Award-winning journalist and author Vauhini Vara will talk about 鈥淎.I. Dominance and a Planet in Peril: How Speculating About Our Future Illuminates Our Present鈥� on Friday, Feb. 2 at 6 p.m. on the campus of 草榴社区 (UAH). Her program is part of the Dr. Mulk R. Arora Endowed Lecture series in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Photo by Rachel Woolf, courtesy Vauhini Vara
草榴社区 (UAH) will bring Pulitzer Prize finalist and award-winning journalist and author Vauhini Vara to campus on Friday, Feb. 2, for an exploration of artificial intelligence and its possible effects on our society. UAH is a part of the University of Alabama System.
Her program, 鈥�A.I. Dominance and a Planet in Peril: How Speculating About Our Future Illuminates Our Present,鈥� will be presented at 6 p.m. in Morton Hall Room 145 as part of the Dr. Mulk R. Arora Endowed Lecture series in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CAHS).
Hosted by the UAH Humanities Center and CAHS, the event is open to the public free of charge. A reception and book signing will follow at 7:30 p.m. in the Morton Hall Atrium.
A graduate of Stanford University, Vara holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at Colorado State University.
She is a former technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and elsewhere.
When Vara was in college, she lost her older sister to cancer. She had trouble writing about her sister until 2021 when she used an early model of the AI that would become ChatGPT to help her find the right words. Her nine-part essay, 鈥淕hosts,鈥� was published in The Believer and later incorporated into 鈥淭he Ghost in the Machine鈥� episode of the weekly public radio program 鈥淭his American Life.鈥�
Her acclaimed debut novel, 鈥淭he Immortal King Rao,鈥� published in 2022, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics鈥� Circle鈥檚 John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction鈥檚 First Novel Prize. It won the Colorado Book Award. Now it is being adapted for television.