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 […]

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 […]