Undermining Autonomy One Swipe at a Time
In the summer of 2017, Hurricane Irma—a monster category 5 hurricane—was bearing down on us. The storm was projected to make a head-on collision...
If We’re Living in a Simulation, The Gods Might Be Crazy
This essay was originally published in Slate.
That we’re living in a computer simulation—it sounds like a paranoid fantasy. But it’s a possibility that futurists,...
The Multiverse and Anthropic Principle are not enough
The question: why are we all here? used to be the purview of religion. The Bible claims that God created the universe and human...
Quantum Physics Reveals the Unity of the Universe
This article was originally published on August 23rd, 2023 in the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas: https://iai.tv/articles. This essay is...
What Hegel Has to Teach Us about AI
This essay was previously published July 6th, 2023 in The New Statesman
In the summer of 2022, engineer Blake Lemoine posted to Medium a transcript of his...
Unimaginable Time
Buried in an arctic mountainside in Norway is the Global Music Vault, a digital data storage facility that is designed to preserve selections of...
The Great Betrayal: why the Internet became an autocracy and how it may yet...
This post includes excerpts from Vili Lehdonvirta’s book Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control (MIT Press).
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The Internet...
Overcoming Cognitive Bias with Algorithms
This is a revised text of a lecture given at King’s College in March 2023
The judgments of human beings can be biased; they can...
AI and Social Justice: The latest technological ‘revolution’ and the Capability Approach
Face recognition to unlock our phones, navigation apps that show traffic in real-time, digital assistants that turn on lights and lock doors in our...
Smartphones and Meaningfulness
This essay explores topics discussed in Tiger Roholt’s recently published book, Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones.
Imagine that you are at the DMV...