Héctor Vila
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Hector Vila: What podcasts offer in the age of AI
Something curious is happening in our increasingly automated world. While AI promises to democratize expertise, eliminate drudgery, and amplify human intelligence, potentially solving problems that have plagued humanity…
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Hector Vila: AI and geopolitics: An early experiment gone awry?
The current lull following the application of world-wide, and world-changing, tariffs levied on “Liberation Day” gives us space to try to understand what happened, and maybe what is…
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Hector Vila: AI and the uncertain future
Throughout this series on artificial intelligence, we’ve explored its fundamentals, examined its environmental impact, and analyzed its implications for governance. Now let’s turn to perhaps the most crucial…
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Hector Vila: AI governance looming large
Governance has dominated our discourse since at least 2016. We’ve been wrestling with the distribution of rights and responsibilities among different participants; rules and procedures for making decisions;…
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Hector Vila: AI is feeding global warming
Data centers, which house large numbers of networked computers, servers and storage systems that process, store and distribute massive amounts of data out of sight, and out of…
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Hector Vila: How to understand the different kinds of AI
Artificial Intelligence is a confusing term because it encompasses quite a lot. Take for instance cruise control in your car, that’s artificial intelligence, as is the autopilot on…
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Guest editorial: How AI is reshaping education and society
We’re halfway into the fall, 2024, academic term, and chatter suggests anxiety about the future of education and artificial intelligence. That AI will replace human teachers entirely. Students…
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Hector Vila: A great awakening in the offing?
Since I have been writing about higher education in these pages, it’s incumbent that I address the current campus protests against the agony in Gaza.
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Hector Vila: The Mentor
One day, a young first-year student comes up to me and says, “Yo, brotha Hector, why can’t you take me under your wing?”
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Hector Vila: The boundaries of education
There is a wide boundary between the teacher and the student, found most profoundly in colleges and universities. It is thick with emotional distance.
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Hector Vila: Seeking an antidote to despair
If we are to consider the place of love in our work and world, we need to be able to respond to what is coming at us, what…
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Hector Vila: The humanities: An antidote for the times?
In the two culminating courses of the recent fall term, where the focus was on delving into profound and demanding experiences to foster expressive exploration, I deliberately opted…
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Editorial: A phrase to ponder
In his column today, Middlebury College Professor Hector Vila writes a probing piece about how the humanities might be an antidote to the anxieties of today’s era; how…
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Guest editorial: College sees firsthand the impact of ‘deaths of despair’
Premature deaths produce an intense, unyielding force of overwhelming sadness. This is where we find ourselves at Middlebury College.
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Community forum: A troubled world, and the yearning to heal
At Middlebury College, students in my courses “Writing to Heal” and “The Rhetorics of Death” grapple with a profound incredulity: we couldn’t have anticipated the world’s swift descent…
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Hector Vila: Rwanda proves exception in Africa
The Women Deliver Conference has a powerful history, though in many places in the world, not least of which is the U.S., women’s rights are being challenged.