If you want to make an accurate judgment of how progress is going, it seems intuitive that frequent monitoring would help. On the other hand, popular wisdom suggests that watching too intently can distort your sense of how quickly or slowly something is proceeding: as the saying goes: ‘A watched pot never boils.’ - Psyche
Once you understand how your reward system works, you can consciously redirect it toward the things that actually matter to you. Let’s explore the connection between slot machines, social media, and the secret to a more curious, fulfilling life. - Big Think
People are now using AI to create “grief bots,” which are simulations of deceased loved ones that the living can converse with. There has even been a case where an AI-rendered video of a deceased victim has appeared to deliver a court statement asking for the maximum sentence for the person who took their life. - The Conversation
The idea that technology is altering our capacity not just to concentrate but also to read and to reason is catching on. The conversation no one is ready for, though, is how this may be creating yet another form of inequality. - The New York Times
Social mobility will become progressively locked as AI progresses. What is at risk is not simply job loss, but the very idea of income distribution. The concept of valuable skills is vanishing in real time. - The Critic
Many companies are taking our time and money by practising the dark art of manipulation. They hide crucial terms in fine print. They automatically enroll you in programmes that costs money but don't benefit you at all. They make it easy for you to subscribe to a service, but extremely hard for you to cancel. - The Guardian
It’s the kind of moment that invites a familiar concept: creative destruction. I originally associated the phrase with Joseph Schumpeter, but it actually has its origins in Karl Marx. - The Walrus
How to draw distinction between the good philosophy and the bad philosophy? How much philosophy counts as good, and how much philosophy counts as bad? Any way of trying to draw this distinction faces a version of the same problem all over again. - Humean Being
"A majority of participants actually mentioned how human-like they found the neurotic robot," says Alex Wuqi Zhang, a researcher at the University of Chicago. "They found it to be a lot more relatable." - NPR
This spectacle raises a deeper question: why does infidelity, especially among the powerful, provoke such public outcry. Literary tradition offers some insight: intimate betrayal is never truly private. It shatters an implicit social contract, demanding communal scrutiny to restore trust. - The Conversation
Descartes had a famous dictum about the constitutive powers of the thinking self: I think therefore I am. Could it be that, today, I hate, therefore I am? - The New York Times
Where going online once evoked a wide-eyed sense that the world was at our fingertips, now it requires wading into the slop like weary, hardened detectives, attempting to parse the real from the fake. - The Atlantic
No one knows exactly how the system obtains its matches. There is an entire field in AI known as “mechanistic interpretability” that is attempting to understand how LLMs move from a given input (your passport photo) to a given output (identifying your face in the Facebook post). - Harper's
The problem with a competitive approach to puzzles is that you take what is intended as a soothing and distracting pastime and quietly hitch it to a goal and a ticking clock. - The American Scholar
