HUNTSVILLE – The University of Alabama in Huntsville will bring Pulitzer Prize finalist and award-winning journalist and author Vauhini Vara to campus today for an exploration of artificial intelligence and its possible effects on our society.
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. The program is part of the Dr. Mulk R. Arora Endowed Lecture series in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
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 a visiting assistant professor at Colorado State University.
A former technology reporter for The Wall Street Journal, her work has appeared in 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 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 and is being adapted for television.
