What does it mean to learn when algorithms increasingly shape how knowledge is produced, organized, and interpreted? Editors Elizabeth de Freitas, Matthew X. Curinga, and Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román join Shreya Urvashi to talk about their book Learning Under Algorithmic Conditions (U Minnesota Press, 2026), a collection that examines how artificial intelligence and computational systems are changing education, cognition, and ideas of human intelligence. The editors discuss the complexities of algorithm, training data as curriculum, AI bias, and the concept of more-than-human learning. They also explore the relationship between contemporary technologies and colonial forms of reason, the limits of treating bias as a purely technical problem, and what happens to human agency as learning becomes increasingly entangled with algorithmic systems.

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Today I’m speaking with Garrison Lovely, technology journalist and author of the new book, Obsolete: The AI Industry's Trillion Dollar Race to Replace Us — and How to Stop It (OR Books, 2026). Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most discussed and most misunderstood topic today. Even to the experts and captains of industry, the frontier large language models are essentially black boxes. AI poses many reasons to be both skeptical and optimistic, yet it also poses a fundamental threat to our current economic order and social contract. If AI succeeds, what will it mean for workers, consumers, and the huddled masses who do not own the multi-trillion dollar companies directing the global economy? Garrison Lovely has coined the term, Obsoleting Project to describe the goal of AI companies to build machines that outperform humans on nearly every task. It reimagines technology, not as a tool of efficiency, but rather as a tool that replaces labor full-stop. What happens to our society if they succeed? Garrison’s Obsolete is a fantastic round-up of the most important social and economic challenges posed by AI. I’m thrilled today to have Garrison on The Truth About Bullshit to understand a bit more about the Obsoleting Project.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.

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Since the advent of computers, society has fantasized about conversing with machines. In Divination Engines: Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and the Making of Algorithmic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Dr. Xiaochang Li shows readers how that dream both fueled the demand for data and set the stage for today’s generative AI. 

With original research and clear explanations, Dr. Li elucidates the origins of what’s known as natural language processing (NLP) and the heated twentieth-century debates between computer scientists, linguists, and communication engineers that shaped today’s technology. Starting with early devices that recorded, analyzed, and attempted to interpret human speech, she demonstrates how computer speech recognition, particularly efforts led by Bell Labs and IBM, advanced technology by deemphasizing linguistic meaning in favor of statistical prediction. In other words, researchers gradually abandoned systems that sought to understand human language, opting instead for work-arounds that simply predicted patterns in speech and text data. That solution became incredibly and surprisingly adaptable. As Dr. Li reveals, transforming linguistic questions into engineering ones ushered in the routine operation of search engines, spam filters, and the varied content sorting and recommendation mechanisms that regulate the access, circulation, and legitimacy of information across every platform. But this has all come at the cost of forever requiring copious and ever-growing amounts of new data.

At its core, Divination Engines illuminates how the artifacts of human communication—speech, text, and images—have become both the fodder for and products of computers. This connection between communication and computation, Li shows, has given rise to data-driven analytics, machine learning, and today’s algorithmic culture.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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What if AI’s biggest impact on journalism isn’t replacing journalists, but forcing us to rethink what journalism is for?

In this episode, Joanne Kuai speaks with Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, authors of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination (Polity, 2027).

For decades, journalism has been caught on a “hamster wheel” of acceleration: producing more stories, for more platforms, with fewer resources. AI promises even greater efficiency, but is doing more with less really what journalism needs?

Lewis, Zamith, and Dodds argue that the current AI moment offers something more consequential: an opportunity to reimagine journalism itself. The conversation explores what remains distinctly human about journalism when machines can increasingly perform creative and cognitive tasks; how dependence on AI companies and digital infrastructure is reshaping media power; what AI means for journalism education and human judgement; and whether journalism can harness these technologies in ways that strengthen, rather than erode, its democratic purpose.

The conversation also raises a more fundamental question: is preserving journalism as an institution the goal, or should we rethink how society meets its information needs altogether?

Journalism in the Age of AI is available open access. Learn more and access the book here.

About the authors

Seth C. Lewis is the inaugural Elcan Jefferson Scholars Foundation Distinguished Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies at the University of Virginia. Previously, he was the founding holder of the Shirley Papé Chair in Emerging Media and Director of Journalism at the University of Oregon. In his research, Lewis examines the social implications of emerging technologies and their consequences for news and public life.

Rodrigo Zamith is an Associate Professor and former Chair of the Journalism Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of journalism and technology, with a focus on understanding the social implications of emerging technologies for how news is produced, distributed, and consumed. He is a recipient of UMass’ Distinguished Teaching Award.

