Paul Levinson
Bio
Paul Levinson's novels include The Silk Code & The Plot To Save Socrates; his LPs Twice Upon A Rhyme & Welcome Up. His nonfiction including Fake News in Real Context, The Soft Edge, & Digital McLuhan have been translated into 15 languages.
Stories (603/0)
Review of Westworld 1.6
An outstanding Westworld 1.6 -- the series gets better and better, Isaac Asimov (author of the three later four laws of robotics would've loved it) -- and in this episode jumps into some of the real paradoxes and ethical quandaries of artificial intelligence.
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
Review of Westworld 1.4
"Vacation" — it was the name of a Connie Francis song in the early 1960s (Wikipedia says 1962, and that it was Connie's last big hit, and I remember hearing and singing it in high school), and it was probably the most important word spoken in Westworld 1.4.
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
Review of Twin Peaks: The Return 1.10
Twin Peaks: The Return 1.10 last night ended with a better than usual song, which is saying a lot, since those concluding songs are often the best part of the episode. Last night's song, sung by Rebekah Del Rio—who, I don't know, reminds me a little of Monica Lewinsky—was entitled "No Stars," a nice touch, since the episode has even more stars than usual, but who's counting.
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
Review of Game of Thrones 7.1
Game of Thrones, as everyone knows, was back last night with the start of its seventh season. It was an altogether excellent episode, satisfying in that every major character was given some time, but one thread I especially liked was Sam in the library.
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Geeks
Review of Westworld 1.2
As the second Presidential debate played out across lots of television in October 2016, the second episode of Westworld proceeded on HBO. Actually, it had been available On Demand for about a week -- as our own world became ever more like Westworld in our ability to control our fiction, if not our reality.
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
Review of Westworld 1.1
If you're talking about AI science fiction—robots or androids programmed to convincingly think and act like humans, or almost like humans, or more than humans—you've got to start with Isaac Asimov and his three laws of robotics: (1) a robot can never harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow injury to befall a human, (2) a robot must follow all orders given to it by a human, except if such orders conflict with the first law, and (3) a robot should always act to preserve its own existence, except when following this third law would conflict with the first two. Thus, a robot ordered by a human to dismantle itself must follow that order, unless the robot knows that the human giving such as order was set to commit suicide, a suicide which the robot not dismantled could prevent. (This is not an exact quotation of Asimov's presentation of the three laws, but my own statement of them, with an explanatory example.)
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
Review of Twin Peaks: The Return 1.9
That was the best line in Twin Peaks: The Return 1.9 last night—"I Don't See No Hidden Buttons" (said by the sheriff)—because, of course, he sees no hidden buttons, how could he, if they're hidden, and somehow that deeply obvious statement about what can't be seen is symptomatic of the entire Twin Peaks: The Return story, right?
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
What Amelia Earhart Photo Says About the Power of Photography
I've been thinking about that newly uncovered photograph of Amelia Earhart and its upending of history, telling us she indeed survived that dive her plane apparently took into the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
Review of Twin Peaks: The Return 1.8
Anyone who doubted that Twin Peaks is one bizarre science fiction horror story of a story got their answer tonight in episode 1.8: it is, with a vengeance, spun of gut-wrenching, stomach-churning, searingly mind-blowing wordless narrative the likes of which you don't often see on any television, unless you're maybe watching Donnie Darko someplace the 20th time.
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
Synchronicity
It’s been this way all of my life. Like when I was in high school, and we’d be reading our homework assignments out loud, and some kid would stand up right before me and read pretty much what I had written. Not that he’d cheated or anything. I never showed my work to anyone. And yet he’d written my ideas, even using my words. I had a hard time proving that I wasn’t the cheat. “Great minds think alike,” the more enlightened among my teachers would say. But that was too pat. I knew something else was going on—I just didn’t know what.
By Paul Levinson5 years ago in Futurism
