J. Cole just dropped a video from his latest project KOD—Kevin’s Heart. In the video, comedian Kevin Hart’s role is a meta-self-conscious reflection (of Hart playing himself, “playing himself”) that draws on the news of Hart’s personal infidelity to his wife—or “cheating scandal turned extortion plot,”as Dee Lockett puts it—going public. Don’t get me wrong,… Continue reading The Dissolution of Cheating: Kevin’s Heart
1.The torrent of Facebook-related scandals has incited deep reflection on the role of technology in our lives. We simply do not know all that our new technologies are doing to us. We might not know for some time. At this point, understanding ourselves, both individually and as a society, cannot be so easily distinguished from… Continue reading Some Brief Reflections on the Use of Technology in Education
In late 2017, the Republican Congress and Senate were designing and negotiating what would end up becoming the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, signed into law by Donald J. Trump on December 22. There was a media firestorm surrounding the passage of the law, not only because of the inherent stake citizens (=… Continue reading Philosophy of Taxes: A (GO)Primer
After the Las Vegas shooting I wrote a will called “If I’m Killed in a Mass Shooting.” In it I made two claims: There is no gun debate. Despite the patina of rationality, the NRA slate of arguments is so transparently terrible that it makes a mockery of the whole concept of public discourse. What’s… Continue reading It Won’t Be Different This Time
An interest in the existential risk posed by artificial intelligence (AI) has taken hold in the public imaginary. Some dismiss it, some fear it, and most struggle to conjure the appropriate emotional response to the magnitude of the changes we face. We are hurtling towards more and more powerful types of technology with ever increasing… Continue reading The Missing Conversation about Machines
The more I read and think about Facebook, the more I am convinced that it is deeply terrible for the world—and, as a corollary that few people accept, the more obvious it is to me that Facebook should no longer exist. So I am calling on Mark Zuckerberg to do the right thing: shut Facebook… Continue reading Facebook Should Shut Itself Down
1 Machines are coming to resemble human beings more each day. At a concrete level, this is true because human beings are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to produce machines that increasingly resemble human beings. But more abstractly, this is true in principle: machines exist in the first place because they resemble human beings. Karl Marx,… Continue reading The Specter of Machine Intelligence
