On Thursday, April 17, Another Look presented Dino Buzzati’s 1960 The Singularity. The book, originally published in 1960, probes some of the deeper human questions surrounding artificial intelligence . It was republished last year in a new translation by Anne Milano Appel for New York Review Books.

Will Dunn, writing in The New Statesman, called it “a stylish, compelling little mystery” that, although more than six decades old, “predicts … with unsettling accuracy. Its characters are confronted by the presumptuous arrogance of men whose brilliance in engineering disguises how morally and emotionally incapable they are.”

The hybrid event took place in Levinthal Hall at the Stanford Humanities Center. Three of the panelists for the event agreed to share their comments. See the posts below.

Panelists included:

•   Stanford Prof. Robert Pogue Harrison, author, director of Another Look, host of the radio talk show and podcast series Entitled Opinions, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books

•   Stanford Prof. Tobias Wolff, one of America’s leading writers and the founding director of Another Look, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Arts.

•   Stanford Associate Prof. Laura Wittman, is a specialist in modern Italian literature. Some of you will remember her from our 2018 event on William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions.

•   Bryan Cheong received his Bachelor of Science from Stanford University with a degree in applied and computational mathematics before receiving a Masters in Materials Science, also from Stanford. For the past few years he’s been working in the high-tech sector of Silicon Valley. 

Listen to the podcast on the link below: