It’s in the news right now that a defendant will rely on an assist from an artificial intelligence project designed to level the playing field between ordinary… Read more ““AI lawyer” and the ethics of AI development”

There’s a great moment in Michel Serres’s Statues in which – responding to the Challenger disaster – he describes spaceflight as a form of human sacrifice. He… Read more “Scientific progress and the presumed necessity of suffering”

By global, I don’t mean just geographically, though I definitely mean that. I also mean with an expansive vision of intersections among religion, science, and technology. Those… Read more “Wanting a global approach to religion, science, and technology”

Not long ago, I blogged a few thoughts on robots and religion. I noted an old paper of mine and some contributions to the journal Material Religion… Read more “Robots: the stuff of religion pt2”

Okay, so the bad isn’t really about academic publishing, and the good isn’t about academic publishing in general. I just want to make some notes on where… Read more “Good and bad in academic publishing”

Today I remembered how I’m allowed by OUP to upload portions of my book for folks to read a bit (and hopefully be excited by!). So I… Read more “Futures of Artificial Intelligence – sampler”

Every week brings the latest wonderful accomplishment in chatbots, machine learning, and other would-be artificial intelligences of the sentient variety: most absurdly, the recent thrill of a… Read more “Jesus toast, the Turing Test, and imagining artificial intelligence”

There’s been a raft of commentary on how academics write things and academic publishers reap unusually robust financial benefits (see excellent summaries here and here); but right… Read more “The cost of academic book publishing”

I’m listening to an excellent interview with Dr. Renny Thomas, an anthropologist in India. In my opinion, Dr. Thomas is at the forefront of studying religion and… Read more “Anthropology of the moderns”

One of the things that I engaged last year was an extensive set of conversations, workshops, and public events on AI ethics. I was involved with those… Read more “AI policy recommendations”