Artificial intelligence has quickly become one of the most-watched fields in the world over the past few years. Many hail the technology as the future of innovation, while others watch wearily as AI becomes more and more advanced. Recently, the California Legislature passed a regulatory policy aimed at promoting AI safety, which, on its face, […]
Tag: AI
On Happyend, Duty, and Justice
Neo Sora’s 2024 film, Happyend, brings to life a verisimilar portrayal of a country in decline: a right-wing, authoritarian, surveillance state slowly in construction. In a process replicated throughout the world, basic rights — to privacy, to refuge, to anonymity — are stripped away, ostensibly in the name of group-safety. High school students in Sora’s […]
Why California Should Push Nuclear
The word “nuclear” is often associated with gigantic, terrifying bombs, or the neon-green sludge that contributes to the erratic behavior of Homer Simpson. And yes, it earned that reputation with infamous mistakes, such as the horrifying incidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. However, one must keep in mind that these mistakes were made by […]
From Cricket to Corruption: How Imran Khan Won an Election from Prison
In the tumultuous landscape of Pakistani politics, Imran Khan’s journey from a cricket star to a prominent political figure has been nothing short of a rollercoaster. In the 1980s and 1990s, Khan served as an all-rounder on the Pakistan cricket team and was regarded as one of cricket’s best. However, in 2018, Khan was elected […]
Silenced Voices and Empty Stages: The Impact of the SAG-AFTRA Strike
The year is 1920, and Hollywood is a brand new industry which nobody is quite familiar with yet. There is a boost in American income that flows toward the entertainment industry due to heightened prosperity. Next thing society knew, “the popularity of “moving pictures” grew in the early part of the decade [and] “movie palaces,” […]
Embracing AI: ChatGPT is a Teacher’s Friend, Not Foe
Artificial intelligence is powerful. We can use it to generate artistic images with a short prompt in DALL-E, or to negotiate our daily lives via smart assistants like Siri or Alexa. But as ever, the arrival of transformative technology raises doubt and fear: will it be made to do our bidding in ways that improve […]
The U.S.-China Brain Drain
This publication, the Berkeley Political Review, is situated within the Bay Area, a section of California that is best known for its incredible innovations in the technology field. The ecosystem created in Silicon Valley is unlike any other comparable industry ecosystem in the world and has led to the creation of world-conquering technology companies. Focusing […]
Algorithmic Injustice
Algorithms in the justice system started off as a noble solution to a serious problem: the bias of judges. There are two distinct ways that judges can be biased — targeted bias, such as sexist and racist beliefs, and cognitive bias, ways in which our mental circuitry fails to work logically (such as how judges […]
Artificial Intelligence and the Loss of Humanity
The term “artificial intelligence,” or AI, has become a buzzword in recent years. Optimists see AI as the panacea to society’s most fundamental problems, from crime to corruption to inequality, while pessimists fear that AI will overtake human intelligence and crown itself king of the world. Underlying these two seemingly antithetical views is the assumption […]
AI (Part I): Anew Infrastructure
“Artificial intelligence” (AI) is sometimes jokingly used to label tasks that computers cannot yet do. Among these is possessing a sense of humor, which “requires self-awareness, spontaneity, linguistic sophistication, and empathy,” and extends beyond the wonky errors of Google Translate and auto-generated YouTube captions. However, in spite of its apparent shortcomings, AI has silently yet […]