The dire wolf is not back. The New Yorker tried to convince us otherwise this week, with an article that surely makes one wonder what happened to its famed fact-checking department. Extinct, I guess, much like the Canis dirus which lived in the Americas until about 10,000 years ago.
In 2016 Microsoft made headlines when it debuted Tay, a chatbot modeled to speak like a teenage girl, which rather dramatically turned into a "Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours," as The Telegraph put it. The Twitter bot was designed to “learn” from the other Twitter users who
It's been another very dark week, hasn't it. Not even Cory Booker's act of elocutionary endurance could shake me out of the gloom. It's a personal gloom, no doubt – this week marked the five year anniversary of the last time I saw
According to some of the surveys that its evangelists are prone to cite, AI is now everywhere in education – or if not now, then soon, widely and excitedly adopted by the majority of teachers and students. To that, I utter the words of Marcia Brady, "Sure Jan." When
If you don't mind, I'd like to return to that other big story that appeared recently in The Atlantic. No, no, not the one where editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg describes how he was added to the Trump Administration's Signal group chat discussing plans to bomb
The Secretary of Education Linda McMahon will speak at the ASU+GSV Summit next month. The conference makes no mention in its blurb promoting the Secretary's appearance of what happened last week: President Trump's executive order to dismantle her department. There's no mention of
The Gates Foundation, we learned this week, is backing away from its environmental efforts, slashing staff and funding for projects that sought in part to address global climate change. Bill Gates is "retooling his empire for the Trump era," as The New York Times put it. No mention
I’d said in my last email that I didn’t plan on sending you anything today. I ran the NYC Half yesterday and presumed that I’d be too anxious on Saturday and too tired on Sunday to write anything. Think of this as either a bonus email or
On Saturday night, ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and prominent pro-Palestine campus activist still living in campus housing with his 8-month-pregnant wife, a US citizen. Initially, Khalil, who was born in Syria, was told his student visa was being revoked; when agents were told he
There's an argument I make in Teaching Machines that I'd like to repeat here – a setup to this first of many essays in which I work through some ideas about AI, agents, and agency: In 1971 the psychologist B. F. Skinner published his most controversial book,
"It's Bad." It's very very bad. And each week, when I gather up the education and AI-related news here, I keep wishing I could say we've reached the peak of this mountain of horrors and that things will get easier, things will
There were numerous news items last week about surveillance and algorithmic decision-making in the workplace. These kinds of stories aren’t new, of course. But as Elon Musk has infiltrated the White House, instructing his minions to eliminate as much of the federal workforce as possible; and as the Trump
