What exactly is academic freedom? It is the freedom to express and debate ideas without fear of censorship or reprisal. It is the freedom to explore. It is the freedom to let the imagination wander. It is the freedom to exchange knowledge with colleagues and others. - The Atlantic
We’re so used to trying things for ourselves that it seems bizarre to imagine us ever stopping. And yet, more and more, it’s becoming clear that artificial intelligence can relieve us of the burden of trying and trying again. - The New Yorker
Gig work, as it turns out, didn’t begin with Uber but with Avon direct-sales reps. The wacky metaphysics of today’s tech billionaires have their analogues in the “mind-cures” of nineteenth-century spiritualists. And the celebration of “charismatic” executives has its origins in German social science, with disturbingly fascist undertones. - Commonweal
How did an obscure argument about a mathematically complex and rather baffling theory of physics become embedded in public consciousness as an extraordinary exploration of the human psyche? This essay tells the story. - Aeon
Chatbots learned from human writing. Now the influence may run in the other direction. Some people have hypothesized that the proliferation of generative-AI tools such as ChatGPT will seep into human communication, that the terse language we use when prompting a chatbot may lead us to dispose of any niceties or writerly flourishes. - The Atlantic (MSN)
As digital replicas of real people become more common, especially in image-based industries like fashion, urgent ethical questions are emerging. These include conversations about the future of work, compensation and identity in the cultural economy. - The Conversation
One risk is that they close down possibilities. They can shut down our thinking, coercing it to fit the shape of someone else’s comparison rather than our own. - Psyche
Is there any threshold at which an A.I. would start to deserve, if not human-level rights, at least the same moral consideration we give to animals? - The New York Times
I can hold a tailored conversation on any of the topics I care about with a system that has effectively achieved Ph.D.-level competence across all of them. I can construct the “book” I want in real time—responsive to my questions, customized to my focus, tuned to the spirit of my inquiry. - The New Yorker
And when she comes back? “I wondered what the movies would look like a year later; the answer, it turns out, is not nearly as interesting as the mediums they continue to inform and influence.” Ouf. - Washington Post (MSN)
Housing crisis, whatever: The mansion is set to become a (rather exclusive) AirBnB. “It’s not a museum. And if you’re going to call it a living house, you’ve got to make it a living house. And that involves having people in it.” - The Guardian (UK)
For better and for worse, science today is shaped by strongly human factors: economic value, political priorities, career prospects, cultural trends, and a range of human biases and beliefs. Imagine the science if all that baggage could be abandoned. - Aeon
“That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you. Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal.” - TechCrunch
It is not only that those wistful and innocent longings we all feel when we think of home were once subject to urgent medical intervention and scrutinised as symptoms of a fatal disease. The 17th-century medical-scientific literature possessed a weirdly inhuman and morbid philosophy of the effects of nostalgia. - Psyche
Whether it’s Adobe apps or Figma, AI features are increasingly being built into creative tools that push designers into an era of editing and using AI as a tool, rather than having to create everything from scratch. - The Verge
