The End of ‘Life’ As You Know It

The End of ‘Life’ As You Know It

In 1947, Claude Beck used the defibrillator to undo what was once deemed irreversible: the cessation of the human heart. Only a few years later, the first mass-produced mechanical ventilator began supporting inert bodies through heavy steel lungs. For the first time,...
You Don’t Have to Be a Jerk to Resist the Bots

You Don’t Have to Be a Jerk to Resist the Bots

There once was a virtual assistant named Ms. Dewey, a comely librarian played by Janina Gavankar who assisted you with your inquiries on Microsoft’s first attempt at a search engine. Ms. Dewey was launched in 2006, complete with over 600 lines of recorded dialog. She...
AI Will Make Human Art More Valuable

AI Will Make Human Art More Valuable

The advent of AI models will only accelerate this trend. We will place ever more value on works that seem made for their own sake, rather than ours. That’s bad news for the AI robots, which are explicitly designed to please us. Engaging in a task for its own sake is...
An AI Told Me I Had Cancer

An AI Told Me I Had Cancer

I realized that I had imagined the AI would take in my entire chart and make a diagnosis, possibly with some dramatic gradually-appearing images like the scenes on Grey’s Anatomy where they discover a large tumor that creates a narrative complication and is solved by...