Reading Time: 13 minutes We took an unintended hiatus last week for Humanist Book Club, but hopefully for the better. Comments to date on this series suggest that many folks aren’t reading the book directly, but responding to my summaries and analysis of author commentary. This places an added burden to ensure that I’m articulating key points properly, and […]
culture
Posted inBooks
Humanist Book Club: How we pre-engage with popular science
Reading Time: 6 minutes A year ago, I reflected on decolonizing our thinking around archaeology, and the immediate challenges posed by such an attempt. Although on one level it’s self-evident that the field has been informed by extremely biased (and racist) actors, secular folk like me rely on scientific positivism for so much in our lives that it can […]
Posted inMyth & Folklore
What the world can teach us about religiosity at home
Reading Time: 8 minutes The man who sells newspapers in my barrio is an Evangelical Christian, and also a deeply angry person living in a lot of pain. He lost his wife to COVID-19, he spent the vast majority of his life barely making ends meet, and he attributes not killing himself to the knowledge that his god will […]
Posted inThe Future
A deluge of artificial stories: The chatbot crisis at Clarkesworld
Reading Time: 5 minutes Two days ago, Clarkesworld shut its doors to tackle a rising tide of story submissions that had all the hallmarks of being generated by chatbots. The surge happened especially as ChatGPT functionality became more widely accessible in the last few months. Solutions have not yet emerged to this problem, but my industry of speculative writers, […]
Posted inTechnology
You thought HAL was creepy? Meet Sydney
Reading Time: 4 minutes We’ve already seen what havoc technology-exploiting evil operators can wreak on people and societies. More than 70 million presumably-sensible Americans voted in 2020 for a presidential candidate whose entire political message was—and continues to be—built on easily-shredded tissues of falsehoods.
Yet considering that advances in AI are currently sprinting at breakneck speed into reality, Trump’s seduction of a huge swath of the American electorate was decidedly low-tech.
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
AI is here: Are we finally ready to rethink the value of being human?
Reading Time: 6 minutes It’s been a good few months for machine-learning software—and a confusing one for the humans trying to live their best lives around it. Last fall, digital art generators like Midjourney and DALL-E drew the alarm of illustrators, photographers, and other digital artists: not just because the algorithms were trained on data not expressly sanctioned by […]
Posted inCulture
Are my children missing out on ‘True Christmas’?
Reading Time: 3 minutes I am a fully-fledged secular atheist. I also love Christmas. It is probably a learned thing involving decades of cultural normalization following a childhood ensconced in an at least nominally Christian Christmas tradition. What I mean by this is that I, like many people of my era, spent Christmases at school singing carols and hymns, […]
Posted inCulture
Giving Tuesday: An annual secular ritual with global ambitions
Reading Time: 4 minutes I like to say I’m not one for ritual, but I fall into seasons of celebration and reflection as much as the next person. I also understand folks who, having grown up with religion, long for secular equivalents to cherished childhood traditions. One of the five pillars of Islam is Zakat, charity from those who […]
Posted inTechnology
Anonymity, privacy, transparency, integrity: Do we even know the future we want?
Reading Time: 8 minutes In the late 2000s, research blossomed around our use of online avatars. Did our videogame icons and social media profiles represent our actual selves, our ideal selves, or something else entirely? And did they have a reciprocal impact, a “Proteus effect” that transformed self-perception? Did we change in the real world based how our online […]
Posted inPolitics
Vote for character, not shady characters
Reading Time: 3 minutes When you go to the polls to vote in Tuesday’s midterm election, if you didn’t vote early, keep one word in mind: character. The critical importance of that under-emphasized virtue to the health of the republic is eloquently underscored in a wise (as always) essay by David French in The Atlantic magazine’s “The Third Rail” […]