There is nothing artificial about systems built from real atoms, powered by real electricity, running in real machines. The systems reproduce, vary, adapt, undergo selection and gather energy from their environment. By any working definition that draws on biology rather than philosophy or religion, that is life. - Noema
Life on the internet has become, among other things, a test of patience and an experience of gruelling duration; the ad somehow continued for more than three minutes. A captive audience, it turns out, gets crude digital puppetry as its just deserts. - The New Yorker
The vibes, less pollable but perhaps no less palpable, are noxious. Students boo speakers who extol A.I. in commencement addresses, and consumers deride celebrities and brands that embrace the technology. - The New Yorker
Across millions of math sessions by a group that ranged from fifth graders to college students, the researchers compared performance from before 2022, when ChatGPT first came out, with the work that followed its arrival. - The New York Times
“When Glass asked one of the kids why they picked this particular podcast, they said, ‘We just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.’” Ouch. But also, creative as heck. - The Verge
A culture of creativity is also a culture accepting of failure. Creativity is not a science. You can’t possibly bat 1,000. There are inevitable failures, and it’s really important to know as a culture how to process failure so that when you do, it doesn’t destroy people’s ability to continue to create. - Harvard Business Review
It would be hard to overstate how ignorant the Founders of the United States were about their own country. The main map they’d used to negotiate the postwar peace with Britain was woefully inaccurate. - The New Yorker
He explained the three types of discourse that characterise deliberation – moral, ethical, and pragmatic – and was clear that when it comes to the moral, there are no experts: only individuals working out, together, what’s right in a given context. - Aeon
At least for now, then, robots legally are things, not persons. But neither category quite fits. Instead, robots are outlaws: they lie outside the protection of the law, and their actions are not answerable to it. - The New Yorker
The battle for the role of AI in higher education this fall is being fought over when and where AI and other digital technologies should be used. This combat ignores the larger crisis: how can colleges verify that they are preparing students to become productive members of society in a digital age? - Post Alley
A half-century after poststructuralism broke out of Parisian lecture halls and stumbled into unexpected acclaim and vitriol in the English-speaking world, we now have enough distance from the culture wars of the 1980s and ’90s to look back on theory with clearer vision. Or so it would seem. - Hedgehog Review
‘Sceptic’ comes from the Greek skeptikos, meaning enquirer, and has a long and serious pedigree in philosophy. Yet, since the 1990s, the term has been hijacked by science-denial movements, giving us oxymorons like ‘climate sceptic’, ‘vaccine sceptic’, and ‘evolution sceptic’. - Aeon
The former chief executive of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s entertainment group has obtained a near-£15m investment for his UK music tech startup that hopes to recreate classic concerts by manifesting musicians as digital avatars. - The Guardian
At the event, about workers’ rights and the upcoming Olympics in L.A., “protesters from the Fair Games Coalition — wearing Jedi robes and Jar Jar Binks masks and carrying lightsabers — rallied together outside the new museum.” - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
