According to a recent YouGov poll, Americans rate the 2020s as the worst decade in a century for music, movies, fashion, TV, and sports. A 2023 story in The New York Times Magazine declared that we’re in the “least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” - The Atlantic
For one thing, there is a desire in conversations to be cooperative with your partner. When they ask a question, the default cooperative answer is usually “yes,” so you often go with that default. On top of that, it you may feel deficient if you’re lacking knowledge or awareness that someone else has. - Fast Company
"I do think intellectual history has been revitalized but primarily outside the confines of the academy. Of course, there are plenty of great intellectual historians currently writing, but the field has experienced the same fate as the general history profession in terms of the so-called academic jobs crisis that has significantly deepened since 2016." - The Ideas Letter
AI developers are firmly on track to build better replacements for humans in almost every role we play: not just economically as workers and decision-makers, but culturally as artists and creators, and even socially as friends and romantic companions. What place will humans have when AI can do everything we do, only better? - The Guardian
Fake images didn’t really bother me until I started looking at them with my kids. They wanted pictures of baby animals; at some point, Google Images started showing us A.I. creatures, ruining the whole idea, which was to marvel at the fact that these baby peacocks and baby lions actually exist. - The New Yorker
He found a way to be both a public intellectual and an academic, a scholar with the fervor of the preacher and a pundit with the depth of a teacher. - BookForum
Research has drawn on principles of fluid dynamics to improve traffic predictions, sped up simulations of turbulence to enhance our understanding of hurricanes and devised tools that helped predict the spread of Covid-19. - Quanta
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