Tomás Dodds is an Assistant Professor in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Director of its Public Tech Media Lab. His research examines the evolving relationship between journalism and technology, with a focus on how journalists and media organizations can develop open-source tools and artificial intelligence systems that serve the public interest.

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Beyond the Facts: Tacit Knowledge and the Hidden Infrastructure of Our Informed Times (Bloomsbury, 2025) describes tacit knowledge, what it is, how it used and its role in our current data driven world. Author James Cortada argues that fuzzy, hard-to describe information is greater and more, important than just hard facts. What is tacit knowledge? It is what we might consider knowledge that is unable to be fully communicated; knowledge that we understand implicitly, but it is a bit hard to explain. For example, it is the kind of knowledge one needs to ride a bicycle, but that cannot be described precisely on paper in the way one might be able to explain how to cook a dish. Tacit knowledge is the least understood type of information and one of the most difficult to communicate. Yet there is more tacit knowledge in our lives than the specific facts one can find in a book, on the Internet or in the simple form of a fact. This book is designed to introduce the reader to the concept of tacit knowledge and how to recognize and use it. This book offers definitions of tacit knowledge and compares the topic to explicit knowledge, then describes how the former is used today. The author argues that both types are used today and explains how one can use both types of knowledge in their lives. This book is essential primer to understanding tacit knowledge and learning how to use it to your advantage.

Guest: James (Jim) Cortada is a senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota. He is a leading authority on the role of modern information. He holds a PhD in modern history but worked at IBM Corporation for nearly 40 years in sales and consulting. He has written several books on the business history of the computer industry and just over a dozen on the history and use of information over the past two centuries. So, he straddles the subject between historical evolution and its current uses.

Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.

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Long before Google, Amazon, or Microsoft, computer technology shaped how people worked, how markets operated, and how businesses became big. After World War II, military officials and their partners in industry looked to the newly invented electronic computer as they sought to cut costs, speed up labor, manage supply chains, and—they hoped—bring stability to the postwar economy. Their efforts would shape early computer science and the first applications of computer technology in manufacturing and business, with profound consequences for workers and managers alike. By the 1960s, practices originally developed to improve industrial efficiency were being used by Wall Street, influencing how markets worked and even how traders thought. Digital technology became central to finance, tying together far-flung trading floors and automating decision making—with alarming consequences, including the 1987 Black Monday crash.

In Coding Capitalism: Computers and the Remaking of the Postwar US Economy (Columbia University Press, 2026), Dr. Devin Kennedy offers a new history of the digital economy, showing how the computer emerged from—and transformed—capitalism in the United States. He traces how computer science and technology were made by industry, which molded computation to manage factories, financial markets, and entire firms. Drawing on the archives of businesses, computer researchers, regulators, and financial institutions, Coding Capitalism retells the story of the postwar economy and the computer, revealing how mid-century business laid the foundations of the digital world. Bridging business and economic history with the history of science and technology, this book uncovers the prehistory of big tech and demonstrates how capitalism has shaped computing since its invention.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director Eli Karetny sits down with Alexis Cruz, founder of Enough Consulting and former strategic advisor for governance at Meta. Cruz explores how the proliferation of AI and digital platforms has shifted global politics into an "anocracy"—a precarious gray zone situated between traditional democracy and authoritarianism.

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Since the 1990s, technologists have promoted a vision of the “cloud” as a shapeless and intangible entity. Grounding the Cloud: Urbanism in the Shadow of Data (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) by Dr. Ali Fard peers through this hazy façade to reveal the earthly material foundations of global computing and data extraction. Tracing the historical and technological development of the cloud computing paradigm, Dr. Fard exposes an ever-evolving project in which ideologies, economic models, and marketing images collude to shape our shared urban environments.

Demonstrating how technology’s spatial footprint now stretches to nearly every corner of the globe, Grounding the Cloud analyzes the often-hidden infrastructures that facilitate platform capitalism—from the mines extracting rare earth minerals in remote regions to the vast global network of fiber-optic cables at the bottom of the oceans to the nondescript data centers that sit on the peripheries of major urban areas. Meanwhile, with compelling examples of smart-city initiatives and corporate campuses, Dr. Fard shows how the future of urbanism is deeply intertwined with the growing economies of data extraction.

Breaking down the myth of a clean and efficient tech urbanism, this book makes visible the complex material geographies and geopolitics that undergird today’s most powerful and omnipresent corporations. A timely critique of the growing agency of tech platforms in determining the future of urban space, Grounding the Cloud offers an essential framework for understanding the shifting relationship between technology and urbanization.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

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