A familiar cautionary tale about AI is the paper clip maximizer, where an AI destroys the world in pursuit of its seemingly banal task of making paper clips efficiently. The story imagines an AI with general, even superhuman, intelligence and agency. The debates continue about whether or not AGI will ever be achieved. But what […]
Category: digital rhetoric
The University at Buffalo has been in the news (and social media) over an upcoming event involving a controversial speaker invited by a conservative student group on campus. I’m not here to discuss the particulars of this case or how to respond to it. I’m sure Google can help you learn more. My interest is […]
Writing a post analyzing the moral panic surrounding the latest digital media technology is nearly as boring as participating in the moral panic itself. Let’s not worry too much about ChatGPT. In a decade it will probably seem as quaint as Clippy. So I’ve got a tangent here and this Harry Potter-esque post title. I’ll […]
Categories
the volumetric capture of agency
The FIFA World Cup has had a recent habit of introducing new media technologies into the sporting world. That’s not surprising given its status as a global spectacle. Given the many controversial aspects of this year’s event in Qatar, the introduction of the “semi-automated video assistant referee” is relatively mild. However, it’s an excellent example […]
There’s a 2004 video interview of Katherine Hayles conducted by Arthur Kroker for C-Theory, where she discusses How We Became Posthuman, Writing Machines, and My Mother was a Computer. Her 1999 book traces the posthuman back to the beginnings of computers and cybernetics. Considered differently though, posthuman theory as we encounter it gets some start […]
Following up on Ted Underwood’s recent post on the recent article “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” So yes my post title is a joke, but in my defense, they started it. Very briefly put, this is a conversation about natural language processing. NLP is about the nonhuman-computational processing […]
I’m reviewing the copyedited version of my book manuscript (still well on pace for a Jan 2022 publication), and I’m thinking of adding a paragraph like the one below, either to the preface or introduction. Probably the preface since that bit has a more personal register. Basically it’s about the fact that the book was […]
There are no categorical imperatives requiring the use of social media in any way. I.e., we are not under any universal obligation to use social media. We should probably start there. At the other end of the spectrum, I don’t believe it is controversial to assert that social media platforms (and their corporate owners) seek […]
By the end of this month, I will finish my two-year stint as WAC director at UB. As I am now in Media Study, I don’t anticipate running a “writing program” again. Before that, for seven years I was the WPA in the UB English department and spent three years running a graduate certificate professional […]
The removal of Trump from various social media platforms has been big news, as is the de-platforming of Parler by Apple, Google, and Amazon. There’s a lot of conversation about this in relation to the first amendment. I’m not a constitutional law expert, so I’m not going to focus here on the strictly legal aspect. […]
Alex Reid 