Jul 2026· Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies· 0 citations· 2 references
TL;DR
This review reads the book alongside the regulatory architecture being built on the same theory of agency: the EU AI Act, the harmonised standards beneath it, the UNESCO and OECD ethics frameworks above, and the November 2025 Digital Omnibus provisionally agreed upon in May 2026.
Abstract
David Eliot trained as a card magician before turning to AI research. His Artificially Intelligent sets out to democratise AI for general readers, and on its own terms it succeeds: the history is rich, the writing is clear, and the central argument that AI is socially constructed and democratically redirectable is held with conviction. This review reads the book alongside the regulatory architecture being built on the same theory of agency: the EU AI Act, the harmonised standards beneath it, the UNESCO and OECD ethics frameworks above, and the November 2025 Digital Omnibus provisionally agreed upon in May 2026. The argument here is additive, not corrective. Knowing the trick is not the same as breaking it. The real subject of magic is attention, not secrets. Alongside AI ethics and governance literature, the magician’s eye points to what visibility cannot reach: the case for a code of practice from inside a profession that understands attention management.
How AI systems work by recycling a narrow set of visual tropes in their training data that have very little to do with human notions of intelligence or creativity is shown.
Matti Pohjonen· Anthropological Theory· 0 citations
This essay contends that reading is nothing less than a validation of our shared humanity. However, the author’s joyful reading is increasingly disturbed by the dearth of reading in society at large. Missing is the focused attention on a single passage, unadorned by images, uninterrupted by alerts, unlit by a screen—simply text on paper. But in a world where celebrities appear shinier and happier than anyone in real life, black letters on a white background look like a failure, even aesthetically: too plain, too severe, too boring. For the author, that simplicity is part of the point: letters that do not call attention to themselves but rather to the ideas they signal. Digital media fractures our attention, while reading requires us to maintain focus on something other than ourselves. Reading thus resists two dominant cultural trends: the solipsism of life online and the impulse to move on to whatever is newer, hotter, or simply more outrageous.
This paper examines the intersection of Vedic performing arts including oral recitation, ritual enactment, and commentarial pedagogy with the computational and archival tools of Digital Humanities and calls for a human-centered framework of digital mediation that holds together accessibility and philosophical depth, archival innovation and cultural accountability.
Anita Goswami, Hemlata Negi· ShodhKosh Journal of Visual...· 0 citations
This article examines how practitioners engage with the technology's perceived opacity by placing practitioners’ own descriptions of AI within broader anthropological discussions of magic, and argues that references to ‘AI as magic’ help situate rapidly evolving technological systems within everyday lifeworlds.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Hannah Arendt reimagines the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Rather than treating them as two adjacent fields, she situates aesthetic perception before ideological thinking. If totalitarian movements are distinguished by their disdain for sensual reality, as Arendt argues, resistance must begin by rehabilitating the aesthetic sensibilities that ground ethical judgment and political action. In recent years, Arendt has been widely invoked as a prophet of the present, making The Origins of Totalitarianism a surprise bestseller. But the book ends with only a side glance toward the future, leaving the reader with a devastating diagnosis and no treatment plan. This article draws on Arendt’s conception of aesthesis as embodied perception to reassess how two of her contemporaries, Emmanuel Levinas and Vladimir Nabokov, sought to redefine the roles of philosophy and art in a culture dominated by ideology.
Patrick Eichholz· American Literature· 0 citations
The Philippine perspective suggests that while AI may function as an efficient tool for "automated commodities," it lacks the emotional resonance and accountability required for true Likha.