For 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 MoreI only just recently realized that I’ll be completing my 10th year teaching in higher education at the end of this semester (not counting my time teaching or TA’ing in grad school). Whoa. In many ways, it feels like the last decade has flown by. There are days when I look out upon students’ faces…
Read MoreFor the past two months, students at Christian Brothers University have been working in small groups on the Technology and Human Values Project, which requires them to “devise a merely-possible technological solution to a real-world social, political, or moral problem.” Yesterday, five different classes chose the top two projects in their section to represent them this…
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 MoreThere’s an old anecdote about boiling frogs that is often employed by philosophers to explain the sorites paradox. If you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, the story goes, it will immediately sense the heat and the danger, jump out of the pot, and be spared its life. But if you put…
Read MoreWomen’s voices, ideas, engagements, and critiques are constantly being erased and/or appropriated– in academia, on the internet, at workplaces of every ilk– sometimes through slick and malicious moves, but much more often as a consequence of careless inattention. Also, water is wet. I was just recently “disappeared” in an essay by my friend Joshua Miller…
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…
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