The few jobs today that are tangibly useful—say, social workers and science teachers—pay far less than the mass of uninspiring administrative and middle-management roles that prop them up. As a result, many opt for the paycheck, even if that means resigning oneself to working a job that doesn’t really need to be done. - The Point
If ‘language is one of the keys to individual autonomy’, the central challenge in a linguistic landscape being flattened and standardized by AI is to ‘continue to believe in language learning as a tool of emancipation and liberation’. - Eurozine
A Texas novelist discovers the hard way that authorial intent is no match for America's hunger for mythology. Sometimes the culture writes the ending, whether you like it or not. — The American Scholar
A Danish writer discovers what Instagram influencers fear most: that maybe there's no authentic self to brand after all. Thank goodness for Austrian modernists who made existential fragmentation fashionable. — Aeon
Largely ignored by academic philosophers, the “Dark Enlightenment” movement and Yarvin have curried favor and influence with tech executives in recent years. A software engineer by training, Yarvin has become a kind of official philosopher for tech leaders like PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel and Mosaic founder Marc Andreessen. — Time
Some of these online influencers are pretty easy to spot, but others are good enough that they’re duping people. And in some cases, it seems almost impossible to know for certain whether a specific influencer is real or not. - The Atlantic
Need to take an online math quiz? Write a biology-lab report? Create a PowerPoint presentation for history class? AI can do all of this and more. One high schooler recently told me that he struggles to think of a single assignment that AI wouldn’t be able to do for him. - The Atlantic
Entertainment and tech companies have gotten smarter about putting consumers into bastardized flow states that leaves people feeling drained and sad rather than challenged and enlarged as selves. - Derek Thompson
It’s a phenomenon that has long puzzled psychologists and philosophers alike. Given that we usually dread sadness and strive to avoid it because it feels so bad – from painful conversations to the grief of loss – why do we actively seek it in art? - Psyche
This is a war over whether technology will merely optimise calculations or eliminate a quintessentially human element such calculations can’t capture. But beneath these debates, the question still lurks: what makes us so special? And can it be computed? - Aeon
A combination of technological, economic, political, and cultural forces, at work both within and without the university, had by the early 2020s effectively pummeled the tradition of universitarian humanism into unconsciousness. - Chronicle of Higher Education
Artificial intelligence is both a technology and a theology, and in its latter aspect, it too often resembles a doctrinal dispute among an assortment of shrieking priests. - The Nation
Even if you spend very little time online, there’s little you can do outside the logic of the internet. It is a force that warps our reality, a cosmic background noise that is everywhere and nowhere — something inhuman that’s subtly reshaping our language, our politics, even our minds. - The New York Times
