The adoption and diffusion of such technologies led to wild-eyed speculation about their possible social and political consequences, a discussion that, characteristically, ricocheted between dreams of a technological utopia and fears of an artificial state. - The Guardian
If the Anthropocene began when the Industrial Revolution set industry against the living world, the Symbiocene imagines what should follow: interspecies democracy, life within Earth’s limits, and ecological reciprocity. - Aeon
What is Intelligence? simply reduces everything to physical implementations, either in AI neural networks or in the brain, and often conflates the two. - Inference Review
Zinn presented his readers with genuinely admirable dissidents, from Bartolomé de las Casas to Ida Tarbell and Langston Hughes. At a moment when the country needs effective dissidents, Zinn, the scholar-activist, is in that pantheon. But A People’s History’s had flaws: It can flatten complex problems and people into apparently simple ones. - The New Republic
Unless impaired by a stroke or dementia, most older people retain their language skills and may even improve them as they steadily gain vocabulary throughout their lives. A new brain imaging study from an MIT-Boston University collaboration now reveals the neural activity underlying this observation. - MIT News
But, cautionary moment (akin to making movies about war): “Sometimes the filmmakers, they can kind of get wrapped up in the bad behavior … of the men that they're trying to critique.” Think Fight Club. - NPR
Over one-third of web pages published after the release of ChatGPT show signs of being written by AI, according to a new study from Pew Research released on Thursday. - TechCrunch
It feels counterintuitive, but at sufficiently large scales, they find, you can often remove any single image from the training data, or every image by a given artist, or every photograph of a given person, and the generated sample doesn't change. - MIT
The fan at heart is a manager of excess: too much feeling, too much weight on too little incident. This is a kind of madness after all, the madness of meaning-making under a few too many constraints. - N plus 1
Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021. Another 9% are more excited than concerned and 37% say they’re equally excited and concerned, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28, 2026. - Pew Research
Our new research finds that people are more disturbed by others’ beliefs when they feel those beliefs are not merely different from their own but are based on incorrect information. - The Conversation
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
