Is AI a job killer? What does history say?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now the focus of the most recent automation-is-a-job-killer stories. History suggests an alternate narrative.
artificial intelligence
‘Pre-crime’ software and the limits of AI
Law enforcement agencies are increasingly hoovering up data from social media, online shopping sites, and various other online sources to track suspects and to ‘predict’ crime and unrest. The industry providing the software has every incentive to write code that will exaggerate the threats.
When software rules the world
More and more of our daily routine is being turned over to software. Is that wise in every case? Is there a limit to how much power we should give to software over us?
“Falter”: In New Book, Bill McKibben Asks If the Human Game Has Begun to Play Itself Out
Thirty years ago, in 1989, Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature, the first book about climate change for a general audience. He has just published a new book; it’s titled Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
Artificial intelligence and the limits of the machine model
If we reduce all of our efforts at addressing our problems to language a machine can understand, we will get machine solutions. What we need, however, are solutions that come from our deep connections to this planet as beings of this planet, connections that no machine will ever fathom.
The Singularity is Already Here – It Is the Market
The market economy exhibits most of the traits of the much hyped – and feared – singularity, where an artificial intelligence takes over the show and humans are enslaved.
Driverless cars and bodiless brains
The death of a pedestrian during a test drive of a driverless vehicle calls into question not just the technology—which didn’t seem to detect the pedestrian crossing a busy roadway and therefore didn’t brake or swerve—but also the notion that driving is nothing more than a set of instructions that can be carried out by a machine.