I was nineteen, maybe twenty, when I realized I was empty-headed. I was in a college English class, and we were in a sunny seminar room, discussing “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” or possibly “The Waves.

Bots are everywhere. From simple algorithms and aggregator bots to complex “artificially” intelligent machine-learning systems, they have become inescapable. Some are in chat programs.

It’s hard to keep track of all the overlapping technological, environmental, and political crises to worry about in 2023.

It’s hard to keep track of all the overlapping technological, environmental, and political crises to worry about in 2023.

A shadow looms over the 2020 election: Deepfakes! The newish video-editing technology (or really, host of technologies) used to seamlessly paste one person’s face on another’s body, has activated a panic among pundits and politicians.

A shadow looms over the 2020 election: Deepfakes! The newish video-editing technology (or really, host of technologies) used to seamlessly paste one person’s face on another’s body, has activated a panic among pundits and politicians.

In 2014 machine learning researcher Ian Goodfellow introduced the idea of generative adversarial networks or GANs.

A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills.

Who are you, and what are you doing here? You, there in the mirror, there in the lens of your phone: What do you see? In the eyes of us poor moderns, it seems self-evident that a picture can capture who you are.

A shadow looms over the 2020 election: Deepfakes! The newish video-editing technology (or really, host of technologies) used to seamlessly paste one person’s face on another’s body, has activated a panic among pundits and politicians.

In May, a video appeared on the internet of Donald Trump offering advice to the people of Belgium on the issue of climate change. “As you know, I had the balls to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement,” he said, looking directly into the camera, “and so should you.”

Norman is an algorithm trained to understand pictures but, like its namesake Hitchcock's Norman Bates, it does not have an optimistic view of the world. Norman sees a man being electrocuted.

Bots are everywhere. From simple algorithms and aggregator bots to complex “artificially” intelligent machine-learning systems, they have become inescapable. Some are in chat programs.

In December, Motherboard discovered a redditor named 'deepfakes' quietly enjoying his hobby: Face-swapping celebrity faces onto porn performers’ bodies.

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice.

The technology isn’t the moral game-changer that some make it out to be. There is considerable enthusiasm for technologies that allow people to simulate an engagement with a physical world.

In 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the only sorts of minds.

An adorable black kitten is sitting on a bookshelf, eyes fixed on an insect. It sits, paws perfectly aligned. Then, out of nowhere, it pounces — leaping off the shelf and into the air, wild and frantic.

“The black female’s body needs less to be rescued from the masculine “gaze” than to be sprung from a historic script surrounding her with signification while at the same time, and not paradoxically, it erases her completely.

Stephen Wilkes