“Hello, I’m ELIZA, I’ll be your therapist today.” In 1966, an MIT computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum became one of the first people to have a conversation with a machine. He’d created what we now refer to as a “chatbot,” and he ran it deep within the MIT labs on a huge supercomputer of the same family as the ENIAC. He named the program ELIZA, after the character Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion who is taught more refined speech and manners as s

Among the many things that kept J. Edgar Hoover up at night during the Cold War, one of the most distressing was the prospect of a nationwide truckers’ strike. The expansion of the federal highway system had made trucking a vital lifeblood of American domestic logistics, and thus a primary target of Soviet Communist subversion. Communist putsches had succeeded in taking over regional branches of the Teamsters Union in the 30s and 40s, and while the Teamsters had pushed back a

Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day had quite the reception at Cannes in 2001. The festival is known for overwrought European audience...

As the COVID-19 pandemic escalated in the winter of 2020, many people seemed to have trouble grasping the concept of exponential...

I’m at an age where the movie stars I grew up with are getting old. Harrison Ford is in his 80s, Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks are...