Ideas

Merely stabilizing the economy, or preventing the absolute worst of all possible worlds, will not be enough. In a short few weeks, the COVID-19 recession has made painfully clear our profound economic weaknesses. We have long known that 40 percent of Americans cannot afford an unexpected $400 expense. Now we are beginning to understand exactly what that means. – Boston Review

It would be easy to dismiss the rise of “social distance socializing” as a product of pure necessity, a stopgap until we are, hopefully, able to safely congregate in person again. But these online gatherings are the culmination of a much broader cultural shift: the revelation that so much of our lives is already lived online. What we might call our “digital bodies” — our online avatars, the words we write on Twitter or Facebook, the photos we post on Instagram — are not artificial projections of who we are into an artificial space, but rather part and parcel of our identities. Our “digital bodies” are as much part of us as our legs or our fingers. – The New York Times

The Observer‘s theatre critic, for instance: “‘I am a big believer in walking as writing (or vice versa),’ she says. ‘If I get stuck, I charge around the square and often find a sentence slips into place. I work out what I think more easily on the hoof – going to or from the theatre, or emptying the rubbish – than when stooped over my desk.'” – The Observer (UK)

“These are not the end times, I mean, but nor are they business as usual, and we would do well to understand that not only is there room for a middle path between these, but indeed there is an absolute necessity that we begin our voyage down that path. To the squealing chiliasts and self-absorbed presentists, indulging themselves with phrases like “the end of the world,” I say: “Did it never dawn on you that all of human history has just been one partial apocalypse after another?” And to the business-as-usual mandarins I say: “Thank you for your service in the glorious battles of the past.” – The Point

The necessary response to the pandemic has, after all, intensified huge swaths of the population’s pre-pandemic situations. The economically and medically fragile are at new risk; the cloistered and privileged have only thickened the walls of their bubble. Single people feel extremely single. People in relationships are now super-duper in relationships. The home has become not a refuge from the world’s arena but rather the arena itself. It’s thus tempting to think of the crisis as a personal reckoning: This is the life you’ve been making all along. Now live it. – The Atlantic

If an earthquake now hits India or Iran, like in 2001 and 2003, respectively, killing over 20,000 people in each country—or if we witness a repeat of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina in the US or 2011’s tsunami in Japan—will the world respond? Would the world wish to respond? Currently, health systems and social services are stretched to their breaking points. – Nautilus

They are asking for a $2 trillion commitment for programs that will create living-wage jobs, amped-up public health and housing sectors, and a pivot away from a fossil-fuels-based energy frame. Under their plan, the stimulus would automatically renew every year at 4 percent of GDP, or $850 billion annually, as well as give the public more of a voice in whether — and how — large-scale corporations would get bailouts.For now, the coalition recognizes that the focus should be on stopping the spread of coronavirus and mitigating all related health risks. – CityLab

“Like in journalism, in all the creative occupations, there’s no stability unless you’re a superstar of some sort. ” – New York Times Magazine

To give users a personalised experience, the deep learning bot gathers information about conversation partners by asking them questions, adapts to their conversational style and, over time, attempts to mimic them. Beyond companionship, Replika’s creators believe that the technology could eventually serve as a conversational stand-in for deceased loves ones. – Aeon

Michael Kimmelman: “The coronavirus undermines our most basic ideas about community and, in particular, urban life. Historians tell us that cities emerged thousands of years ago for economic and industrial reasons — technological leaps produced a surplus of agricultural goods, which meant not everyone had to keep working the land. Still, cities also grew, less tangibly, out of deeply human social and spiritual needs. The very notion of streets, shared housing and public spaces stemmed from and fostered a kind of collective affirmation, a sense that people are all in this together.” – The New York Times

“Advertising was like art, and more and more art was like advertising. Ideally, the only difference would be the logo. Advertising could take up the former causes of art—philosophy, beauty, mystery, empire. There are no ethics in fashion. There are no ethics in magazines. There are no ethics in advertising.” – New York Review of Books

Virginia Woolf insisted on the need for a room of one’s own, but only the upper middle classes could have afforded one at the time. In the 19th century, only 1% of the British population lived on their own; in 2011 it was 31%, or some 8 million people. Yet as urbanisation and large families pitched people together, the anonymous world of industrial capitalism also split them apart. Rural life may have been rough, but at least you knew who lived next door. So if a longing to be alone became more acute, so did a sense of being forsaken. – The Guardian

Daydreaming is taken very seriously within scientific circles, where it is more accurately referred to as mind wandering. The level of interest in this area runs more or less parallel to that of the default network, and that is no coincidence either. The neural activity that can be observed when a person is daydreaming is very similar to that found in the default network. The control situation when taking neural measurements is also one in which the brain is not performing any tasks, and so we start daydreaming. We let our thoughts run free and start associating different memories with each other. – LitHub

