The nation-state is not so old as we are often told, nor has it come to be quite so naturally. Getting this history right means telling a different story about where our international political order has come from—which in turn points the way to an alternative future. - Boston Review
Empathy, of course, is a two-way street, and we humans don’t exhibit a whole lot more of it for bots than bots do for us. Numerous studies have found that when people are placed in a situation where they can cooperate with a benevolent A.I., they are less likely to do so than if the bot were an actual...
"In the prevailing scientific worldview, counterfactual properties of physical systems are unfairly regarded as second-class citizens, or even excluded altogether. Why? It is because of a deep misconception, which, paradoxically, originated within my own field, theoretical physics. The misconception is that once you have specified everything that exists in the physical world and what happens to it—all the actual...
For the first time, Timothy Morton wrote, we had become aware that “nonhuman beings” were “responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking.” The nonhuman beings Morton had in mind weren’t computers or space aliens but a particular group of objects that were “massively distributed in time and space.” Morton called them “hyperobjects.” - The New Yorker
"In the past, statistical analysis at this scale was limited by the complexity of the task and the lack of mathematical and computational tools. The triumph of modern machine learning lies in developing increasingly sophisticated, efficient, and data-driven computational methods for doing such analysis. “But is this AI?” ask the skeptics. It is too narrow, too specialized, too dependent...
There is the possibility that technology can come to influence or reflect our values in ways that are beyond our control. For example, wearable technologies (such as fitness trackers or smart watches) provide us with a stream of biometric information. This information changes the way in which we experience ourselves and the world around us. - 3 Quarks Daily
“For most people, the last class they had devoted to clocks and time was early in primary school,” Kevin Birth, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York who has been studying clocks for more than 30 years, told me recently. “There’s this thing that is central to our entire society, that’s built into all of...
Now work conducted in our laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that baseline pupil size is closely related to individual differences in intelligence. The larger the pupils, the higher the intelligence, as measured by tests of reasoning, attention and memory. - Scientific American
When Twitch entered the picture 10 years ago, most creators - writers, artists, makers, eaters of food on YouTube - weren't yet earning money through digital patronage. That has changed, and dramatically. Co-founder Justin Kan says "he and his cofounders spent years ruminating on how to make people interact online and give each other money. Should they have...
If you want to be healthier and happier, that is. "Can’t we stop succeeding for just one moment? Cease trying to be exceptional at something? The answer is yes, but to do so you must embrace your inner amateur." - Psyche
Humans have probably changed dog genes in this arena. A new study shows that "even 8-week-old puppies with little exposure to humans can understand pointing and show sophisticated levels of social cognition in other tests. On top of that, the study found that each fluffball’s genetic makeup was a strong predictor of its ability to follow a pointed finger...
You can already see a divide in the literature - positive stories about people with ALS or locked-in syndrome learning to use neural transmitters to control movement; negative stories about the threat of law enforcement "reading" our intentions before we do. It's the same tech, so what's the real story? - Three Quarks Daily
It goes way - way - beyond dopamine. "You could say that dopamine is to happiness what petrol is to a car; it’s an integral part of making it work, but if you were to literally fill your car with petrol, to the point where it’s leaking out the windows, that wouldn’t help anyone." - Psyche
The facts just don't bear it out. "It’s questionable that there ever really was a ‘movement’ other than in the mind of 19th- and early 20th-century historians." Perhaps one conclusion is that classifications like "the Renaissance" are not great mechanisms for understanding the world of ideas, or the historical world either. - Aeon
