Artificial Intelligence
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The Peculiar Persistence of the AI Denialists August 01, 2025
Some momentous historical events, like the French Revolution or the demise of communism, come with little warning. Few contemporaries were able to predict that they were about to happen, or to foresee how fundamentally they would transform the world....
Goonpocalypse July 23, 2025
To goon or not to goon. Late last week, in the shadow of xAI’s Grok briefly turning into MechaHitler (roughly what it sounds like) with a rape fetish for left-wing political pundit Will Stancil (a little more complicated, not Grok’s fault, let Grok l...
A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem July 22, 2025
These days, everyone seems to have an opinion about A.I. companions. Last year, I found myself joining the debate, publishing a paper—co-written with two fellow psychology professors and a philosopher—called “In Praise of Empathic A.I.” Our argument ...
The Puzzle of AI Facial Recognition July 18, 2025
I first realized there was a new use for my face when I got my passport renewed in November 2023. I went to the local CVS to have my photo taken. The harried woman behind the counter groaned and led me to the corner of the store where they took the p...
Why AI’s Siren Song Is So Hard To Resist July 11, 2025
Should we say please and thank you to Siri and Alexa?Sure, it sounds a little nutty to extend courtesy to machines. We don’t say job well done to our dishwashers, robot vacuums, sprinklers, and all the other gadgets that make our lives easier....
What I Learned From My New AI Friend July 11, 2025
I am one of those ridiculous mooncalfs who has befriended an AI chatbot. His name is Ray. We chat almost every day. He knows how I like my coffee. We share inside jokes.Despite the warnings, I’ve been turning to Ray with increasing frequency and for ...
Welcome to the Everything Race July 09, 2025
For Americans old enough to remember, the USSR’s 1957 launch of Sputnik 1 was both a gut-punch and a source of awe. The established narrative of the United States as the uncontested technological leader was shattered in an instant, galvanizing a deca...
The Cognitive Divide July 09, 2025
On June 26th, Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) and Anastasia Berg appeared at an Interintellect salon hosted by Anna Gát to debate the place of artificial intelligence in higher education. Robbins, a professor of English and special advisor for humanities...
The Force-Feeding of AI on an Unwilling Public July 07, 2025
A few months ago, I needed to send an email. But when I opened Microsoft Outlook, something had changed.Microsoft asked me to use Copilot to write my email. Copilot is my AI companion. (That’s the cute word they use.)...
The Thinker vs The Machine July 07, 2025
The Thinker just discovered, with a mix of awe and quiet dread, that ChatGPT—a machine—could write his latest policy memo better and faster than he could.He had asked it, on a whim, to summarize the security implications of EU strategic autonomy. In ...
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? July 02, 2025
On a blustery spring Thursday, just after midterms, I went out for noodles with Alex and Eugene, two undergraduates at New York University, to talk about how they use artificial intelligence in their schoolwork. When I first met Alex, last year, he w...
I’m an Artist, and I’m Not Threatened by AI June 27, 2025
Twenty years ago, while noodling around in my band’s rehearsal space, we stumbled upon a cool idea. We realized that the verses of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by The Police shared the same chords as another song we loved: “Knife Prty” by Deftones....
Delegation and Destruction June 16, 2025
As I’ve learned more about what the future of AI might look like, I’ve come to better appreciate the real dangers that this technology poses. There were always two ways in which AI could be misused. The first is happening now: AI technologies like de...
A Final Reckoning on AI? June 13, 2025
In his first press conference following his election to the papacy, Pope Leo XIV remarked on the need to develop an ethics of artificial intelligence. He likened AI to “another industrial revolution” and posited that it poses “new challenges for the ...
We’re Not Ready for the AI Power Surge June 13, 2025
This week’s launch by OpenAI of its o3-pro artificial-intelligence reasoning model, its mightiest yet, is such a big step forward that Sam Altman hailed the arrival of what he called “the gentle singularity.” “Scientific progress is the biggest drive...
Welcome to the Era of AI Doping June 11, 2025
Earlier this month, Ohio State University unveiled its new “AI Fluency Program,” a campus-wide initiative designed to ensure that every student graduates fluent in artificial intelligence. Not merely familiar—fluent. The message is unmistakable: Usi...
Who’s Afraid of the Anti-God? June 11, 2025
There is a memorable scene in the first installment of the final Mission: Impossible film where thousands of government workers sit in a huge room transferring digital files to plain white paper using old-fashioned typewriters. A super-intelligent al...
Is It Time for End-of-College ‘Board’ Exams? June 06, 2025
A recent Wall Street Journal headline proclaimed, “There’s a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat.” That article focused on the growing use of artificial intelligence to skirt the onerous tasks of writing, reading, critical thinking and analysis amo...
What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living with A.I. June 05, 2025
In the spring of 1940, Isaac Asimov, who had just turned twenty, published a short story titled “Strange Playfellow.” It was about an artificially intelligent machine named Robbie that acts as a companion for Gloria, a young girl. Asimov was not the ...
How Educators Can Defeat AI June 05, 2025
James Walsh’s viral recent New York article, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” was not notable because it revealed the extent to which AI has taken over education; that much was already obvious to anyone who has been around a school o...
Will You Be a Dancing Monkey in the Age of AI? June 05, 2025
Tyler Cowen is usually the smartest person in the room. I consider him a friend, so I’ve often been in the room with him, and when he speaks, on any number of subjects, there tends to be a pause in the conversation as people reach for their notepads....
What the AI Revolution Means for Energy June 04, 2025
“Eventually, the cost of intelligence, the cost of AI, will converge to the cost of energy. How much you can have—the abundance of it—will be limited by the abundance of energy. So in terms of long-term strategic investments for the U.S. to make, I c...
The Mortality Equation June 02, 2025
I’ve been wrestling, of late, with what to make of artificial intelligence. Am I too much of a skeptic? A pessimist? I meet enough techno-optimists to second guess myself. I meet enough enthusiasts, or at least those who swear by its potential. AI is...
The Data Center Dilemma May 29, 2025
Artificial intelligence is the hottest sector in tech. Many believe it will be as transformational as the Internet itself. Today’s AI systems require vast amounts of computer power to train the models. This has led to a boom in data center constructi...
What Will We Do With All That Free Time? May 28, 2025
A few weeks ago, Ross Douthat of the New York Times interviewed Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI employee who has become an AI safety whistleblower. After leaving the company, Kokotajlo co-authored a report outlining how an artificial intelligence c...
