Archival Images of AI Playbook

In the eleventh century, St. Anselm of Canterbury proposed an argument for the existence of God that went roughly like this: God is, by definition, the greatest being that we can imagine; a God that doesn’t exist is clearly not as great as a God that does exist; ergo, God must exist.

I was raised in a household in which my mother, a divorced old-school feminist, openly hoped for the day when the “racist, angry old white men,” who keep our country in sociopolitical purgatory, would die.

“When Kurzweil first started talking about the “singularity”, a conceit he borrowed from the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, he was dismissed as a fantasist.

The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their mouths, and it is their responsibility to keep this power in mind no matter what they say or do.

Image by Jamy van Zyl In 1986, Science and Technology Studies scholar Langdon Winner launched a debate about the power of technologies to shape human politics when he asked “do artefacts have politics?” A technology like the Robert Moses-designed overpasses that arc above the roads from New Yor

My libertarian friend Conor Friedersdorf has stared into the abyss, and has been jolted by what stared back. He writes about it in a must-read essay with the deceptively anodyne title “The Limits of Diversity”. Conor begins by laying out his own openness to diverse experience.

How an extreme libertarian tract predicting the collapse of liberal democracies – written by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father – inspired the likes of Peter Thiel to buy up property across the Pacific by If you’re interested in the end of the world, you’re interested in New Zealand.

A new report suggests that the marriage of AI and robotics could replace so many jobs that the era of mass employment could come to an end If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of Ame

We are witnessing the beginning of Silicon Valley institutionalizing its religious beliefs.

Earlier this year I went to an event in Austin, Texas, billed as a sneak preview of the evolution of our species.

A new report suggests that the marriage of AI and robotics could replace so many jobs that the era of mass employment could come to an end If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of Ame

We are witnessing the beginning of Silicon Valley institutionalizing its religious beliefs.

What do the most powerful people in the world read? For Donald Trump, the depressing but familiar answer is nothing beyond tweets and headlines.

“ Ido plan to bring back my father,” Ray Kurzweil says. He is standing in the anemic light of a storage unit, his frame dwarfed by towers of cardboard boxes and oblong plastic bins. He wears tinted eyeglasses.

Silicon Valley is coming for death. But it’s looking in the wrong place. After disrupting the way we love, communicate, travel, work, and even eat, technologists believe they can solve the ultimate problem.

With Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, Dorothy R. Santos Moderated by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke

A singularity is a point in space-time of such unfathomable density that the very nature of reality is brought into question. Associated with elusive black holes and the alien particles that bubble up from quantum foam at their event horizon, the term ‘singularity’ has also been co-opted by cultural theorists and techno-utopianists to describe moments of profound social, ontological, or material transformation—the coming-into-being of new worlds that redefine their own origins. Panelists contend with the idea of singularities and ruptures, tackling transformative promises of populist narratives, and ideological discrepancies that are deeply embedded in art and design practices. By reflecting on Afrofuturism and digital colonialism, they will also question narcissistic singularities of 'I,' 'here,' and 'now', counter the rhetoric of technological utopias, and confound principles of human universality.

Singularities panel, Transmediale (5th Feb 2017)The video of our #Singularities panel at Transmediale is now online:Featuring the extraordinary talents of Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, and Dorothy R. Santos speaking (and performing) on refiguring techno-colonialist and heteronormative pasts, presents, futures and identities.The introduction to the panel - written by Morehshin and myself - can be found here. Photos from the panel are here.Stick around for the discussion and Q&A

My libertarian friend Conor Friedersdorf has stared into the abyss, and has been jolted by what stared back. He writes about it in a must-read essay with the deceptively anodyne title “The Limits of Diversity”. Conor begins by laying out his own openness to diverse experience.

Through the past few decades of summer blockbuster movies and Silicon Valley products, artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly familiar and sexy, and imbued with a perversely dystopian allure.