Award-winning journalist and author Vauhini Vara will talk about “A.I. Dominance and a Planet in Peril: How Speculating About Our Future Illuminates Our Present” on Friday, Feb. 2 at 6 p.m. on the campus of The University of Alabama in Huntsville (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
The University of Alabama in Huntsville (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, “A.I. Dominance and a Planet in Peril: How Speculating About Our Future Illuminates Our Present,” 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, “Ghosts,” was published in The Believer and later incorporated into “The Ghost in the Machine” episode of the weekly public radio program “This American Life.”
Her acclaimed debut novel, “The Immortal King Rao,” published in 2022, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It won the Colorado Book Award. Now it is being adapted for television.
