[NOTE: This is the next installment in my series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] Back in 2013, when the second season of Black Mirror was released, I was only just beginning to expand what was, at the time, a somewhat niche-market interest in the tech phenomenon…
Read More[This is the next installment in my ongoing series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] [Note from Dr. J: What follows is a guest post from Shannon M. Mussett, a brilliant philosopher and dear friend with whom I frequently disagree about almost all things technological. When I posted my…
Read MoreThere isn’t a University-wide Honor Code at my current institution, as there was at my previous one, and I realized the first semester after I moved that it was something I missed. So, I wrote one myself which I have students read and sign in the first week of classes. For what it’s worth, I…
Read MoreIn 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…
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