As AI becomes embedded in daily life, understanding how it works matters more than its dazzling outputs. The experiment described here used a generalized adversarial network (GAN) trained on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to learn and produce the novel’s cryptic language. This interdisiplinary project shed light on the “childlike operations” Joyce used to create the novel’s idiom and mapped the latent mathematical structures that shape what the AI knows—illustrating along the way how culture influences AI and, we suspect, the reverse. Read this article
Ignore the apocalyptic title. The subtitle, “Does anyone have a plan for what happens next?” is the point. If AI transforms work slowly, the author argues, we’ll be fine. Faster and widespread change will test not just the economy but our democracy itself. His talks with economists and CEOs make the case for both sides but reveal how little we know. Despite the correctives he suggests, his final question lingers: Are we “approaching the kind of disruption that can be managed with statistics—or the kind that creates statistics no one can bear to count?” Read this article
Today’s brutal assault on higher ed obscures longstanding unhappiness by conservatives with the university-government relationship, albeit one that never previously reached all-out war. This in-depth look explores why universities didn’t see the battle coming—both their adaptability to past changes and their blind-eye to growing public unpopularity. While the Right will never be able to create new universities at the caliber of those they hope to destroy, the author argues, “the golden era of autonomy for universities is probably not going to return.” Read this article
Two renowned economists highlight the pernicious practices and effects that rankings perpetuate. Elite schools provide powerful springboards for professional success, yet their students are drawn disproportionately from the top 0.1% of incomes. And such colleges are not as meritocratic as they’d like one to believe, admitting many students not on academic merit but on criteria that already favor the wealthy. Teasing this out, the authors suggest how to design admissions policies that are more meritocratic and increase socioeconomic diversity. Read this article
By defining “the good life” in terms of individuality, exceptionalism, and elite status, our culture (with social media’s help) has impoverished the concept, putting it out of reach for most and damaging key societal bonds. Despite a fine critique of meritocracy, the author’s focus is not higher ed. But he suggests how liberal education, vocational training, and other learning routes can chip away at a current view of success and happiness that is vastly unattainable and replace it with one that will improve the lot of both individuals and society as a whole. Read this article
