Noema Magazine: 5-Year Anniversary

This year, Noema Magazine – published by the Berggruen Institute – celebrated its fifth anniversary as an award-winning, long-form journal exploring fresh ideas to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

To commemorate this milestone, Noema Magazine brought together renowned AI experts Blaise Agüera y Arcas and Prof. Shannon Vallor to discuss whether AI makes us more or less human. This debate, moderated by journalist Kara Swisher, explored the philosophical ramifications of AI as an emerging transformative technology, as well as our general understanding of intelligence.

The full conversation is available to stream on the Noema Magazine Youtube channel.

As a prelude, Noema Magazine staged a cross-disciplinary performance curated by Alice Scope, drawing from Shannon Vallor's essay "The Danger of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think.” The performance explores Vallor's central thesis: Why do we insist on using “superhuman” to describe something that inherently isn’t? Featuring multimodal artist Portrait XO alongside movement artists Jas Lin, Layne Paradis Willis, Keilan Stafford and Hope Spears, the performance engaged with the essay through nature mapping, choreography and sonic deconstruction of computational logics.

The performance – entitled “System Fatal” – can also be viewed on the Noema Magazine YouTube channel

To learn more about Noema’s fifth anniversary and plans for the future, read editor-in-chief Nathan Gardels’ write-up on the Noema Magazine website