Heather Birchall
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 23 Jun
Heather Birchall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Thank you all so much for coming to Kepler's today.
I'm Heather Birchall, the program manager here.
I hope that many of you have been to some of our author events here, but if this is your very first author event at Kepler's, then welcome.
Now, we all know that magical feeling when we come across the word for very specific situations or feelings, like schadenfreude means feeling satisfied from other people's misfortunes.
Trappenwitz is the perfect comeback that occurs to you only after you've left the conversation and are walking away.
And for my fellow colleagues at Kepler's and anybody who shops here often, sundoku is the Japanese word meaning acquiring books and letting them pile up unread.
Last year, Cory Doctorow coined n-shitification, which refers to the gradual decline of a platform or service as it prioritizes profit over users.
Without naming any names, Amazon is a great example of this.
This phenomenon is also increasingly being applied to AI.
Now, there's no shortage of books written about AI or, in fact, books written by AI, but you won't find any of those books at Kepler's, obviously.
This button-sized book that we're celebrating today, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI, How to Think About Artificial Intelligence Before It Is Too Late, is the one that we all have to read.
AI has colonized our lives, and as Dr. Rowe writes, AI genies now magically appear all the time, whether we're sending a text or an email or taking a picture.
It's both useful and harmful.
And Dr. Rowe has come up with a term for that, reverse centaur.
And he is going to be up here.
We're so lucky that he's going to be up here describing this concept to you.
Cory Doctorow is an author, activist, and journalist.
He has written books for just about every age group.
He's written a picture book, the Little Brother series for young adults, and several sci-fi novels.
He was up here talking to Charlie Jane Anders just last year about his high-tech thriller, Red Team Blues.
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