Is artificial intelligence the ghost in the machine, or just a machine?

From supernatural beings to AI models, I explore how humans moralize invisible agency, and the ethics of how we make use of it.

Recent Posts

  • This Is Not a Big Deal. Relax.
    ICE’s Mobile Fortify app turns facial recognition into a street-level surveillance tool aimed at non-citizens and citizens alike. In October of 2020, during the latter part of the first Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security— specifically, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released a smartphone app with AI facial recognition capability. CBP claims that close to a … Read more
  • ICE’s domestic terrorism problem
    In all of the horrific stories surrounding the killing of Renee Good by ICE officer Jonathan Ross, I haven’t seen much speculation about why he was not only filming her with his smartphone at the time, but did so while moving around the front of her car, and even using it to record himself in … Read more
  • The wealthiest man in the world is an illegal immigrant
    A few days ago, J.D. Vance accused Ilhan Omar of “immigration fraud.” She responded in a statement that began: “This is rich coming from someone who literally said they were willing to ‘create stories’ to redirect the media,” referring to Vance’s own admission to spreading the lie that Haitian immigrants eat people’s pets in September of 2024, … Read more
  • The immigrant physicians sustaining U.S. healthcare
    The intersection of healthcare and immigration policy is found in the halls of hospitals and clinics across America, where increasing numbers of International Medical Graduates (IMGs) are filling in for doctors who won’t return, and state governments are doing their best to usher IMGs into practice where they’re sorely needed. Help (Badly) Wanted: Foreign Doctors … Read more
  • America’s vaccination against equity, and its adverse effects
    The language used to justify policy is…fraught. Every new program is a triumph, as is every cut to an existing one. Every new rule is a sea change, and every executive order a roadmap to utopia. These flowery-but-decisive statements come from all politicians, pointing in all directions, and they always have. But in the United … Read more
  • Mind the strings: Grok 3 and biased AI puppeteers
    Generative AI isn’t supposed to have opinions. Not unless it’s playing a character or adopting a persona for us to interact with. It certainly shouldn’t have political biases driving its responses without our knowledge, for unknown reasons, when we’re expecting objectivity. So when we learn that a generative AI model has been programmed for bias, … Read more
  • No border wands, just brutality: what the death of the CBP One app portends
    It’s infuriating that I have to defend this profoundly unjust yet unfairly maligned, rights-violating, prison gate-keeping, Hollerith-ass, bureaucratic government-enforced insult to human dignity in app form, but here we are. On Inauguration Day, January 20th, one of the first things Trump did was cancel the CBP One app— an app developed by Customs and Border … Read more
  • Deus ex Smartphone: Healthcare Access Isn’t Going to Democratize Itself
    One of my first-year classes in college was History of Theater, in which I learned how the Greeks built amphitheaters into hillsides, carving out a semicircle of seating for the audience around the stage to maximize. The scenery for a play completes the circle, just as it does for any show in an amphitheater today. … Read more
  • Healthcare tech’s turf war hurts patients- here’s how to protect yourself
    Quick recap In my last post (Down the patient portal: the world of healthcare tech serving you data about you) I introduced the back end of patient engagement from the patient’s perspective. While you can’t choose the digital patient engagement tools your provider uses, you can often choose your provider— and different providers may be … Read more
  • Down the patient portal: the world of healthcare tech serving you data about you
    The subject of patient engagement tools, especially patient portals, took up permanent residence in my head last January when my mother, a few months away from achieving octogenarian status, experienced a health event that would change both of our lives. When she came home from the hospital, suddenly she was no longer under 24-7 observation … Read more
  • The painbot
    Sora is a video generation model that translates text to video, a product of OpenAI released earlier this month, and a painbot is a concept I hatched a few days ago while talking to ChatGPT about AI empathy and the potential for AI to recognize, record, and react to human pain. My initial thought was … Read more
  • I (don’t) feel your pain: A conversation with ChatGPT about what “empathic AI” in healthcare really means
    This is an essay in two parts: First, a somewhat rambling conversation that I had with ChatGPT about its own limitations in healthcare, and the limitations of those designing and using it. After that it’s time for the reality check, and some reflection. I review the research on where things currently stand with empathy and … Read more
  • AI, the labor-saving device
    The discussion about AI, specifically about generative AI (whether it’s labeled as such, or just “AI”), revolves around what it means to be human, and it’s doing my head in. Not because I have trouble grappling with the subject matter– my academic research revolved around intuitions we have about invisible agency, specifically how those intuitions … Read more
  • Letter to the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee regarding CBP One
    Dear Committee Members, specifically Chairman Green, I would like to know why, in numerous published statements, Chairman Green has claimed that Anna Giaritelli published a “groundbreaking scoop showing that the criminal cartels had hijacked the CBP One app using virtual private networks (VPNs), and were exploiting the app to make even more money by scheduling … Read more
  • AI Facial Recognition Technology in CBP One™
    My review of the mobile app, CBP One™: The Border in Your Pocket, considered factors in the development of CBP One’s facial recognition engine, the Traveler Verification Service (TVS), that render it unsuitable for CBP One’s current usage in collecting information from migrants at the border. This post takes a closer look at how CBP … Read more
  • CBP One™: The Border in Your Pocket
    In August of 2018, in light of the growing number of apps under Customs and Border Protection, the agency’s Office of Field Operations (OFO) announced that it would develop the CBP One mobile application in collaboration with the Office of Information Technology (OIT). The app would prevent the confusion that comes with travelers needing to … Read more
  • America: lousiest host ever
    Okay, here’s the deal. How it should be. If you’re in the United States for reasons beyond your control– that is, you didn’t decide to come here on your own, pay for it on your own, and physically get yourself here on your own– you’re entitled to the rights and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship. Additionally, … Read more
  • Tuesday health trilogy
    On Boing Boing, travel writer Bob Harris talks about his feet being given a “pedicure” by doctor fish during a visit to Singapore.  The tiny fish eat dead skin (and only dead skin, thankfully) off the feet, making them a useful treatment for people with psoriasis or eczema.  When salons in a few different places in … Read more