What if businesses become too good at selling nostalgia? Research I carried out with colleagues suggests that digital technology is changing nostalgia itself. Ironically, by making the past permanently available, companies may be weakening the very notion they are trying to sell. - The Conversation
“Our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. For nearly two centuries, the west experienced steady generational progress. Each new cohort of children grew up, on average, healthier, happier, and better educated than the last. Until now.” - The Guardian
During the most foundational period of brain development, social interaction of the sort that AI can now emulate isn’t entertainment for the developing brain. It’s nutrition. Once you see it that way, the right parallel snaps into focus. A more apt comparison than social media is food—more precisely, processed food. - The Atlantic
Search can no longer pretend to be a neutral gateway to a stable body of knowledge. While the web has always been organized around intermediaries that shape what survives online and who sees it, the internet’s archival function is today breaking down under relentless pressure from stakeholders with very different—and often conflicting—priorities. - The Walrus
“Most telling is Claude’s branding, incorporating hand-drawn illustrations and details that attempt to tell the world, ‘Hey, we’re the more human AI.’” - Fast Company
Well, from Apple, in any case: "The pay-as-you-go plan would see publishers paid only when Siri AI uses their content,” which is similar to the Apple News+ model for print (er, digital). - Nieman Lab
For “collective effervescence” to occur organically, bodies need to be present, in the same space, dancing to the same rhythm. The function is to restore the social bonds and shared beliefs that are eroded by the drudgery of ordinary life. - The Guardian
More than 25,000 people are working at the site on any given day, building a design by Norman Foster, the celebrated British architect. The city is laid out in grids and includes about a five-mile stretch of government buildings. - The New York Times
Most discussions of AI and consciousness ask whether machines can experience anything. But maybe the real mystery is: If consciousness is not fundamentally related to higher cognition, then what kind of phenomenon is it? - Noema
In popular culture and pop psychology, crowds are often associated with strong emotions, excessive emotional expression and the uncritical spread of emotions. Commentators often link that crowd emotion in turn with uncontrolled behaviour and, in some cases, mindless violence. - Psyche
Generalising comes so naturally that few of us are at any risk of undergeneralising, so we give it little thought. The focus on overgeneralising is understandable given its potential costs, such as the child assuming that a dangerous dog is just like the friendly dogs they’ve encountered to date. - Aeon
Now the problem is how to let in the good bots (like the avatar you send to the Gap to buy you a new pair of pants) and keep out the bad bots (like the thief trying to scrape the data of every Gap customer). The rest of us have to be our own bot detectors. - The New Yorker
"Our contention is that, if we fail to think through and delimit the role of AI in our lives, we risk undermining the intelligibility of our own guiding cultural concepts, and thus initiating a period in our own society of which it may someday be possible to say that “nothing happened.” - The Point
