Labor is “sticky,” the economists say. That’s another way of putting Polanyi’s insight that labor is a fictitious commodity—for a market economy, it is essential that labor be treated as a commodity (i.e., liquified) but also inevitable that it cannot be produced for the market in accordance with demand. This is why at the moment there’s […]

I’ve always liked Paul Krugman, despite the fact that he’s notably to my Right. And I even agree with most of this column. But then some weird logic creeps into his thinking: “Now I’m seeing suggestions that Trumpism is driven by concerns about political gridlock. No, it isn’t. It isn’t even mainly about “economic anxiety.” […]

It is a peculiar feature of the Turing test that in defining intelligence in functional and symbolic terms, it evades (but cannot escape) a longstanding problem in philosophy of mind: the role of the body. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Ex Machina, fictional depictions of AI have often approached the problem from the opposite direction. Where philosophers puzzle over […]