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Podcast: New Models
Episode: Preview | Orit Halpern on Agentic Imaginaries (NM88) 2025
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Our guest is Orit Halpern: co-author of The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023); author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014); and Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden.
Often in discussions about machine learning and smartness, AI is presented as the natural path of human progress, an evolutionary – almost biological – development that emerged out of human communication systems and that has the potential to far exceed them. But as Orit argues, these t...