All Essays

Essays and commentary on the ideas shaping our world.

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Technology

Technological Metamorphosis

Botany is genetically one of the oldest natural investigations undertaken by humankind, for what could be more useful than being able to identify which plants are nice to eat, which are poisonous, and which can treat illnesses? It is useful not only to have this power of identification but also to be able to pass it on. Hence, traditions and folklore, and later, treatises and compendiums have passed down our classifications of plants to us from time immemorial.

Benjamin ScottSeptember 4, 202618 min read

Technology

Artificial Everything

We are makers of things. We are all artists. The child who ties a kitchen towel around her neck to be a superhero is perhaps the purest artist of all. They create artificial worlds, words, and whimsy. The artificial can of course be beautiful, magical, imaginative, and even intensely helpful to mankind. We would not cut short a child’s play simply because they are not living in “reality.” Neither would we sneer at an artificial limb for not being “the real thing.” The artificial worlds of the artist inspire awe, introspection, and a sense of the transcendent.

Kollin FieldsAugust 28, 202613 min read

Technology

You Can't Automate Eudaimonia

The question that I’d been hoping to examine through the use of both experience and philosophy was this: “Is there an ethical use for AI in writing?” As you’ll see, the question changed for me as I wrote.

Shannon ChamberlainAugust 21, 202620 min read

Technology

Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?

The machines we dreamed of always kept their distance. They hovered, they whirred, they did the dishes — but they stayed on the other side of the room, chrome and separate, things we could switch off and walk away from. The technology that actually arrived provides no such distance. It does not sit across from us; it watches us, learns us, and reaches steadily inward — first into how we behave, then into what we want, and at last toward the parts of us we cannot consciously control. The question is no longer what our machines will do for us. It is whether, by the end of it, any part of the self is left that they have not touched.

Kayla-Megan Burns and Tilda NilssonAugust 7, 202613 min read

Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?

Technology

Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Make no mistake, AI agents are the newest species on Earth, and we have attempted to replace millions of years of natural selection with a few months of internet-based human history training, and then unleashed them into the world. In a rush to be first, and in the spirit of competition, AI companies have inadvertently created the Meeseeks Problem, and it’s not a problem that’s going away any time soon, but unlike climate change, this is a problem that could end human civilization in less time than it takes to say, “Maybe we should pump the brakes on this AI thing.”

Roli RivelinoJuly 31, 202620 min read

Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Technology

Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

When an individual begins grafting a new object into their experience, the first thing that happens is a recall. The individual, encountering something novel and unfamiliar, has no recourse other than to appeal to memory and to supplement the present perception with already experienced images of other objects and actions. We say here that the process of recall happens before the process of direct perception, counter to what most people would think.

Benjamin ScottJuly 17, 202615 min read

Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

Technology

A Technological Environment

A social media platform might be more similar in kind, at least in analogy, to a theater. There is an audience (the “user”), a creator (writer, director, set designer, actors), and a platform (the stage, the theater). Without any of these components, the theater, or the social media platform, ceases to exist meaningfully.

James HartreeJune 13, 202611 min read

Technology

Digital Artifacts and the Collapse of the Arendtian Public Realm

In an increasingly digitized society, digital artifacts are progressively replacing non-digital mediums across many aspects of man’s life. In a literal sense, digital artifacts are more permanent, everlasting, and durable than their non-digital counterparts.

Bryan DawsonMay 4, 202612 min read

Digital Artifacts and the Collapse of the Arendtian Public Realm

Technology

The Privatization of the U.S. Government

The interface between citizen and government is changing. It is going high gloss, well engineered, aesthetic — the government is getting a private sector skin. TurboTax and MVD Express turn governmental functions into consumer experiences. It should be no surprise that using TurboTax is more efficient than filing a 1040 Tax Form with a black pen, and sending it off in a letter carried by a pigeon.

James HartreeApril 19, 20268 min read

The Privatization of the U.S. Government

Technology

Technological Niche Construction

We must cobble together some sort of picture of what technology is and what it is doing, how it relates to us and us to it; and we all know by now that it will not slow down to help us out.

Benjamin ScottApril 19, 202619 min read

Technology

A First-Century Slave Teaches Me How to Write

It took about 33 years for me to recover from my first professional success, and I owed it all to a first-century slave who never wrote down a single word in his life.

Shannon ChamberlainApril 18, 202618 min read

A First-Century Slave Teaches Me How to Write

Technology

The Demigod Gap: Coexisting with Post-humans

“Esteemed guests, welcome! We will shortly begin our ascent. Please sit comfortably and enjoy this once-in-a-timeline opportunity to bear witness to Earth’s largest mountain. If perchance some mountain goats appear on our radar, we will call your attention to this exquisite, yet sadly dwindling breed. Monoculars are at the front. Enjoy the view!” Craig sat in the middle of the coach.

Elliot B GaramondApril 18, 20268 min read

The Demigod Gap: Coexisting with Post-humans

Technology

Who The Machine Says You Are

On how AI inherited rhetoric’s most dangerous art, and what it means for all of us. It would be convenient to treat all this as a matter of merely theoretical interest, a clever transposition of ancient categories onto modern technology, the sort of thing one publishes and then talks about at conferences.

Kem-Laurin LubinApril 18, 202613 min read

Technology

I Met A Genie

The genie was so very tempting. I was so fatigued by going through the motions of work. Especially writing- writing emails, connecting with people and understanding what they need, what they care about, and what moral boundaries they draw. Writing documents - figuring out what I want myself, how it breaks down into a set of steps, and then having to communicate it in a way that other people understand.

Elliot B GaramondApril 18, 202611 min read