The Next Civil War
Dispatches from the American Future
Lavin Exclusive Speaker
ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies are changing everything, and that isn't a bad thing. Stephen Marche has been following AI technology long before it gained mainstream attention. He's written extensively for The New Yorker and The Atlantic on the immense opportunity this tech provides for those who learn and adapt to it right now. Programs like ChatGPT give us the chance to rethink why we do things—like the college essay—and figure out what’s truly important. “The value of intentionality, the value of perspective, and the value of intellectual direction is going to be hugely amplified,” Stephen says. With a personal connection with the foremost innovators in the field, he’s uniquely equipped to show us how we can adapt to these new tools.
Stephen has predicted the effects generative AI will have on industries since 2019. Now, his predictions are coming true. For example, the release of ChatGPT is challenging everything within education, giving us the opportunity to rethink the role of teachers, students, and what education is even for. “We’ve been teaching students how to write like machines for a long time,” Stephen says, “and now we’re going to have to teach them how to write like human beings.”
Stephen explores the thorny problems that plague humanity, whether that’s political polarization, inequality, or the complex yet promising generative AI technology. “Artificial intelligence is an ethical quagmire,” he writes in “The Chatbot Problem,” published in The New Yorker. The piece explores the gendered and racialized implications of our speech and how that bias can be encoded in our technology. Stephen poses the question: What is an ethical framework for the distribution of language? And more importantly, what does language do to people?
Marche has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and Esquire, where he wrote a monthly column. He is currently writing a ChatGPT generated novel for Pushkin podcasting, which will be AI-narrated. Stephen is also the author of the blockbuster book The Next Civil War. This stunning piece of speculative non-fiction “should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government” (The New York Times Book Review). His previous books include three novels: Hunger of the Wolf, Raymond and Hannah, and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea.