DENNIS BROE observes how cutbacks, mergers and AI create content detached from both reality and history itself
Latest editorial
AI and socialism
Software engineer SCOTT ALSWORTH explains to his mother
INNOVATION/REVOLUTION? 28/09/1971. Salvador Allende, together with his government during the act of nationalisation of copper.
[Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional - Chile/CC]
SAHAR MARANLOU explores a novella, newly translated and republished in English that tells the history of Iran through women’s bodies
DAVID NICHOLSON applauds the revival of a joyous production that deals with choirs, competitions and communism
New releases from Peruvian Ranil y Su Conjunto Tropical, Leve Leve: Sao Tome & Principe, and South African BCUC
MARY DAVIS welcomes a remarkable documentary about the general strike — politically spot on, and featuring accounts from the strikers themselves — that is available for screenings
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review The Stranger, Undertone, and Outcome
“I NEED to ask you, what actually is AI?”
That’s how my mother began our last long-distance WhatsApp call. And really, it’s not a stupid question. I mean, I don’t have an answer. Not a good one. And I’m not altogether convinced anyone else does either. I don’t know.
Maybe that ought to give us some pause for thought. Maybe Sir Keir Starmer can tell us? After all, he’s just pledged our money — £14 billion of it — to an AI Opportunities Action Plan. Mind you, if he’s asked during Prime Minister’s Question Time, I can well imagine some glib reply like “machine learning” or that old chestnut, “simulated human intelligence.”
To which, we might respond, is my spellchecker learning? Are images generated online with Midjourney, simulating the wonders of our cognitive capacity when they mistake hands for feet?
Similar stories
In the second and final part of his article MIKE SCOTT posits that if we don’t control AI while we’ve got the chance, we could be signing the death warrant for our children and grandchildren
MIKE SCOTT assesses the AI threat to jobs in the first of a pair of articles on the problems it poses
ELIZABETH SHORT recommends a bracing study of energy intensive AI and the race of such technology towards war profits
It’s tiring always being viewed as the ‘wrong sort of woman,’ writes JENNA, a woman who has exited the sex industry