A new book argues that the invention of states and corporations has something to teach us about A.I. But perhaps it’s the other way around. - The New Yorker
Human moral judgment is rich and subtle, emerging through the complex interplay of reason and emotion—not the sort of thing that you’d expect a large language model to understand. - The New Yorker
Setting aside their feelings about being an adult, what did people say defined adulthood for them? They in fact tended to place little emphasis on the traditional milestones of marriage and parenthood. Psyche
Human beings make machines, but machines remake human society, too. Reliable, spring-driven clocks enabled precision time measurement, forcing us into regimented daily schedules, but they also helped sailors calculate their positions at sea with far greater accuracy, leading to the first reliable maps. - The Wall Street Journal
Those who shun the indefinite tend to see the world in shades of black and white, ignoring the gray. They are prone to jump to answers and are distressed by chaos and surprise. - Nautilus
ChatGPT felt new because it was capable of something much like a discussion. You can start with a half-baked idea and develop it with the AI’s help, using it as an aid to your own creativity. However, with each iteration of ChatGPT, ever more questions generate a stock or evasive response. - The Atlantic
"Without distractions, the days seemed to expand. We learned to harvest time, an idea that came to us in national forests across the U.S. We realized that days undisturbed by digital interruptions made time slow down and improved the quality of our time together." - The Atlantic
A new Dragon Age cookbook "admittedly derives from well-worn Europe-centered fantasy tropes — you have your fantasy England, your fantasy France, your fantasy Roman Empire, your underground dwarves" - and their cheese, ham, and giant spider legs. - The Verge
This marriage of convenience between American psychologists and American ad-men was a cozy connection warmed across the early decades of the twentieth century. - Asterisk
Radical politics should aim for a world in which work’s social role is utterly transformed and highly attenuated—a world in which work can no longer serve as either a disciplining institution or the fulcrum for our social identities. - Boston Review
How did we get here, where men who benefit most from our social structures, position themselves as the little guy? This comes from a longer history of political shifts in America and of the rise of mass cultural consumption as a means of political expression. - 3 Quarks Daily
Happiness is, after all, an abstract idea; there is no objective measure for it available. Many people don’t even know what they really mean by happiness: is it a state of general satisfaction? - Psyche
That’s the world, circa 1800. The new paradigm shocked Europe when it started to spread. Cultural elites had just assumed that science and reason would control everything in the future. But that wasn’t how it played out. - The Honest Broker
