Author: Juan A. Esteban
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Repetition is not verification
October 2012. An Australian research vessel was navigating the Coral Sea, between Australia and New Caledonia, when it set a course for an island appearing in its navigational data. It was named Sandy Island, measured approximately twenty-five kilometres in length, and had featured in cartography for over a century. The captain…
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To encode is to decide
The graph effectively records all that may be asserted regarding a work: author, date, provenance, iconography, the various interpretations it has received, and the proponents thereof. It serves, in its optimal iteration, as an exhaustive map of what is expressible concerning the piece. And what is expressible is substantial; it merits documentation. Yet that which renders a work…
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Restore or invent
In August 2025, the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz was projected onto the immersive screen of the Las Vegas Sphere, expanded and transformed through artificial intelligence. Filling a giant screen necessitated three distinct actions, even if they were marketed together under the same label. One involved increasing the resolution of the original image:…
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The machine removes our easy answers
Whenever a machine learns to perform a task we once considered our own, there are those who hasten to assert that such tasks were never truly significant. When machines surpassed our capacity for calculation, we dismissed calculation as mechanical. When they triumphed at chess, we claimed chess was merely calculation governed by rules. When they began to compose coherent paragraphs, we argued that writing is not…
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Eight arcminutes
At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler spent approximately five years grappling with the planet Mars. He possessed the finest astronomical observations compiled to that date: those of Tycho Brahe, a Dane who had measured the positions of the planets with the naked eye, devoid of a telescope, using immense instruments and unparalleled persistence,...
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Who holds the key
In February 2017, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York placed over three hundred and seventy-five thousand images from its collection online for use, sharing, and remixing without restriction. Today, that figure exceeds four hundred and ninety thousand. The Smithsonian launched in 2020 with nearly three million digital items, and today it surpasses the…
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Measured and reserved
Figures now circulate with the certainty of established fact. The world's data centres consumed approximately 415 terawatt-hours in 2024, nearly 1.5 per cent of the planet's total electricity, and may approach 945 by 2030. In the United States, consumption reached 176 terawatt-hours in 2023, representing 4.4 per cent of national demand. Training…
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The criterion is not in the hand
A study from Columbia University, June 2025. Data confirming what many had intuited. A group was presented with identical works: some labelled as human-made, others as generated by artificial intelligence. The latter were valued sixty-two per cent lower. The same image, depending on the label, was worth less than half. A revealing detail: the…
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More beautiful
In Kerala, during the Onam festivities, there exists a popular tradition known as Pulikali: men who paint their bodies as tigers and dance through the streets of Thrissur to the rhythm of percussion. Local neighbourhood groups sustain it with months of preparation in painting, movement, and music. This August 2026, an actor and writer…
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The design was the damage
Today, 26 August 2026, Meta has reached a settlement with a coalition of attorneys general from 47 states and several United States territories to conclude the lawsuit accusing it of designing Instagram and Facebook to cultivate dependency in minors. It will pay at least 12.1 billion dollars over ten years, a figure that could reach...