“The Best Books on Citizens’ Assemblies Recommended by Hugh Pope - https://fivebooks.com/best-books/citizen-assemblies-hugh-pope/. A collection of works that resonate with my work on religion in deliberative democratic practices.
Keith Houston, “The Early History of Counting,” - https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/early-history-counting.
“Navigating the Intersection between AI, Automation and Religion – 3 Essential Reads,” - https://theconversation.com/navigating-the-intersection-between-ai-automation-and-religion-3-essential-reads-211587. I’ll be teaching a new course on Virtual Religion next year that addresses some of these matters.
Ben Tarnoff, “A Certain Danger Lurks There”: How the Inventor of the First Chatbot Turned against AI.” - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai.
Annett Vee, “Against Output,” In the Moment - https://critinq.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/against-output/. She is referring to Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and Schmitchell’s recent paper “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?”
Carl Zimmer, “2 Leading Theories of Consciousness Square Off” - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/science/consciousness-theories.html.
Monica Westin, “Ingenious Librarians,” https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search. Extended mind theory has much to say about the theoretical modeling of our reliance upon others in search technologies.
Italo Calvino, “The Written World and the Unwritten World,” - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/01/05/the-written-world-and-the-unwritten-world/. An interesting comment from a lecture Calvino gave in 1983. It evinces a kind of mysticism about the unwritten world. One wonders what Calvino might have made of the more recent biodeconstruction of Francesco Vitale. As Calvino noted in this same lecture, “I started from the irreconcilable difference between the written world and the unwritten world; if their two languages merge, my argument crumbles.”
Paul Strathern, “The Sheer Teeming Multiplicity and Variety of It All: The Life and Work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder,” https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/sheer-teeming-multiplicity-and-variety-it-all. Bruegel’s 1563 The Tower of Babel would be part of his answer.
Jaron Lanier, “There Is No A.I.” - https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/there-is-no-ai. As Lanier notes, if A.I. had inbuilt provenance then it could more easily achieve the “foundation agreement” amongst his tech colleagues “that deepfakes—false but real-seeming images, videos, and so on—should be labelled as such by the programs that create them. Communications coming from artificial people, and automated interactions that are designed to manipulate the thinking or actions of a human being, should be labelled as well. We also agree that these labels should come with actions that can be taken. People should be able to understand what they’re seeing, and should have reasonable choices in return.”