Philosophy

BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS podcast, Ep10: “Nosedive” with John Danaher

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Black Mirror, Black Mirror Reflections, Emergent Tech, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values 0 Comments

  For episode 10, I am joined by Dr. John Danaher to talk about social credit systems, the ubiquity of ranking metrics, whether or not its possible to go “off the grid,” and “Nosedive” (Season 3, Episode 1 of Black Mirror), which first premiered in 2016. Listen/Download BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS podcast episodes  Subscribe to BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS…

Read More

Hotel Bar Sessions podcast: A brief history

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Hotel Bar Sessions, Philosophy, podcast, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

I can’t be sure who’s still regularly checking in on this blog, but those of you who are have surely noticed that I’ve shifted my energies from blogging to podcasting over the last year. Beginning in November 2020, I did a 22-episode run of my first podcast BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, in which I interviewed philosophers,…

Read More

BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, Ep1: “15 Million Merits” with Shannon Mussett

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Black Mirror, Black Mirror Reflections, Emergent Tech, Ethics, Philosophy, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values, Television 0 Comments

  I’m sooooo excited to announce the release of our first episode of BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS podcast! As you may have heard– from my endless self-promoting on FB and Twitter– this podcast will be structured as a series of conversations between myself and some very smart people as we talk/think through the technology, philosophy, morality,…

Read More

Black Mirror Reflections podcast

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Black Mirror, Black Mirror Reflections, BMR podcast, Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Pop Culture/Film/Literature, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values 0 Comments

  I’m in the process of recording the first few episodes of a (limited series) podcast entitled Black Mirror Reflections, which will be released next week. I’ve written a lot about Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror on this blog over the years, I regularly teach a course entitled “Technology and Human Values,” and I incorporate Black Mirror episodes in several…

Read More

A Conversation with Your Past Self

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson coronavirus, Online Learning, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

This semester, I’m giving my students the option to submit a video “Conversation with My Past Self” in lieu of taking the Final Exam. I was inspired by this video that I saw on Julie Nolke’s YouTube channel, in which she sits down at the breakfast table and chats with the January 2020 version of herself….

Read More

What If You Were Gerald McGrew?: A “Rebuild the Internet” Thought Experiment

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Anonymity, Big Data, Ethics, Internet, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Privacy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values 0 Comments

You may remember the story by Dr. Seuss (né, Theodore Seuss Geisel) from 1950 entitled If I Ran the Zoo, in which the pint-sized protagonist, Gerald McGrew, imagines the amazing creation he could bring about if he were allowed to run the zoo. If I Ran the Zoo is not only a great story about the never-before-seen exotic animals…

Read More

Why You Should Care That Artificial Intelligence Can Lie (Part 2)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Emergent Tech, Ethics, Philosophy, Posthuman, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values 0 Comments

If you haven’t already, please read Part 1 of “Why You Should Care That Artificial Intelligence Can Lie” before continuing, because I’m picking up in this post where I left off in the last one. Again, the concern here is whether or not robots (AI systems) can lie. As I demonstrated in Part 1, there…

Read More

Why You Should Care That Artificial Intelligence Can Lie (Part 1)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Emergent Tech, Ethics, Philosophy, Posthuman, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology, Technology and Human Values 0 Comments

Many people, myself included, are willing to affirm the near-future possibility of artificial general intelligence (AGI), or machines capable of performing all of the cognitive functions normally associated with human minds. The most important of these capabilities, not yet achieved by our extant “narrow” AI, is consciousness (sometimes, problematically, called “self-awareness”): an imprecise, indefinite, and…

Read More

What To Assign If You Want To Teach The Future (Redux)

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Emergent Tech, Open Source Pedagogy, Philosophy, Public Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching, Technology, Technology and Human Values 0 Comments

ICYMI, I posted the first iteration of “What To Assign If You Want To Teach The Future” last year at the conclusion of my advanced seminar called “Technology and Human Values.” I’m now teaching that course every semester and, because both emerging technology and the scholarship about it is being produced at a mind-boggling pace,…

Read More

“Even This Small Dream Feels Impossible”: Comradeship in the Face of the Posthuman

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Marx, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Technology and Human Values 0 Comments

I recently finished reading the excellent new book by Jodi Dean (Political Science, Hobart and William Smith College) entitled Comrade: An Essay on Belonging. There are many reasons to recommend Dean’s all-too-brief, but brilliantly executed, text: its surgeon-like evisceration of the ideological cult of “allyship,” its elaboration of the truly liberatory promise of the “Communist Horizon” (which Dean…

Read More