History writing is based on the faith that events, despite appearances, don’t happen higgledy-piggledy—that although individuals can act irrationally, change can be explained rationally. - The New Yorker
It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families. - The Atlantic
“There is no ‘I’ in AI.” Computers can beat a grandmaster in chess, but they don’t know that chess is a game. Jeff Hawkins argues that we can’t achieve artificial general intelligence “by doing more of what we are currently doing.” - GatesNotes
On the face of it, the gamification of reality looks like fun. But when everything becomes a game, it turns out, that game ends up dissolving into its merely apparent opposite: work. - Hinternet
"One way you can think about this neural network is transcendent beauty as a service,” says Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and chief scientist at OpenAI. “Every now and then it generates something that just makes me gasp." - MIT Review
It's not just that you’re the product. You’re also the laborer, the factory, and the logistician. You’re also the resource. And your boss is crowdsourced. - Wired
The data (as well as Aristotle’s intuition, per his question about the prominence of melancholics in the arts) suggest that the answer is yes. - LitHub
“If you define neuroaesthetics as the use of neuroscience to explain art and aesthetic experience, then it is not surprising that neuroaesthetics fails: art just isn’t a phenomenon (neurological or experiential) to be explained by neuroscience, psychology, or any other empirical science.” - Nautilus
Like the Delta blues or Yellowstone National Park, baseball is as indelibly American as it is painfully uncommercial. Left to fend for itself, the game will eventually disappear. The New York Times
For certain kinds of tasks—playing chess, detecting tumors—artificial intelligence can rival or surpass human thinking. But the broader world presents endless unforeseen circumstances, and there A.I. often stumbles. - The New Yorker
Virtue signalling is more nuanced and more interesting than the picture painted by conventional wisdom and political rhetoric. As it turns out, there are bad and good things about virtue signalling – but probably not for the reasons you think. - Aeon
These days, the art of hanging out seems to be waning in cities. The American Community Life Survey reported last year that only 25 percent of people living in areas with “very high” amenity access actually socialize with strangers at least once a week. - The Atlantic
Computer scientists had been trying to coax machines to write verse since at least the 1960s, and Racter was a singular example of how something mindless could create something meaningful. Indeed, it led the avant-garde poet Christian Bök to wonder if humans were needed to produce literature at all. - New Criterion
Yes, but it won't be top-down. "Factchecking outfits may do good work, but they are missing a crucial component: the power of the crowd. Because, as well as counterfactual communities, we’ve also seen what you might call truth-seeking communities emerge around specific issues." - The Guardian (UK)
Or, more likely, has April Fool's Day ruined the internet? "People, us included, get so easily hoodwinked, and ... this has led us to a place where we start to suspect that nothing online is real." - Slate
