[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 series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!] What happens when our otherwise virtuous desire for justice becomes hyperbolized, hypostatized, and perversely transfigured into an insatiable thirst for vengeance? That is the question that was first explored in Black Mirror‘s…
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!] Ever since the first season of Black Mirror was released in 2011, I have been utterly confounded by my friends’ and colleagues’ affection for its second episode, “15 Million Merits.” Reasonable people disagree about…
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 MoreI promised my friend and fellow blogger Samir Chopra that I would write something about the recent uptick in conversation about technology in the classroom, the overwhelming majority of which has been condemnatory. Full disclosure: I’m a big fan of technology (even in the classroom), I consider myself a cautious techno-optimist, and so I am…
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…
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