A collection of 22 posts
Philosopher and programmer Sean Welsh talks with Zoe Booth about AI, colonial history, and why scepticism is the best guide through both technology and politics.
The disillusion produced by GPT-5 is not a technical hiccup, it’s a philosophical wake-up call.
The discipline of English literature seems unlikely to survive the coming technological tsunami—and maybe it doesn’t deserve to. And I say this as a professor of English, who believes in the power of the written word.
Automation, artificial intelligence, and robotics are set to redefine the relationship between labour, capital, and production.
Virtual friends are already good enough to engage us and satisfy some of our appetites. They are going to get better, spread into more corners of our lives, and settle in.
AI catastrophe is easy to imagine, but a lot has to go consistently and infallibly wrong for the doom theory to pan out.
Technology steers my life along tracks chosen for my digital double, not for me. But this proxy personalisation wouldn’t work at all if I didn’t play my part.
We hear much talk of “aligning AI with human values” but relatively little delineation of what these values are.
This cock-up was not caused by a bug that went unnoticed; it was deliberately engineered.
Human beings need meaning, and a life in which all one’s needs were met by external agents would fail to provide it.
There is a new contender for the most effective weapon in the propaganda wars: photorealistic, generative AI art.
On the 85th anniversary of his death, a look back at the legacy of Nikolai Kondratiev and its implications for the coming age of GenAI.
We must free our artificial descendants to adapt to their new worlds and choose what they will become.
There are valid concerns and there are unfounded fears. Let us separate the two.
Chat knows more, gizzards are more complex, and you’re more intelligent.