What Happens When Independent Machines Make Mistakes (And They Will)?

“Products and services that make decisions autonomously will also need to resolve ethical dilemmas—a requirement that raises additional risks and regulatory and product development challenges. Scholars have now begun to frame these challenges as problems of responsible algorithm design. They include the puzzle of how to automate moral reasoning.” – Harvard Business Review

Are Museums An Education Or An Experience?

“It has made me unexpectedly nostalgic for an idea of museums as spaces where the individual can go and explore on their own without being told what to think; spaces to contemplate works of art which express and demonstrate a different set of ideas and beliefs from the present. I don’t want constantly to be badgered and made to feel guilty that my ancestors have travelled the world collecting objects in order better to understand and interpret the world. I don’t necessarily regard the ideas and beliefs of museums in the past as morally reprehensible, but, instead, believe that many of them were stimulated by curiosity and a passionate desire for the understanding of other cultures — a spirit not necessarily of plunder, but of awe.” – The Critic

Learning To Hear Beethoven

James Wood: “It took me some time to listen properly to Beethoven, to get past the heroic glower of his portrait, the worldwide canonicity. (Surely it didn’t help that our entire generation, like those before us, had to trudge through Für Elise and what we could manage of the Pathétique on the piano. I used to go to sleep to the broken sounds of those pieces, as my brother, five years older, toiled downstairs at his ‘homework’.) It wasn’t till my early twenties that I started listening to the piano sonatas as they demand to be heard: evenly, carefully.” – London Review of Books