Technology Archives - Public Seminar

Stop Asking Whether AI Can Write Good

Can I, um, use it at a friend’s house?

March 25, 2026 • by Elvia Wilk

Is it ok to use AI for spell check? What about grammar? Writing image captions? Smoothing transitions between paragraphs? Translating from other languages? Search Engine Optimization? Is my email autoresponder some kind of AI? If I accidentally click an ad for a Large Language Modal (LLM) targeted to me by ...

Sex & Gender

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

December 17, 2025 • by Benjamin Mangrum

Slavoj Žižek argues that gaming and virtual reality programs figure the computer as “a consistent other, stepping into the structural position of an intersubjective partner.” This claim follows on the heels of a reference to Jacques Lacan’s diagnosis in an infamous koan about the impossibility of sexual relations. For Lacan, ...

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

Artificial Intelligence

First as Comedy, Then as Farce

A conversation with Benjamin Mangrum on the assembly of The Comedy of Computation

December 16, 2025 • by Benjamin Mangrum and Rayna Salam

When confronted with change we don’t understand, there is only one thing to do: laugh. Or so says MIT literature professor Benjamin Mangrum. In his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence (Stanford University Press, 2025), Mangrum peers into the archives ...

Art & Design

Joanna Walsh’s E-Elegy

Amateurs! How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters offers a remembrance of posts past

December 10, 2025 • by Eva Szilardi-Tierney

Here’s a theory: The posts, tags, and profiles that constitute the internet are all works of art, produced by amateur artists. Whether or not these amateurs recognize their work’s “artiness” is irrelevant; participation on the internet requires acts of intentional creation and studied self-representation, with the express purpose of display, ...

Artificial Intelligence

Writing Was Always Magical

On Literary Theory for Robots and divining the text of the future

June 12, 2025 • by Tsering Dolka Gurung and Dennis Yi Tenen

Rather than focus on techno-utopian fantasies or doomsday predictions in which technology replaces humans, scholar Dennis Yi Tenen inspects writing itself as a human technology. In his new book, Literary Theory for Robots (W. W. Norton, 2024), the English professor and former Microsoft engineer asks: How will AI change the ...

Disability

Greg Abbott’s Wheelchair

Cripnormativity rewards crips like Abbott for distancing themselves from other disabled people

June 10, 2025 • by Andrew Joseph Pegoda

On July 14, 1984, an 8,000-pound oak tree fell down in the River Oaks suburb of Houston, Texas. The tree stuck a young man out doing one of his favorite pastimes—running—leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. But the young man, who had just received a law degree from Vanderbilt ...

Artificial Intelligence

Great Engineers, Terrible Philosophers

A conversation on the rapid evolution of AI technology, the nature of intelligence, and the importance of the European project

June 9, 2025 • by Luciano Floridi, Giannis Perperidis and Alexandros Schismenos

Sam Altman has claimed that by the end of this year, OpenAI will be capable of “truly astonishing cognitive tasks.” But what exactly does “cognition” mean in the context of artificial intelligence? As the sophistication of such technologies, our dependence on them, and the rhetoric used to sell them escalates, ...

History

Curzio Malaparte’s War

The notorious war correspondent wanted to show us a civil war between different modes of industrialized modernity

January 30, 2025 • by Adam Tooze

Two of the most shocking books about World War II were written by the Italian fascist litterateur and dandy Curzio Malaparte. His “novels” Kaputt and The Skin have been canonized through incorporation into the wonderful series of New York Review Classics. They are hailed by luminaries like Milan Kundera, Gary ...

Finance

Platforms, Payments, and Ponzi Schemes

A review of Rachel O’Dwyer’s Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform

May 1, 2024 • by Paulo L. dos Santos

Electronic platforms can also be thought of as a distinctive type of “terrain” that, like land, can define specific types of revenue and power for those who control them. ...

Artificial Intelligence

Who’s Afraid of the Large Language Model?

Declining creativity in generative AI

March 27, 2024 • by Chris Holdaway

Whether as a tool for human poets or as a poetic agenda of its own, language models might embody to the truest extent the collision of computer revolution and ancient poiesis....

Who’s Afraid of the Large Language Model?

Music

Taylor Swift: The Modest Proposal

Finitude, in 63 parts

February 28, 2024 • by Rick Moody

And so the working hypothesis of this proposal is: that only art with an awareness of finitude constitutes meaningful composition. ...

Artificial Intelligence

The Rise of AI Ethics

The focus on far-off consequences distracts from existing threats to human rights, fairness, justice, equality, and safety

February 21, 2024 • by Peter M. Asaro

AI ethics is not really a distinct field or coherent discourse, but more of an amalgamation of different perspectives considering the potential implications of automated systems and algorithms making decisions with consequential impacts on human lives. ...

Technology

Stop Asking Whether AI Can Write Good

Can I, um, use it at a friend’s house?

Erotic Pleasure and Technological Mastery

An excerpt from The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence

First as Comedy, Then as Farce

A conversation with Benjamin Mangrum on the assembly of The Comedy of Computation

Writing Was Always Magical

On Literary Theory for Robots and divining the text of the future

Greg Abbott’s Wheelchair

Cripnormativity rewards crips like Abbott for distancing themselves from other disabled people

Great Engineers, Terrible Philosophers

A conversation on the rapid evolution of AI technology, the nature of intelligence, and the importance of the European project

Curzio Malaparte’s War

The notorious war correspondent wanted to show us a civil war between different modes of industrialized modernity

Platforms, Payments, and Ponzi Schemes

A review of Rachel O’Dwyer’s Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform

Who’s Afraid of the Large Language Model?

Declining creativity in generative AI

Taylor Swift: The Modest Proposal

Finitude, in 63 parts

The Rise of AI Ethics

The focus on far-off consequences distracts from existing threats to human rights, fairness, justice, equality, and safety

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