We have a real need to be needed. And yet many forces—thinking machines, aging, economic and social dislocation—appear to be making us feel redundant. Are we building a world in which no one is particularly necessary? Do we already live in such a world? - The New Yorker
We have not a single piece of meaningful legislation in the United States Congress about artificial intelligence. We have essentially nothing about social media. This is something that we’re now battling out in the courts. - The Walrus
This may strike you as a little paranoid. The rise of the telephone, in the past century and a half—from the rotary diallers at home and the boxes in the street to the smartphones in every pocket—is associated with a change that, broadly speaking, we consider positive. - The New Yorker
For a time, the photograph or moving image acquired its own evidential authority: seeing something recorded was, with reasonable caveats, grounds for accepting that an event had occurred. - The Conversation
How do we give shape to this disquiet? We might call it fatigue, burnout, or ‘just needing a break from the world’, but often it’s grief – mourning for a faith we once had in fellow citizens to recognise a certain decency or sense of fairness. It isn’t partisan; it’s human, and it has a name. - Psyche
The empty-self metaphor has inspired a large following. These followers embrace an optimistic view in which human foibles can be readily vanquished through systematic manipulation of social environment. However alluring it may be, we suggest it is time to replace this Panglossian view with one that acknowledges the importance of enduring psychological structures. - Psyche
What we are trying to do is not just help ground students—the large majority of them scientists and engineers in training—in a humanistic research program, but to identify irreplaceable ideas during a time of accelerated change. - The Atlantic
“What we see in front of us used to be culturally diverse. Now it is culturally generic. Most of what we see is the big chains we see everywhere,” she said. “It creates a sense of placelessness. We could be anywhere.” - The New York Times
Our curiosity may be or could be one of the best things about us (though when we describe someone as a curious person we can sometimes mean that they are a bit odd, as though we admire curiosity but it makes us uneasy). - London Review of Books
"At 'temperature zero,' the model always chooses the most likely next token and gives the same answer every time" - down to the music and menus in every restaurant or pub. - The New York Times
Deal by deal, ownership is being extracted from the thousands of communities where businesses were built to the handful of cities where capital is already concentrated. - The New York Times
Systems fail; unanticipated difficulties occur; things break or rot. To cope with this reality, philosophical and religious traditions such as Buddhism and Stoicism have long focused on transience, unpredictability, and the inevitability of change and loss. - Scientific American
We live in a golden age of digital creativity. Forget A.I.: you, yourself, can record an album from your sofa, or curate a photo-essay on the train. In that spirit, here are some of my favorite creative digital tools. - The New Yorker
