BlogFlockGreetings from soggy Los Angeles -
I had big plans for this week, including writing a dispatch on the New Luddism conference at Columbia and an excellent tech-smashing tribunal in Brooklyn. I’d also hoped to finish an essay on the scourge of AI companions but that went long, and events…
Does Cory Doctorow even need an introduction at this point? If you spend any amount of time at all online, then you’ve encountered his work, his ideas, his words. But the ultra-prolific science fiction writer, digital rights activist, and coiner of the “Enshittification” verbiage that’s become universal shorthand for the…
Presenting my latest and final album as The Organizing Committee.
The new record, "Keeping Secrets From the Numbers," is available today on Bandcamp, and will be streaming on most platforms (aside from Spotify) in the coming weeks. It will be the last record as The Organizing Committee.
Greetings all,
I’m editing this piece en route to New York City, where I hope there will be enough overworked air traffic controllers to prevent my plane from landing in the East River. Provided that does not happen, I’m very much looking forward to visiting the place where, according to…
Geoffrey Hinton recently won a Nobel Prize for his work on backpropagation, a foundational piece of research that contributed to the emergence of contemporary artificial intelligence systems – particularly generative AI systems such as Large Language Models. I recently served as a panelist at the "Who's…
Happy Halloween all. I got into the spirit by catching up with the horror flicks I’d been sleeping on (28 Years Later was surprisingly good) and, more importantly, chatting with the great tech journalist Jacob Silverman, author of GILDED RAGE: ELON MUSK AND THE RADICALIZATION OF SILICON VALLEY, a…
Greetings all,
I’m a little bleary today, as I wrote much of this after staying up late watching the Dodgers go 18 innings in a completely unhinged, 7-hour World Series game. I am not necessarily what you would call a Huge Sports Man, but you have to get into the…
I don't identify as neurodivergent, per se, though I know I have been a synesthete, which I know sounds like I am trying to be fancy. Synesthesia is a bit of a superpower – music seems to be much cooler for me than for most other people – but…
For the past few years, the AI industry and executives like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have very cleverly shepherded the conversation about generative AI to work in their own interests. In their telling, generative AI is a transformative technology that is improving many different aspects of our society, but particularly…
I have to apologize for nearly any invocation of Slavoj Zizek or Jacques Lacan, so fair warning. But I want to highlight a point made by Yuxuan Zhang in a paper on the LLM "Unconscious," where he draws on a favorite joke of Zizek:…
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