Ideas

Some scientists believe if robots can master conversational humor, and speak like the people they serve, it could help humans accept them as part of our lives. But is that even scientifically possible? – Daily Beast

Felipe Fernández-Armesto: ‘Confused by chaos, infantilized by ignorance, refugees from complexity flee to fanaticism and dogma.’ But something else is happening too. Human history was formerly all about divergence; now, as cultural differences are eroded, we are converging. The result, according to his hypothesis, will in the end be a slowing down of the imagination and ideas.” – Spectator

Maybe morality started with food. Really. – The New York Times

The problem is that it’s difficult to defend the notion that the truth is recognisable by its beauty and simplicity, and it’s an idea that has contributed to getting fundamental physics into its current mess. – Aeon

“At the most benign level of the junk industry are papers, published in journals with no effective screening process, that are obvious nonsense—about Martians being supermanagers on Mars, chocolate being a “superfood,” or even just the sentence “get me off your fucking mailing list” repeated 863 times. But beyond these papers, in journals with varying standards and reputations, are far more dangerous, flawed studies, including misleading reports about safe drinking water, fake “proof” that humans aren’t responsible for climate change, or bogus research that vaccines cause autism.”  – The Walrus

Sidewalk Labs, the smart-city startup from Google parent company Alphabet, has released its master innovation and development plan to turn a sizable swath of Toronto’s Lake Ontario shoreline into “the most innovative district in the entire world.” – CityLab

Being a philosopher on brain rest is like being a point guard on hand rest. The major asset for your profession is suddenly not working reliably. – The New York Times

Some of the earliest scientific studies of creativity focused on personality. And some evidence suggests that innovation comes easier to people with certain personality types. A 1998 review of dozens of creativity studies found that overall, creative people tend to be more driven, impulsive, and self-confident. They also tend to be less conventional and conscientious. – Nautilus

Far from having evaporated, ‘folkloric disenchantment’ is still common today in the writings of self-described magicians, shamans and witches. But we also find its analogue in academic disciplines. In this academic version of the myth, nostalgia for vanished magic has been replaced by the idea that a scientific worldview has stepped in to replace more primitive folk-belief systems. – Aeon

The main factors that determined whether a person could correctly perceive each image as a fake were their level of experience with the internet and digital photography. – The Conversation

The 18th-century poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller warned against being driven purely by work in his “On the Aesthetic Education of Man.” He wrote, “Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.” – The New York Times

That seems a little impractical, no? Well, marry someone who makes a good income, stop taking massive holiday trips, and focus on small things in the present, says one artist. – The Guardian (UK)

“To the brain, information is its own reward, above and beyond whether it’s useful,” says Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu, a neuroeconomist whose research employs functional magnetic imaging (fMRI), psychological theory, economic modeling, and machine learning. “And just as our brains like empty calories from junk food, they can overvalue information that makes us feel good but may not be useful—what some may call idle curiosity.” – University of California Berkeley

It’s easier to pick one out of two meals than one out of 50. With more options, we spend more time analyzing and tend to get stuck. Often, we’ll choose to do nothing at all for a long time, and dragging your heels never feels good. – Good Company

“Here is the danger with authenticity: it has a tendency to make aspiration look fake. You are trying to be something you are not. But aspiring to be a better person—or better at anything—often involves trying to be something you are (currently) not. Hence the problem. Authenticity is often so bluntly insisted upon that all efforts at change or self-improvement appear phoney.” – Prospect

“Reality is annoying like that: at every level of examination, it raises more questions than answers. There are always details that don’t fit, exceptions to rules, consequences that can’t be predicted. That’s why humans, who famously cannot bear too much reality, have evolved a method of coping with all this complexity: we lie to ourselves about how much we understand.” – New Statesman

“Minimal manning—and the evolution of the economy more generally—requires a different kind of worker, with not only different acquired skills but different inherent abilities. It has implications for the nature and utility of a college education, for the path of careers, for inequality and employability—even for the generational divide.” – The Atlantic

“If ideas drive history and most ideas are bad, as Felipe Fernández-Armesto believes, what follows for politics? A sceptical sort of anti-utopianism, perhaps, which regards any large scheme for human improvement with suspicion.” – New Statesman

Tagged as “Industry 4.0,” (hey, at least it’s better than “Internet of Things”), this fourth industrial revolution has been unfolding over the past decade with fits and starts—largely because of the massive cultural and structural differences between the information technology that fuels the change and the “operational technology” that has been at the heart of industrial automation for decades. – Ars Technica

DeepFakes created by artificial intelligence can now credibly fool anyone into thinking they’re real. “By combining this real clip of Albert Einstein speaking, for example, with a photo of the famous mathematician, you can quickly create a never-before-seen lecture.” But imagine the ill uses this can be put to. – The Verge

David Chalmers: “Once we have a human-level artificial intelligence, there’s just no doubt that it will change the world. A.G.I.s are going to be beings with powers initially equivalent to our own and before long much greater than our own. To that extent, I’m on board with people who say that we need to think hard about how we design superintelligence in order to maximize good consequences.” – The New York Times

“We are able to empathise with nonhuman characters or intelligent machines in human-made fiction because they have been conceived by other human beings from the only subjective perspective accessible to us: ‘What would it be like for a human to behave as x?’ In order to understand machinic art as such – and assuming that we stand a chance of even recognising it in the first place – we would need a way to conceive a first-person experience of what it is like to be that machine. That is something we cannot do even for beings that are much closer to us.” – Aeon

“In the era of Donald Trump — and YouTube — the most fevered version of the case against postmodernism has become increasingly visible. That is, the claim that a coalition of critical theorists, poststructuralists, multiculturalists, feminists, queer theorists, and African-­American and other “studies” professors have successfully conspired to take over educational institutions, the media, and the U.S. government, and even to establish a new International World Order.” – Chronicle of Higher Education

The distinction is critical: Whereas addiction is something people experience mostly as individuals, social norms are shared mental states shaped by the views and beliefs of other members of the society and by our subjective perceptions of those beliefs.  – Fast Company

A new study quantifies it. “The study examined data from nearly 20,000 people in England who took part in the Monitor of Engagement with the Natural Environment Survey from 2014 to 2016, which asked them to record their activities within the past week. It found that people who spent two hours a week or more outdoors reported being in better health and having a greater sense of well-being than people who didn’t get out at all.” – The New York Times

Journalists, politicians, and others worry that the technological sophistication of artificial intelligence–generated deepfakes makes them dangerous to democracy because it renders evidence meaningless. But what panic over this deepfake phenomenon misses is that audiovisual content doesn’t have to be generated through artificial intelligence to be dangerous to society. “Cheapfakes” rely on free software that allows manipulation through easy conventional editing techniques like speeding, slowing, and cutting. – Slate

One side attempts to mislead the public over a key issue – the safety of a drug, whether climate change is real, or whether vaccines are dangerous, for example. At the same time, the other side works to combat this misinformation campaign.  – Aeon