Ideas

One of the distinctive features of my cognition is that not only do I think with sound and music; I also don’t think in images during my waking hours (although I dream vividly and visually at night). This lack of visual imagery is known as aphantasia, partial in my case. – Aeon

Introduced in 1842, the US design patent law saw just 14 designs registered in its first year, including a typeface, a bathtub and a “corpse preserver”. By 1930, the patent office was issuing 3,000 design patents a year, and 6,500 by 1941, a figure that wasn’t exceeded until 1989. That number has now mushroomed to around 35,000 – good news for lawyers, but maybe less so for innovators. – The Guardian

“As a scholar of communication and performance studies, what interests me is how NFTs are redrawing parts of the art world in radical ways by raising questions about how artists, audiences and critics understand performance, criticism or protest in a capitalist society.” – The Conversation

“Without the distance between self and thought, self and utterance, we are unable to entertain, probe, or debate ideas. We are unable to change our minds or to persuade others. We are not even in a position to form our views in thoughtful, disinterested ways. But there may yet be a way out. Precisely by codifying and accelerating the collapse of the distinction between ideas and identity, Twitter might ironically be alerting us to the absurdity and shallowness of intellectual life practiced on its terms.” – Hedgehog Review

Hawking was no Newton. He said so himself. At a White House event in 1998, First Lady Hillary Clinton read a question from the Internet: “How does it feel to be compared to Einstein and Newton?” He replied, “I think to compare me to Newton and Einstein is media hype.” Then again, as Charles Seife demonstrates in Hawking Hawking, he “worked very hard to cultivate” these comparisons. – New York Review of Books

Despite what every podcast host says (is forced to say?) and what your author friends tell you, it’s not five-star reviews. Those are literally a dime a dozen. This is a different appeal, according to a study, and it explains why people crying about books on TikTok can juice those books’ sales. – Fast Company

We now consider disinformation a defining part of the contemporary experience. In 2016, Oxford Languages chose post-truth as its word of the year. The essential characteristic of our age, the accompanying press release stated, was the loss of a distinction between truth and feeling; we were entering an era in which “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” – The Walrus

Blockchains may radically transform many facets of business life, but they’re a tool particularly well suited for collaborations. Put simply, blockchains are digital ledgers where several people have joint control over the shared information — a feature that makes them ideal for situations where trust and information sharing are important. The technical design of blockchains makes it virtually impossible anyone to change the contents of the ledger without approval from the other parties. Moreover, they can be paired with smart contracts — programmed codes that are automatically executed once certain conditions are met. – Harvard Business Review

With the rise of artificial intelligence, machine programming, and the ever more rapid automation of technical skills, many companies are seeking just the creative and humanist thinking that emerges from a study of the liberal arts. – Forbes

If we cannot slow down and grow cautiously, evenly, gradually into our new technological and political possibilities and responsibilities—even the potentially liberating ones—the last recognizably individual men and women may give place, before too many more generations, to the simultaneously sub- and super-human civilization of the hive. – Commonweal

“Between those who see meritocratic admissions as giving fair rewards to hard work and ability, and those who demand that schools focus on students’ identities rather than individual performance, there appears little room for compromise. But the two positions have unexamined common ground, coexisting in the consciousness of students and teachers.” – Tablet

“Work, and the way it fits into one’s life, can be and often has been, less rigid and routinized than is common today. In modernized societies, work is organized around the clock, and most jobs are shoehorned into the same eight-hour schedule. In the past, and in some cultures still today, other factors–the seasons, the weather, tradition, the availability of light, the availability of labor–determine which tasks are done when.” – 3 Quarks Daily

His character is a heavy-metal drummer who becomes deaf – very quickly. “You’ve got a character who is very focused on his daily grind. … Just like we are as a culture and a society, on the treadmill – a workaholic culture. Then we have a health crisis that suddenly throws him into a kind of purgatory, and in that lockdown limbo he’s forced to reassess what really matters to him. That’s a journey that so many of us have been on right now.” – BBC

Restrictions both from public health officials and venues will be in place. “Venues can also choose to separate people into sections based on their vaccination status. Those who are fully vaccinated could sit shoulder-to-shoulder, but they still must wear masks.” – Los Angeles Times

Public space is different now than it was 15 months ago. Streets have been turned to outdoor eateries and pedestrian malls; Paris removed tons of street parking and converted the Rue di Rivoli into a biking haven. Will any of this decentralization of the car – and concurrent centralization of pedestrians and bikers – remain? – Fast Company

“The idea behind NFTs was, and is, profound. Technology should be enabling artists to exercise control over their work, to more easily sell it, to more strongly protect against others appropriating it without permission. By devising the technology specifically for artistic use, McCoy and I hoped we might prevent it from becoming yet another method of exploiting creative professionals. But nothing went the way it was supposed to. Our dream of empowering artists hasn’t yet come true, but it has yielded a lot of commercially exploitable hype.” – The Atlantic

“People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.” – IEEE Spectrum

Is authenticity fading away as a personal ethic or is it something everyone wants to be? In fact, both are true – because the meaning of authenticity is changing. – Psyche

The story of the concept of ‘meritocracy’ has been well rehearsed in recent times, largely because of the way in which inequality and precarity have exposed its weaknesses. But some are still surprised to learn that the idea was conceived in the spirit of social satire, not the spirit of idealism. – Sydney Review of Books

Miller argues that AI-fueled art gains independence from its algorithmic parents and takes flight in works that bear the hallmarks of creativity and genius and will one day exceed human artists’ wildest imaginative dreams. Miller says he sympathizes with what I’m saying about the power of art coming from the connection with a human artist, plumbing their emotions and consciousness. But I’m being premature. Just wait, he says, computers will one day produce art as transcendent as the works of Beethoven and Picasso were in their times. – Nautilus

Clearly, asking questions about consciousness does not prove anything per se. But could an AI zombie formulate such questions by itself, without hearing them from another source or belching them out from random outputs? To me, the answer is clearly no. If I’m right, then we should seriously consider that an AI might be conscious if it asks questions about subjective experience unprompted. – Nautilus

An efficient memory system involves “a finely orchestrated balancing act between data storage and data disposal.” To retain an encounter, deliberate attention alone will get you most of the way there. – The New Yorker