanav’s and Morozov’s essays on AI and the left miss a deeper reality: Today’s AI is not a neutral tool operating within capitalism but the materialization of…
"I just find AI to be creatively soulless": Casey Hudson on the controversial tech and Star Wars: Fate Of The Old Republic
"I’m just really unimpressed with it."
Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on Making Art with AI and What the Discourse Is Missing
The artists talk process, slop, and why optimism and pessimism don’t quite cover it.
AI Safety Is a Narrative Problem · Special Issue 5: Grappling With the Generative AI Revolution
This op-ed explores power and narrative dynamics around AI. Drawing on pop-culture references, the professional experiences of the author and examples from 2023’s “Great AI Safety Hype Roadshow,” this piece draws on the literary criticism technique of practical criticism to consider how speeches and announcements from both Silicon Valley executives and research scientists to interrogate the media-friendly nature of p(doom) discourse—which focuses on the existential risks of AI (PauseAI, 2023)—and its likely consequences. The complexities of AI and its numerous social impacts can be difficult for even the most expert analyst to unpack. In spite of this, the potential of “existential threats” has successfully cut through to become a mainstay of mainstream media coverage over the last year. This piece will make the case that this is an effective narrative conceit that has achieved a number of ends that traditional science communication tends to find difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Firstly, it is easy to understand. Simplification of this nature—that removes jargon and complexity and focuses on a single outcome—is much easier to fit on a TV rolling news ticker or on the cover of a tabloid newspaper than more well-balanced, representative opinions. Secondly, it inherits prior assumptions from well-known dramatic forms. P(doom) plays to stories familiar from Greek tragedy through to Marvel movies, in which lone male heroes battle ineluctable forces. Thirdly, it is imbued with urgency and so becomes difficult to ignore.
On AI and building your own GIS software
Of the thousands of essays over the past two years surrounding AI and its implications are some very thought provoking ones with enormous implications for GIS. Some of the essays are around the the…
People & Technology
To understand AI’s effect on moral character, ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah goes back to John Stuart Mill, and the idea that people are shaped by their choices.
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
Thomas Kuhn Foundation | Science Intelligence for the New World
The world's first science intelligence engine capable of monitoring scientific progress in real time
Something Big Is Happening
A personal note for non-tech friends and family on what AI is starting to change.
Dario Amodei, hype, AI safety, and the explosion of vibe-coded AI disasters
What the AI cheerleaders don’t tell you
More Than a Tool
What We Learned from a Year of Conversations About AI
AI is a software un-crisis
I haven't asked her, but I bet Margaret Hamilton feels right at home bossing Claude around.
After the feed with Eli Pariser, Ben Smith, and Jasmine Sun
Literature fans should welcome AI as a fellow wordsmith | Aeon Essays
Strong resistance to AI among writers is understandable. But it obscures what we share with the machines: language itself
When AI builds itself
Our progress toward recursive self-improvement, and its implications.
</> htmx ~ Yes, and...
In this essay, Carson Gross discusses his advice to young people interested in computer science worried about the future given the advancements in AI.