In my experience, of the people who have actually watched Black Mirror, there are two types: those who absolutely LOVE it, and those who never got past the pig episode. To be fair to the second group, “the pig episode” (aka, “The National Anthem”) is the very first episode of the very first season and it packs…
Read MoreThis past weekend, at the Society for Existentialism and Phenomenology conference, I heard a really fascinating panel dedicated to “The Promises of Polytheism” and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Now, as a rule, I’m not all that interested in theism(s) of the sort that most people would recognize, but I…
Read MoreFor many years now, the term “artificial intelligence” has sat uncomfortably with me. What we call “artificial intelligence” today refers to any number of operations, performed by machines, that are normally attributed to human minds.. These operations are many and varied– calculating, planning, problem-solving, learning, natural language processing, reasoning, et al– and we generally collect…
Read MoreDid the image above give you a little bit of a dystopic shiver? It should. This Thursday, December 14, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai plans to roll back the Obama-era Title II regulations governing net neutrality. We can’t let that happen. You’ve no doubt heard the words “net neutrality” a lot in recent months (including on…
Read MoreIt seems like everyone who is talking about net neutrality today worries that we’re not talking enough about net neutrality. They’re right. So, allow me to add mine to the choir of voices warning about Federal Communications Commission Chairman (and former Verizon lawyer) Ajit Pai‘s plan to dismantle the free and open flow of digital information…
Read MoreIn the first chapter of James Barrat‘s forebodingly entitled Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, he imagines what might happen once we cross the threshold from garden-variety artificial intelligences like we have today (i.e., self-driving cars, speech-recognition software, chess- and Go-playing machines) to artificial general intelligence (AGI), where machines could…
Read Moreby Edward Kazarian and Leigh M. Johnson A little over two years ago, more than 600 philosophers petitioned the American Philosophical Association to “produce a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic discipline of Philosophy.” The immediate motivation for the petition was several high-profile cases of sexual misconduct by philosophers, which…
Read MoreEarlier this week, I finished reading the recent Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation from Pope Francis entitled Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”). Subsequently, on various news outlets and social media, I have seen a number of so-called “summaries” of Amoria Laetitia that can at best be described as grossly inadequate and ungenerous readings of it and, at worst, as…
Read MoreThe photo to your left is of a sock-monkey, hung by a noose from one of the windows on the campus of Rhodes College this week. It should go without saying, I hope, that not only is the sock-monkey itself a manifestly racist symbol (echoing the colonialist project of comparing blacks to apes in order to justify their…
Read MoreI’ll just assume that many non-Catholics, like myself, have absolutely no idea what authority Pope Francis’ Amoris Laetitia exerts (or exhorts) as a “Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation.” So, first, a primer on Papal texts. An apostolic exhortation is but one of many different types of communications from the Pope to the community of clerics and laypersons that constitute…
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