Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Two Systems That Feel Similar From the Outside You have a question. You open an AI. You type the question. An answer comes back. The interaction looks the same whether the system is designed to serve...
Read article →The Oldest Professional Oath Around 400 BCE, on the Greek island of Cos, a school of medicine associated with Hippocrates formalized a set of ethical commitments for physicians. The specific language...
Read article →What Character Design Has Always Been Writers have always understood something that technologists are only beginning to grapple with: the character of a created entity determines almost everything abo...
Read article →The Convenient Misunderstanding When people argue that diverse voices in AI development matter, the response that comes back most reliably is that this is political correctness being imported into a t...
Read article →A Principle From the Wrong Direction The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which influenced the political thinking of Benjamin Franklin and several American founders, operated according to a principle that t...
Read article →The Oldest Analogy in the Newest Conversation Fire is perhaps the most ancient example of transformative technology. Prehistoric humans who controlled it could cook food, ward off predators, survive c...
Read article →The Question Hiding in Plain Sight Every AI system encodes values. There is no neutral option. A system that recommends content has made choices about what counts as relevant. A system that flags harm...
Read article →When History Stops Being a Textbook There is a particular frustration that comes from learning about the past through flat pages and static images. You read that the Forum in Rome was once the center...
Read article →A Simple Question With No Simple Answer Who is AI for? The question sounds naive, but try to answer it honestly and it gets complicated fast. A company that builds and deploys an AI system has shareho...
Read article →The Difference Between a Crutch and a Tool There is a version of AI companionship that is genuinely useful. A person who struggles with social anxiety practices conversation with an AI companion, deve...
Read article →The Room Where AI Gets Built Imagine the team meeting where a major AI system's training objectives are decided. The people around the table have PhDs in mathematics, computer science, and statistics....
Read article →The Business Model Hiding in the Feed There is a number that drives more AI decision-making than almost any other: daily active users, or more specifically, the time those users spend in a system and...
Read article →What Gutenberg Actually Unleashed The popular story of the printing press is one of unambiguous liberation. Books escaped the monasteries. Knowledge spread to the masses. The Renaissance bloomed. The...
Read article →When Technical Mastery Is Not Enough The field of AI alignment — the project of ensuring that AI systems do what we actually want them to do — has produced remarkable technical work. Researchers have...
Read article →The Ceremony That Cannot Be Observed Some ceremonies are not meant to be seen by outsiders. Some are not meant to be seen by the uninitiated, even from within the community. Some involve knowledge tha...
Read article →The Atom Did Not Choose In July 1945, the Trinity test in New Mexico produced a light brighter than anything humans had previously made, followed by a shockwave that knocked observers down miles away....
Read article →Before This Was Possible Every sacred text ever written has been read. This is obvious. What is less obvious is how the reading has always been constrained: by access, by literacy, by language, by the...
Read article →The Weight of What Is Leaving Somewhere right now, an elder who knows the complete ceremonial songs of their community is in their eighties and has no one to teach. Somewhere, a woman who carries the...
Read article →What Language Loss Actually Means The extinction of a language is not like the extinction of a species, though the metaphor is commonly used. A species that goes extinct takes with it a lineage of bio...
Read article →When Everyone Can Finally Speak to Everyone For most of human history, the ability to communicate across languages belonged to a privileged few. Diplomats needed interpreters. Travelers stumbled throu...
Read article →The Problem With Universal Emotions Paul Ekman's research in the 1960s and 1970s proposed that six basic emotions — fear, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise — are universal across cultur...
Read article →What Shamanism Actually Is The word "shaman" comes from the Evenki language of Siberia, and its journey into English involved considerable distortion. In its original context, the shaman was a special...
Read article →The Limit of the Recorded Interview Oral history projects have been collecting interviews with survivors, witnesses, and practitioners of vanishing traditions for decades. The recordings are invaluabl...
Read article →The Man Who Holds the Memory In West African societies spanning the Sahel from Senegal to Mali, Niger to Guinea, the griot occupies a role that has no precise equivalent in other cultural traditions....
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