Civic Studies » Artificial intelligence

AI as Satanic

Peter — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:08:48 +0000

“Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them. And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it” (Job […] Continue reading →

AI as the road to socialism?

Peter — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:36:51 +0000

Just under 40% of occupations jobs in the USA may be replaced by AI if it proves to be as powerful as some think it will be.* As a thought-experiment (not as a prediction), imagine that 40% of current workers, or about 60 million Americans, are no longer employed because AI does their former work. […] Continue reading →

can AI solve “wicked problems”?

Peter — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:15:37 +0000

I’ve been reading predictions that artificial intelligence will wipe out swaths of jobs–see Josh Tyrangiel in The Atlantic or Jan Tegze. Meanwhile, this week, I’m teaching Rittel & Webber (1973), the classic article that coined the phrase “wicked problems.” I started to wonder whether AI can ever resolve wicked problems. If not, the best way […] Continue reading →

Reading Arendt in Palo Alto

Peter — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 14:43:39 +0000

During a recent week at Stanford, I reread selections from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (ON) and The Human Condition (HC) to prepare for upcoming seminar sessions. My somewhat grim thoughts were evidently informed by the national news. I share them here without casting aspersions on my gracious Stanford hosts, who bear no responsibility for what […] Continue reading →

Victorians warn us about AI

Peter — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:30:30 +0000

In the fictional dialogue entitled Impressions of Theophrastus Such (first edition, 1879), George Eliot’s first-person narrator envisions the development of machines that can think, affect the physical world, and reproduce themselves. Humans suffer as a result, devolving into passivity and ultimately becoming extinct: Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will have diminished with the diminishing […] Continue reading →

a collective model of the ethics of AI in higher education

Peter — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 16:11:20 +0000

Hannah Cox, James Fisher, and I have published a short piece in an outlet called eCampus News. The whole text is here, and I’ll paste the beginning here: AI is difficult to understand, and its future is even harder to predict. Whenever we face complex and uncertain change, we need mental models to make preliminary […]

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the ACM brief on AI

Peter — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 17:19:11 +0000

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has 110,000 members. As artificial intelligence rapidly acquires users and uses, some ACM members see an analogy to nuclear physics in the 1940s. Their profession is responsible for technological developments that can do considerable good but that also pose grave dangers. Like physicists in the era of Einstein and Oppenheimer, […] Continue reading →