Topic
Future
A collection of 67 issues
Ethics and Technology: From Neutral Infrastructure to the Age of AI
From its inception, going back to the postwar (World War II) period, the technology industry was heavily involved in the design, development, manufacture, and sale of infrastructure. Initially, the infrastructure was vertically integrated hardware and software. More recently, software has come to predominate, with the rise of disaggregation, where hardware
Biographers of “Great Men” Do Us No Favors
Is AI the Capstone of Tech Feudalism?
Amid the Media Deluge: Revisiting AI’s Big Questions
News articles, feature stories, and opinion pieces about artificial intelligence are proliferating wildly. If the technological advance of AI is outpacing its media coverage, then all the optimistic and pessimistic AI scenarios that philosophers, pundits, and scientists have propounded might materialize sooner than expected. Unfortunately, the worst of the pessimistic
Past is Prologue, and Forewarned is Forearmed
I remember clearly when I first experienced the World Wide Web (WWW). I was visiting the Toronto office of the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) during the spring of 1991, and a group of developers asked whether I’d be interested in taking a trip through cyberspace. At first, I thought
Tough Questions About Tech’s Shadow Rule
Earlier this week, The New Yorker published a lengthy feature article by Ronan Farrow titled “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule.” Ronan Farrow, as you might recall, was the author of an earlier article in The New Yorker, and a subsequent book, that investigated allegations of sexual abuse against Hollywood producer