Political violence is hardly new to the United States, but over the past two decades the appetite and tolerance for violence in American political life has been growing. The country entered an unprecedented phase in November, when voters returned Donald Trump to the presidency despite his vague promises of revenge and his specific promises of pardons for the January 6 insurrectionists. Terrorists and assassins are emerging from unexpected corners of society.
The question will be simple but perpetual: Person or machine? Every encounter with language, other than in the flesh, will now bring with it that small, consuming test. For some—teachers, professors, journalists—the question of humanity will be urgent and essential.
Creative artificial intelligence is the latest and, in some ways, most surprising and exhilarating art form in the world. It also isn’t fully formed yet. That tension is causing some confusion.If you’re familiar at all with the use of creative artificial intelligence, you probably know it through one of the popular text-to-image AI applications, which use sprawling databases of existing imagery to convert a written prompt into a new picture.
Last week, Google put one of its engineers on administrative leave after he claimed to have encountered machine sentience on a dialogue agent named LaMDA. Because machine sentience is a staple of the movies, and because the dream of artificial personhood is as old as science itself, the story went viral, gathering far more attention than pretty much any story about natural-language processing (NLP) has ever received. That’s a shame.
Recently I published a book of speculative nonfiction about the possibility of a civil war in the United States. In the opening chapter, I imagine a scenario in which a carnivalesque group of far-right activists takes over a bridge and refuses to leave, provoking a response from federal authorities. My fantasy became reality recently, except not in a rural American county, as I had envisioned it, but in Windsor, Ontario.
Gambling has become one of the defining pleasures of our time, the perfect accompaniment to an era of high-risk, rigged economies and a looming sense of collapse. Once there was Las Vegas; now there’s a Las Vegas in every phone.You can bet on almost anything today. Elections. Literary prizes.