Frank Pasquale

Trebor Scholz and the New School for Social Research are sponsoring a conference in a few weeks on the political… Read More »Digital Labor at the New School

I’m glad to see all the Google focus here! (And I’m sorry to have been away for so long–a number… Read More »DIY Book Scanner

Tyler Cowen’s “Good and Plenty” promotes the use of market mechanisms to fund culture. He’s recently turned his attention to… Read More »Valuation and Virtue in the New Economy

I sometimes wonder if the flipside of the AI campaign to make machines more humanlike is a pharmacological campaign to make humans as quiescent as machines. As global competition increases the value of productivity, an underground world of neuro-enhancing drugs is a growing part of campus life. But what about “emotional enhancements?” Christopher Lane, whose work I’ve discussed before, foresees a new market, and new perils:

[T]he American Psychiatric Association . . . has generated untold amounts of publicity and incredulity . . . by debating at its convention whether bitterness should become a bona fide mental disorder. Bitterness is “so common and so deeply destructive,” writes Shari Roan at the Los Angeles Times, “that some psychiatrists are urging it be identified as a mental illness under the name post-traumatic embitterment disorder.” “The disorder is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder,” she continues, “because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. People with PTSD are left fearful and anxious. Embittered people are left seething for revenge.”

Read More »A Machine Would Never Be Bitter

Here is a very nice NYT profile of Beth Noveck’s work at the White House to use technology to enhance… Read More »Noveck’s Proposals for Open Government