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 MoreFull disclosure: The title of this post is clickbait. I haven’t actually invited students to flip me the bird this semester. What I have done, however, is invite students to give me some kind of silent and subtle indication– we agreed on a flick of their pen or a slighttly-raised finger– whenever I use a word…
Read MorePictured: Chic Jones, legendary Beale Street singer The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) will be holding its annual meeting in Memphis this year on October 19-21. As a native Memphian, I’m excited to share my city (the 901) with all of you who will be attending. There are so many hidden gems in this…
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 MoreWhat if academic Philosophy really invested in making itself understood to the general public? Over the last few years, I’ve seen the emergence of a number of initiatives aimed at cultivating what is now called “public philosophy.” The discipline of Philosophy’s largest professional organization constituted a committee dedicated to it (the APA Committee on Public Philosophy)….
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 MoreIn the last couple of weeks, Kirsten Lepore’s brilliant claymation short “Hi, Stranger” has taken the internet by storm. It features a nameless, gelatinous, nude, humanoid protagonist (pictured left) with a soothing, gender-ambiguous voice who engages in a spontaneous, quasi-therapeutic, and strangely intimate conversation directly with you, the viewer. Reactions to Lepore’s short have been…
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…
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