When tech writer Vauhini Vara was struggling to process her sister’s death in 2021, she asked an early version of ChatGPT to write about it through an increasingly complex series of prompts. The essays in her collection, “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age” build on her conversations with AI, enlisting its help to grapple with what it means to be human when our thoughts, our words — and with them, our very humanity — are filtered through machines. We talk to Vara about how technological capitalism is redefining what it means to be human.

Guests:

Vauhini Vara, tech journalist and novelist; her new collection of essays is “Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age”

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