News, Resources

Resource: A more interesting upside of AI

My friends are generally optimistic, forward-looking people, but talking about AI makes many of them depressed. Either AI is scarier than other technologies, or public conversation about it has failed them in some way. Or both. I think the problem is not just that people have legitimate concerns. What’s weird and depressing about AI discourse […]

Editors' Choice

Editors’ Choice: Is Google Home a History Calculator?

In their 2005 article in First Monday, Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig recount the story of a remarkably prescient colleague, Peter Stearns, who “proposed the idea of a history analog to the math calculator, a handheld device that would provide students with names and dates to use on exams—a Cliolator, he called it, a […]