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 for centuries, these same AI advances threaten to create what we might call the “connection paradox” — simultaneously connecting us globally while isolating us individually.

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 happening.

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 question: How do we prepare for the future that … (read more)

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; the systems for monitoring and enforcing complia … (read more)

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 mind, and feed the devices that run beneath our lives consume a lot of energy, … (read more)

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 airplanes that keep flights safe and timely.

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 using AI tools are always cheating. Learning to use AI isn’t … (read more)

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.

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?”

There is a wide boundary between the teacher and the student, found most profoundly in colleges and universities. It is thick with emotional distance.

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 affects us, what vies for our very being.

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 to center my final discussion on love.

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 love and the concern for each other might counter our society’s obsession with the ills … (read more)

Premature deaths produce an intense, unyielding force of overwhelming sadness. This is where we find ourselves at Middlebury College.

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 into such darkness.