[ad_1] MIT Press Excerpted from Democratizing Our Data: A Manifesto by Julia Lane. Reprinted with permission from The MIT PRESS. Copyright 2020. On sale as an ebook now. On sale in print 9/1/2020. Nowadays when people have an appointment to go to across town, their calendar app obligingly predicts how long it’s going to take […]
Category: mit press
Hitting the Books: Do we really want our robots to have consciousness?
[ad_1] MIT Press Excerpted from How to Grow a Robot: Developing Human-Friendly, Social AI by Mark H. Lee © 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Although I argue for self-awareness, I do not believe that we need to worry about consciousness. There seems to be an obsession with robot consciousness in the media, but why start […]
Hitting the Books: How to be active on social media and still keep your job
[ad_1] MIT Press Excerpted from Keep Calm and Log On: Your Handbook for Surviving the Digital Revolution by Gillian “Gus” Andrews. Reprinted with Permission from The MIT PRESS. Copyright 2020. Who’s in the Audience? Would Your Followers Get Mad? Broadcasting makes a lot of changes to how we communicate, especially when we’re suddenly speaking to […]
Hitting the Books: Without glass, we’d have never discovered the electron
[ad_1] MIT Press Excerpted from The Alchemy of Us – How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another by Ainissa Ramirez. Reprinted with permission from The MIT PRESS. Copyright 2020. Long before the Great War, in 1895, science and magic were hard to separate. That year, Wilhelm Roentgen took a ghostly picture of his wife’s hand using mysterious […]
Hitting the Books: How ‘universal’ stem cells might fix our brains
[ad_1] MIT Press Excerpted from The Future of Brain Repair – A Realist’s Guide to Stem Cell Therapy by Jack Price. Reprinted with permission from The MIT PRESS. Copyright 2020. The work of Gurdon, Thomson, and Yamanaka revealed something quite remarkable: if a cell can be induced to express the appropriate factors, then its fate […]
Hitting the Books: How an attempt at digital allyship fell flat
[ad_1] #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justiceby Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, Brooke Foucault Welles For people living in the margins of American society, Twitter’s ability to connect and amplify their voices offers unprecedented social and political opportunity. Hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter, #GirlsLikeUs, and #ICantBreathe have become rallying cries whose online impacts have resulted in […]
Teaching AI to sing slime mold serenades
[ad_1] The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativityby Arthur I. Miller Most of the time when we hear about AI, they’re taking our jobs or putting us in jail or inflicting some other autonomic horror upon humans. But there’s a second side to that AI coin. One in which machine learning algorithms […]
Stop pranking your kids to impress Jimmy Kimmel
[ad_1] Sharenthood: Why We Should Think before We Talk about Our Kids Onlineby Leah A Plunkett Parents have been proudly posting pictures of their children’s development since the days of the derragotype, probably even before then if they could draw fast enough. But in the modern digital era — where Grandma and Grandpa are a […]