Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
This month, Noema celebrated its fifth anniversary as a critical and award-winning magazine known for its success in discerning and perceptive curation of content illustrated by original works of art.
While most media these days are jumping into the meme miasma, Noema is going in the opposite direction. We step back and look at the big picture with long-form essays and interviews that connect the dots with perspective and link the correspondence of ideas, always looking beyond boundaries to seed the cross-fertilization that generates new thinking.
When Yuval Noah Harari was hosted last year by the Berggruen Institute’s Studio B series, which brings big thinkers together with Hollywood storytellers, I asked him, “Your knowledge is so encyclopedic. Where do you get your information?”
“Most information is junk,” he told me. “I actually go on information fasts to cleanse my mind. What I do is read long books that go deeply into subjects. And I read Noema.” That perfectly encapsulates how we see our mission.
Noema publishes online weekly and in print once annually. Each print edition is organized around an encompassing theme that enters through the window of current events to plumb the deeper dynamics at work in our age of upheaval. The first edition during Covid was “The Great Acceleration” followed by “Planetary Realism,” “Rupture,” “Passage,” “Threshold” and the forthcoming “Paradigm Shifts.” The cover is original artwork.
The core of the evening celebration in Los Angeles was a panel discussion titled “Does AI Make Us More Or Less Human?” Kara Swisher, the famed chronicler of the rise of Big Tech, moderated a discussion between Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who is at the cutting edge of AI development at Google Research, and Shannon Vallor, one of the more prominent scholars today who focuses on what it means to be human in the age of AI. You can watch the full discussion below.
As she has written in her essays for Noema, Vallor pointed out how the narrow optimization of performing tasks via the “unthinking intelligence” of machines cannot match the range of lived experience, emotion and labor of understanding that constitutes human intelligence. Her concern is that, as AI takes over cognitive tasks, our competence in those domains will diminish as we become dependent on programmed robots, thus losing our agency and autonomy. As she sees it, the market incentive structure that drives Big Tech in what it chooses to optimize is taking us down a path that will not empower, but disempower, humanity.
Agüera y Arcas sees in this same evolution of AI not the loss of agency, but its amplification to “more-than-human” intelligence as a fully interdependent symbiosis of human and machine capacities emerges. He also reiterated a theme of one of his Noema essays: The self-organizing principle of “computation” — by which organisms construct themselves by learning from the environment, assembling information and sharing code to reproduce, grow and thrive — also applies to the development of inorganic intelligence, which will become “life-like” as it further evolves.
Swisher echoed Vallor’s concerns about how the narrow self-interest of Big Tech is deforming the potential of AI. Alarmed at the unaccountability of the tech oligarchs, she insisted on the need for regulation by elected officials. She provocatively noted at one point that she’d rather have conservative Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in charge of AI regulation than Elon Musk.
Because Noema is situated in California with a wide network of relationships in Silicon Valley, we are one of the few publishing platforms that explores the larger philosophical and social implications of AI with its actual creators. Those looking for this kind of critical engagement sooner or later find their way to our pages.
The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, for example, is drawing on Noema essays and interviews as it prepares to examine what AI means for human dignity and social justice globally.
The new pope, Leo XIV, has already indicated he will focus on AI, following in the stead of his papal namesake, Leo XIII, who issued a famous encyclical in 1891 at the outset of the industrial revolution, “Rerum Novarum” — “of new things” or “revolutionary change.” It threaded a path between capitalism and socialism, defending private property but also emphasizing “distributive justice” and workers’ rights in a manufacturing market economy that produces greater inequality even as it generates vast new wealth. “In our own day,” Leo XIV said in his first meeting with cardinals after being elected, the Church needs to update its social teaching in response “to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
Noema will cover the Vatican’s reflections as part of our continuing conversation about what AI means for being human in the 21st century. That conversation will also follow the threads of other major challenges from the planetary imperative of stemming climate change to synthetic biology and the return of geopolitics to great power spheres of influence. If you are looking for the big picture, stay tuned to Noema.
