AI Threatens Literary Translation
The etymology of the word translation—“to carry across”—conjures an image of physical labor. It is deeply relational, requiring at least two bodies, those of an author and of the person…
Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Work, and Algorithms | Matteo Pasquinelli and Richard Hames
What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence"—a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind, such as in its…
Government agency TVs hacked—to play AI video of Trump licking Musk’s feet
A video likely generated with artificial intelligence (AI) that shows President Donald Trump kissing the feet of Elon Musk played on Monday inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development…
Can we avoid the enshittification of clean-energy tech?
In this episode, I chat with author Cory Doctorow about "enshittification," his viral term for how digital platforms and smart technologies inevitably get worse over time. We explore how monopoly…
HarperCollins is selling their authors’ work to AI tech.
We’re not going to be able to rely on the courts to protect us, seeing as the Authors Guild suit against OpenAI has already been partially defanged by a California…
Microsoft deal would reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power AI
Pennsylvania’s dormant Three Mile Island nuclear plant would be brought back to life to feed the voracious energy needs of Microsoft under an unprecedented deal announced Friday in which the…
Narrating Audiobooks From Other Worlds
The field of audiobooks has exploded since the introduction of mp3 players, and it continues to expand. But it takes a unique set of skills to voice audiobooks in sci-fi…
The Creativity Fallacy
What does it mean to be a creator at a time when creativity is completely commodified? In this episode, we talk about the status of the author, and how audiences…
Willy Wonka Experience: Every single thing that happened
The viral Glasgow Willy Wonka experience disaster has captured the hearts of the internet, and it feels like new, insane details have been emerging every five minute. So we at…