Digital Americas

The Comedy of Computation is out! https://www.sup.org/books/literary-studies-and-literature/comedy-computation

In this cultural history of the computer, Benjamin Mangrum shows that comedy has been central to how we've made sense of the technology's sweeping effects on public life and private experience. From the first Broadway play to include a computer in the 1950s to popular films like You've Got Mail and joke-telling digital assistants, Mangrum assembles an extensive archive of work by writers, filmmakers, programmers, engineers, and other technologists who have coupled comedy with computation.

Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? | Stephen Harrison The world’s most important knowledge platform needs young editors to rescue it from chatbots – and its own tired practices, says tech writer Stephen Harrison

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8waycYyy7E/?igsh=MTltYmx2Z2dxdzV3cQ==

25 Years Later, Here We Are 🌐 David Bowie predicting the future of the internet. The footage is from a BBC interview from 1999. Video Credit: BBC Archive | YouTube #davidbowie #internet #FutureOfTech #socialmedia #humanity #futuretechnology #prediction #society

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/aug/03/open-ai-sam-altman-chatgpt-gary-marcus-taming-silicon-valley

OpenAI’s Sam Altman is becoming one of the most powerful people on Earth. We should be very afraid Sam Altman’s ChatGPT promises to transform the global economy. But it also poses an enormous threat. Here, a scientist who appeared with Altman before the US Senate on AI safety flags up the danger in AI – and in Altman himself

https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-copyrighted-material-parliament

OpenAI Pleads That It Can’t Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free OpenAI is begging Parliament to allow it to use copyrighted works because it's "impossible" for the company to make money without them.

Every Time You Post to Instagram, You’re Turning on a Light Bulb Forever

https://www.texasmonthly.com/arts-entertainment/halt-and-catch-fire-atx-festival-reunion/

Ten Years On, ‘Halt and Catch Fire’ Is More Urgent Than Ever An uncynical show about tech founders might seem like a relic. Its creators disagree.

ChatGPT and the movie ‘Her’ are just the latest example of the ‘sci-fi feedback loop’ Science fiction and technological innovation feed off each other in an ongoing back-and-forth that can play out over decades.

ChatGPT is bu****it - Ethics and Information Technology Recently, there has been considerable interest in large language models: machine learning systems which produce human-like text and dialogue. Applications of these systems have been plagued by persistent inaccuracies in their output; these are often called “AI hallucinations”. We argue that thes...

First came “spam.” Now, with AI-assisted search, we’ve got “slop.” https://nyti.ms/4aWPp0f