Computers
Story Stream
Critique of Artificial Reason February 28, 2024
When the literary scholar Dennis Yi Tenen was a child, his father brought home a reel-to-reel recording by the British prog metal band Uriah Heep. Tenen, who now teaches at Columbia, was born in Moldavia; in a recent interview with Douglas Rushkoff, ...
Vertex Is the Last Good Place Online February 27, 2024
OK, look, I know how it sounds when I say that I wind down from a long day on the internet by playing a game on the internet. I’m a freelance journalist writing a book about private equity, which means I spend my working hours toggling between half a...
The Novelist as Information Machine February 27, 2024
Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, is, in essence, a three-part novel where the first and last parts–comprised of the diary of a young French ethnologist named David Mazon–are relatively easy, light, comic, and the middle s...
Unlocking Antiquity February 19, 2024
A computer scientist has labored for 21 years to read carbonized ancient scrolls that are too brittle to open. His efforts stand at last on the brink of unlocking a vast new vista into the world of ancient Greece and Rome.Brent Seales, of the Univers...
Frontier AI Ethics February 15, 2024
Around a year ago, generative AI took the world by storm, as extraordinarily powerful large language models (LLMs) enabled unprecedented performance at a wider range of tasks than ever before feasible. Though best known for generating convincing text...
