Anna Neill, Author at Public Seminar

What a Victorian author can teach us about the conflict at Google over sentient AI

August 19, 2022 • by Anna Neill

Machine cognition, like that of human and nonhuman animals, may or may not become conscious cognition. That remains to be seen. But what matters is how we already harness it and who profits....

Literature

Decolonizing Daniel Defoe

How Black lives matter in A Journal of the Plague Year

February 9, 2022 • by Anna Neill

It isn’t hard to see why A Journal of the Plague Year has enjoyed renewed attention in recent times. But to invoke it without considering Defoe’s support for British imperialism and the expanding Atlantic slave trade is to make literary history complicit with colonial and racial injustice....