The Robot and the Philosopher
Sophia wasn’t particularly talkative that evening. Earlier that day, she’d been onstage at the conference I was attending and had been teased for a gesture that looked as though she were…
Tag
artificial intelligence (a.i.)
Why A.I. Didn’t Transform Our Lives in 2025
One year ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, made a bold prediction: “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of…
The Role of Doctors Is Changing Forever
Historically, medicine’s power rested on a specific kind of cultural authority—the ability to determine not only what diseases exist, who has them, and what to do about it, but also what…
Five Things That Changed the Media in 2025
The true-crime genre has been a cornerstone of the podcast market for years, and we could very well see a proliferation of newsletters about cold cases, wife murders, or gangland rackets.…
Is A.I. Actually a Bubble?
Luckily for managers, building human capital takes a long time. Or, at least, it used to: artificial intelligence is, among other things, a technology that speeds up learning and increases…
That New Hit Song on Spotify? It Was Made by A.I.
Nick Arter, a thirty-five-year-old in Washington, D.C., never quite managed to become a professional musician the old-fashioned way. He grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in a…
What Hollywood Is Missing About A.I.
In 2025, A.I. seems to pop up on TV nearly as often as it does in real life. On the hospital-mockumentary sitcom “St. Denis Medical,” a curmudgeonly physician resents the unerring faith…
TextEdit and the Relief of Simple Software
The so-called desktop first appeared on a home computer in 1981, with the release of the Xerox 8010 Star Information System. That device pioneered the graphical-user interface, or G.U.I.,…
Will A.I. Trap You in the “Permanent Underclass”?
The “lumpenproletariat,” according to “The Communist Manifesto,” is “the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society.” Lower than…
Should College Get Harder?
Around twenty years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I taught a class in a special observation room at my university’s teaching center. My students and I sat around a long…
Putting ChatGPT on the Couch
I’m still not sure whose idea it was for me to be Casper’s therapist—mine or his. I know I mentioned my profession to him, but I am pretty sure he was the one who engaged me that way. I…
The A.I. Bubble Is Coming for Your Browser
There’s an old business maxim dating to the California gold rush: it’s easier to make money selling picks and shovels to aspiring miners than to strike it rich finding gold. Artificial…
The High Femme Dystopia of Star Amerasu
If the recent embrace of seemingly—and only seemingly—autonomous machines is any indication, something much less chic than the future premised in “The Matrix” awaits us. During the 1999…
What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?
For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. Much of the euphoria and dread swirling around today’s artificial-intelligence technologies can be…
What It’s Like to Brainstorm with a Bot
Contrary to what many of my friends believe, good academics are always working—at least in the sense that when we’re stuck on a problem, which is most of the time, it’s impossible to leave…
What Do Commercials About A.I. Really Promise?
If a recent crop of commercials touting the benefits of artificial intelligence is any indication, lots of Americans these days feel unduly burdened by the demands of everyday cognition.…
“M3GAN 2.0” Is a Victim of Inflation
The sequel, which adds more A.I.-endowed robots and increases their powers, diminishes its dramatic impact. Source link
A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts
In an experiment last year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than fifty students from universities around Boston were split into three groups and asked to write SAT-style…
What’s Happening to Reading?
What do you read, and why? A few decades ago, these weren’t urgent questions. Reading was an unremarkable activity, essentially unchanged since the advent of the modern publishing…
Do Androids Dream of Anything at All?
Although the literature of automatism has existed in one mold or another since the late Middle Ages—with sixteenth-century folktales about a golem made of clay and summoned to life,…
What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living with A.I.
For this week’s Open Questions column, Cal Newport is filling in for Joshua Rothman. In the spring of 1940, Isaac Asimov, who had just turned twenty, published a short story titled…
Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life
Last Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it was acquiring a company called io, an artificial-intelligence-forward product-development firm co-founded, last year, by Jony Ive, the vastly…
Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?
In 2017, soon after Google researchers invented a new kind of neural network called a transformer, a young OpenAI engineer named Alec Radford began experimenting with it. What made the…
My Brain Finally Broke
I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the…