This economic catastrophe is blowing up the myth of the worker robot and AI takeover. We’ve been led to believe that a new wave of automation is here, made possible by smarter AI and more sophisticated robots. Yet our economy still craters without human workers, because the machines are far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity. You’re more likely to have a machine automate part of your job, not destroy your job entirely. – Wired

Magic challenges our sense of what’s real; Houdini wanted to challenge the ultimate reality of death, by risking it over and over. That risk, he later wrote, is what “attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the ‘human fly,’ who scales the walls of the same building. If we knew that there was no possibility of either one of them falling or, if they did fall, that they wouldn’t injure themselves in any way, we wouldn’t pay any more attention to them than we do a nursemaid wheeling a baby carriage. – The New Yorker

How many of us today are able to free ourselves from the page and head out the door when we rise from our desks? Even abiding by the dictates of nature, breathing deeply out in the open air as we set our legs into motion, it’s likely we need to accomplish the undertaking as quickly and efficiently as possible. But in so doing, perhaps we still miss the essence of the activity itself. We forego the art of walking. – Aeon

Is it possible that our experience of decision-making – the impression we have of making choices, indeed of having choices to make, sometimes hard ones – is entirely illusory? Is it possible that a chain of physical events in our bodies and brains must cause us to act in the way we do, whatever our experience of the process might be? – Aeon

Says one professor of media psychology on why so many people are watching, say, “The Great British Baking Show” and other comfort watches or re-watches: “There’s a lot of comfort in knowing when something’s going to happen. You don’t have to exert a lot of cognitive energy, so it doesn’t feel taxing.” – The Atlantic

This kind of reflexive self-doubt is not so much a ‘syndrome’ as it is a widespread state of psychological distortion, with roughly 70 per cent of people experiencing it at some point in their lives. – Aeon

It’s tempting to ask if we can learn to be more creative. Creativity does have some genetic heritability: talent – mathematical, musical – runs in families. For example, the Dutch identical twins David Oyens and Pieter Oyens were both successful 19th-century painters. But, given that the human brain is plastic, constantly learning and changing, can we also learn to be creative, based on our experiences? – Aeon

Charles McNulty: “I’m sure I’m not the only writer who fantasizes about retreating to a country house with nothing to do but curl up by a fire beside a mountain of Dickens and Dostoevsky. But as the coronavirus pandemic upends our civilization, I’m urging myself to jump off the self-improvement treadmill.” – Los Angeles Times

Nobel laureate Michael Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist who teaches structural biology at Stanford University and spends much of his time in Tel Aviv, unexpectedly became a household name in China, offering the public reassurance during the peak of the country’s coronavirus (Covid-19) outbreak. Levitt did not discover a treatment or a cure, just did what he does best: crunched the numbers. The statistics led him to the conclusion that, contrary to the grim forecasts being branded about, the spread of the virus will come to a halt. – CTech

Crises like coronavirus are opportunities as well as threats. Naomi Klein writes that ideas that were heretofore beyond consideration can sometimes become possible – for example no-strings bailouts of big companies or medicare for all. Depends on how you treat them. – The Intercept

The economic fallout of event cancellations is making headlines. However, little attention has been paid to the social costs. Events play an important role in community life and research has repeatedly shown that attending festivals and community events has many benefits. – The Conversation

As local and state governments try harder and harder to urge social distancing and isolation, internet usage will naturally increase from private residences. And “while it’ll be difficult for everyone to access all the resources they need in this time of shutdowns and isolation, it’ll likely impact low-income populations the hardest. Advocates worry that the homework gap, which refers to the difficulty students have completing course work without a stable home internet connection, will widen as schools close their classrooms and provide lessons and materials virtually.” – Slate

The platforms are under no legal obligation to proactively seek out infringement and remove it, nor – most annoyingly of all – do they ever have to permanently remove an infringing work. “Notice and takedown” does not mean “notice and stay-down,” which results in an ongoing game of Whack-A-Mole for copyright owners who get a work removed, only to see it pop up again somewhere else on the internet… again, and again, and again…  – Creative Future

Here’s the 20,000 foot summary: Your brain’s most important job is not thinking or feeling or even seeing, but keeping your body alive and well so that you survive and thrive (and eventually reproduce). How is your brain to do this? Like a sophisticated fortune-teller, your brain constantly predicts. Its predictions ultimately become the emotions you experience and the expressions you perceive in other people. – Nautilus

The day is coming when practically anything that a human can do—at least anything that the labor market is willing to pay a human being a decent wage to do—will soon be doable more efficiently and cost effectively by some AI-driven automated device. If and when that day does arrive, those who own the means of production will feel ever increasing pressure to discard human workers in favor of an artificially intelligent work force. They are likely to do so as unhesitatingly as they have always set aside outmoded technology in the past. – Boston Review