Was chatting with a coder friend recently about artificial intelligence (AI) and the persistent buzz that it will be replacing countless jobs in the future. Increasingly, those jobs will include the so-called “knowledge” jobs at which I made my living. College education in the humanities, learning how to read, research, think, evaluate and write? Bahhhhahaha! Better at this point to pick up a useful skill such as Certified Robot Assistant in an Amazon warehouse, where your main concern is troubleshooting any complications the robots encounter finding the items Jeff Bezos has promised his customers they’ll receive in a few nanoseconds.…
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A vacation trip to the east coast last week brought forth a surprise. Despite my best (or worst?) intentions to mix in some work with the pleasure of my first experience of New England in the fall, it turned out that for the several days I spent on the rural Maine coast, I had no Internet access. Adding insult to injury, my cellphone service was down as well. Apparently, there are not enough people out there to warrant the digital infrastructure that would allow those far-flung inhabitants to keep fully on pace with the 21st century. Now, I am someone…
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I was really worried about that Abby Wambach! Thirty-five years old now, holder of two Olympic gold medals, the all-time leading goal scorer in the history of professional soccer, the international women’s soccer player of the year in 2012. But she’d never won a World Cup championship, and the titanic match against Japan last Sunday was her final shot! Talk about high stakes!! Millions of people around the world were, as her mother told an L.A. Times reporter, “praying for her.” I wasn’t quite going that far, there being a few more pressing causes on my prayer list. If I…
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Is it possible for art to cross a line into such monstrous or simply offensive or empty moral terrain that it is no longer deserving of categorization as “art?” A quick look at dictionary.com’s basic definition of art yields this: “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.” “According to whose aesthetic principles and using what metric of the ‘beautiful,’” I can hear First Amendment civil libertarians and self-styled avant garde artists asking already. Good questions. The questions have particular relevance to post-modern art, that period from…
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Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. —Ecclesiastes1 I was a fight fan in my youth. On Friday nights, my dad would pop home after his arduous work week with a quart or two of Eastside Old Tap Lager in hand—or when he was feeling flush, the slightly pricier Miller High Life—and we’d tune into the Friday Night Fights hosted by Don Dunphy, whose voice remains permanently etched in my memory. (Exactly where, is what I want to know, and how does memory encode itself into my brain matter to so clearly remember a voice?)…