We have to think about why people are so angry in the first place — Last week, The Atlantic published “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid” by Jon Haidt, the NYU professor and author of The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt has perfected the art of “Get Off of My Lawn-ism,” or finding ways to rationalize and codify…

Algorithms and worker power — In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate…

Millions of images generated with code have fueled the engine of a new economy. But modern art has been associated with a lot of shenanigans over the years — is AI art the dawn of a new era, or the art world’s latest prank? — Generative Art uses techniques from Machine Learning and Machine Vision to generate images. And it has produced a lot of headlines around the subject of what is and isn’t real art.

Saying ‘le dollar bean’ instead of ‘lesbian’ so you don’t get demonetized — In China, people often speak in code online. Why? To evade the Chinese government’s filters. The authorities don’t want conversations they don’t like — most notably criticisms of major officials. So they run software to autodetect banned keywords on the major Chinese social networks. As a result, Chinese Internet users…

Reading between the headlines to get the real story on Elon’s Twitter bid — On Thursday, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter. He proposed buying the company’s shares at $54.20 each, a $9 per-share premium, presenting its board with a tough decision. Musk is a brilliant businessman. He founded one company that sends rockets to space and another that popularized electric vehicles…

I thought it was nothing more than a fun gimmick. I was wrong. — I was skeptical of virtual reality. For the past few years, I’ve been reading articles and watching videos about the technology as it has rapidly risen in popularity, but I wasn’t so impressed by what I saw. VR looked fun. I’m a lifelong science-fiction reader, and it was certainly cool…

It’s all buying and selling for the sake of buying and selling — When crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi purchased the NFT of Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet back in March 2021 for a staggering $2.9 million, the world was divided into two groups. Some pointed to the sale as proof of both the NFT concept and the wider demand. Others couldn’t help…

Why aren’t there more Wikipedia-scale successes online? — On Monday night, I participated in a class session of Technology, Media & Democracy, a partnership of five academic institutions in New York City, co-taught by Justin Hendrix, combining two classes he runs at NYU and Cornell Tech, David Carroll at The New School, Douglas Rushkoff at CUNY Queens College…

A practical blueprint for assessing the value, limitations and quality of new technologies for ourselves and our families — Our modern digital society has us switching amongst a series of technologies/apps throughout our day. We’ve become conditioned to reach for the laptop or mobile device to find answers to our questions, connect with family and friends, stream your favorite shows, or droomscroll on social media. Over past few years…