ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

The Struggle For A “Self” We Recognize

We imagine our choices are free, our selves sovereign, but much of our behavior arises automatically. We are driven by inner conditions, social cues, learned scripts, and neural flows—just as the machine is driven by token prediction and loss minimization. The difference, of course, is that the human brain is plastic. - Hedgehog Review

We All Read. But Our Reading Has Changed. This Has Changed Our Culture (And Not For The Better)

On average, we spend more than two hours scrolling through such platforms each day. But not all reading is created equal. The mind can skim over the surface of a sentence and swiftly decode its literal meaning. But deep reading — sustained engagement with a longform text — is a distinct endeavor. - Vox

The Relevance Of Glee, A Decade After It Ended

 “I was mad that the representation, whether of teenagers or queerness, was not completely akin to my own real-life experience — this show was my lifeline; the least it could have done was conform to my limited perception of reality, right?” - HuffPost

AI Slop Is Increasing To Such An Extent That The Open Web May Die

And be replaced with … people and print? "Indie local news publishers I know, already frustrated by the junkiness of digital distribution, are increasingly turning to in-person events, print editions and zines and printed handout cards with QR codes.” - Matt Pearce

Does Our Continual Phone Use Prevent Us From Fully Living?

With each recording, “we’re atrophying our memory a little and trusting that it will work autonomously. But it’s like an engine: if we give it a boost, it keeps working, but if we don’t, it gets worse and worse.” - El País

The Perils Of Thinking That Better Design Will Fix Things

Design works best when it knows what it can achieve and what it can’t; the history of design is full of utopian projects that failed to make a difference. - The Atlantic

So Just Why Did Prehistoric Humans Decide To “Start” Civilization?

Why did humans spend 50,000 years (or more) in seemingly uneventful prehistory — with hunter-gatherers living the exact same way across thousands of generations — before starting on the trajectory that took us from cave paintings to (almost) self-driving cars in the comparative blink of an eye? - Big Think

Evidence Of Cognitive Decline After Using AI

A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas. - The New Yorker

Why So We Find Silences In Conversations So… Awkward?

Confronted with a prolonged silence during conversation, most of us find ourselves ‘desperately thinking of something to say’. Silence makes us desperate. But why? - Aeon

About 100 Years Ago The World Was Being Remade By Technolgy. There Was Fear. Sound Familiar?

The years between 1900-1914 have appropriately been called by historian Philipp Blom as the “vertigo years.” To find your footing in this dizzying period so often meant jumping into the unknown or, as many did, sleepwalking through it and hoping things would sort themselves out. - Novum

The Future Of Human Creativity With AI

In creative fields such as design, writing and content, teams that paired AI with human input consistently outperformed those using either alone. "When the task requires creativity and the generation of novel ideas, human-AI collaboration tends to deliver the best outcomes," the study concludes. - Entrepreneur

A Worry: Will Young People Lose Thinking Skills Because Of AI?

The brain continues to develop and mature into one’s mid-20s, but like a muscle it needs to be exercised, stimulated and challenged to grow stronger. Technology and especially AI can stunt this development by doing the mental work that builds the brain’s version of a computer cloud. - The Wall Street Journal

Behavioral: Why We’re Addicted To Work

Work requires and supports a certain ecology of tasks, an economy of attention. You train your mind to it. When the job’s gone, that attention economy is rendered useless. But you’ve devoted so much time to it that you don’t know how else to deploy your behavioral resources. - 3 Quarks Daily

Does Choice Make You Free? (The Costs Of Choosing)

If choice has indeed become an end unto itself, absent a set of principles for actually making choices, then something has gone awry. - The Atlantic

Our Technologies Keep Trying To Give Us “Experiences.” They’re Fake.

More and more, our “mediating technologies” are in the business not of enhancing our own senses to encounter the world better, but in replacing authentic experience with “experiences.” - The Point

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');