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Jan 8, 2025 | 
discoursemagazine.com | Jacob Bruggeman
With AI becoming increasingly popular, critics of the new technology have cited concerns about privacy and data security. Such objections are nothing new: Thirty years ago, increasingly widespread use of the internet prompted many of the same criticisms.
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Jan 7, 2025 | 
fusionaier.org | Jacob Bruggeman
January 7, 2025 By Jacob Bruggeman The Soviet space program is not remembered; it is misremembered. The statues of Gagarin rise like monoliths to a triumph that tells only half the story. In the West, we cast it as a sideshow to our own grand narrative: NASA, the moon, the Right Stuff. But the history of the Soviet space program, as John Strausbaugh makes clear in The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, hardly unfolded so neatly.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
fusionaier.org | Jacob Bruggeman
October 29, 2024 Jacob Bruggeman When you think of rural America, what comes to mind? In his new book, Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t, historian Steven Conn contends that what we imagine as “rural” is shaped by myths going back to Thomas Jefferson. American literature and political rhetoric frequently portray the rural as a pastoral Eden, a place apart from the forces of modernity.
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
discoursemagazine.com | Jacob Bruggeman
Regular news readers are likely familiar with headlines describing the recurring “deluge of disinformation” in our political life. Disinformation—distorted or false information disseminated with the desire to deceive those who encounter it—is nothing new. As historians have shown, conspiracy theories, a form of disinformation that many in the media see as the great threat to American life today, have been something of a constant in U.S. political life for more than a century.
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Sep 11, 2024 | 
jamesgmartin.center | Jacob Bruggeman
Asked about chatbots in 2022, a colleague or professor may have replied, “Huh?” In 2024, however, AI-assisted chatbots are seemingly everywhere: embedded in social-media feeds, integrated into workflows, and visibly open on many a screen in America’s classrooms.
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May 2, 2024 | 
fusionaier.org | Jacob Bruggeman
By Jacob Bruggeman Nostalgia seems to be everywhere in politics today. On the left, communitarian movements and concepts like “degrowth" seem to search for a future informed by a human past that was more localized and in touch with the environment. Then too, policy proposals like those clustered in the “Green New Deal” explicitly harken back to the heyday of midcentury and wartime liberalism, when the American never shied but rather embraced big social problems and infrastructure projects.
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Apr 24, 2024 | 
discoursemagazine.com | Jacob Bruggeman
In a November 2023 New York Timesinterview, OpenAI’s on-again, off-again CEO, Sam Altman, was asked about the risks of novel AI technologies and even the ominous possibility of AI-driven human extinction. He responded, rather dismissively, by reaffirming his belief in technology as the driver of human progress. “Yeah, I actually don’t think we’re all going to go extinct,” he said. “I think it’s going to be great.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | Jacob Bruggeman |Daniel Miller |Samuel Gregg |Rachel Lu
In his 1889–90 fictional portrait of aspiring Victorian artists grasping for success, Henry James observed that novels of the age were “large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary.” Science, technology, and imperial expansion encouraged Enlightenment thinkers and popular broadsides to rhapsodize about the steady march of “progress” and the supposedly rational, modern subjects beating its drum.
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Apr 5, 2024 | 
jamesgmartin.center | Jacob Bruggeman
We are living through a period described by technologists as an “AI Boom” or “AI Spring.” A swift and impressive gain of function in generative artificial-intelligence systems (AI), made possible by developments in computer-science techniques known as deep neural networking, has given new force to old questions about technology and society. Drawing on new designs for large language models especially, technologists have sustained a period of major investment and growth in the industry.
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Mar 8, 2024 | 
fusionaier.org | Jacob Bruggeman
By Jacob Bruggeman In 1929, Albert Einstein sat for an interview with the Saturday Evening Post. Einstein’s work on general relativity and unified field theory won him a Nobel Prize in 1921 and captivated the public imagination. When the Post interviewer asked about the inner-workings of the physicist's mind, Einstein replied: “I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited.
