Reviews – Audibly Speaking: A Site of History and Memory

Ai is perhaps the ruination of higher education, at least as it is currently being used by many students with a shameless push from the new barbarians at the gates, the techies who come up with this stuff and promise that it will solve all the individuals woes and help them “succeed” in school.  Well, evidently “success’ does not include learning, because there is no more effective if deadly way to squelch learning than through machine learning, where only the machine “learns,” not the luckless human who puts it through its paces.

Stephen Fry, the great British writer, condemns AI’s cost to creativity in a Youtube Video that says it far better than can I:

Fry Reads a Letter About AI

What a pleasure it was for me to interview Laura Malvoyante about her insights into society’s growing need for digital minimalism in the face of the addictiveness of tech. Technology is a voracious feeder on the limited and priceless commodity of time in our lives.  At the same time, sometimes the antidote to this invasion is technology itself, in the form of devices that can force upon ourselves, in their build capacity and form factors, a more limited and rational relationship to the digital plenitude.  Laura’s matchless intelligence on this topic,  and her own personal journey through digital addiction and the nexus between disability and device, make this one of the most important and timely episodes presented on Audibly Speaking.

This podcast episode reviews the film director Peter Jackson’s new film about World War I, “They Shall Not Grow Old.”  Using new technologies and old-fashioned respect for the facts, Jackson has crafted a documentary that brings old newsreels vividly to live, converting what the film was able to capture into what the cameramen of 1918 actually saw through their lens.