ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

With A Phone, A Friend, And Some LEGO, You’re All Set To Understand The Planet

Sure, people didn’t have phones (or LEGO) 2,000 years ago, but even they knew the Earth was round. - Wired

Do You Miss Angelfire And Geocites?

Then the indie web might be for you. It’s “pushing back against algorithms and AI and calling for a more creative, personal internet.” - The Verge (Archive Today)

Did We Make A Mistake When We Separated The Notion of Consciousness From Physical Things?

Ever since Descartes, who split mind from matter and linked thinking and being, we’ve drifted from the very thing that makes us human. We’ve separated ourselves from the natural world, physically and mentally. The mental separation enabled the physical one. We came to see ourselves inhabiting a world of things, ourselves the only conscious element within it. - Harper's

Study: Constant Checking Of Your Phone Feeds Cognitive Decline

A study by the Singapore Management University found that frequent interruptions to check our devices lead to more attention and memory lapses. Unlike total screen time, the frequency of smartphone checks is a much stronger predictor of daily cognitive failures. - Washington Post

Scientist: AI Creativity Is Mathematically Limited To Amateur Status

The study provides evidence that large language models, such as ChatGPT, are mathematically constrained to a level of creativity comparable to an amateur human. - Psypost

Study: Our Brains Have Five Major Eras In Our Lifetimes

The study mapped neural connections and how they evolve during our lives. This revealed five broad phases, split up by four pivotal “turning points” in which brain organisation moves on to a different trajectory, at around the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83 years. - The Guardian

Those Eureka Moments And Why They’re So Remarkable

You never feel as if you’re getting warmer; rather, you go from cold to hot, seemingly in an instant. Or, as the neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, known for his work building neurobiological models of learning, wrote in the 1940s, sometimes “learning occurs as a single jump, an all-or-none affair.” - Quanta

If Machines Do Most Of Our Writing, What Will Happen To Human Writing?

If you’re more likely to read something written by AI than by a human on the internet, is it only a matter of time before human writing becomes obsolete? Or is this simply another technological development that humans will adapt to? - The Conversation

As Our Machines Get More Intelligent, We Keep Redefining What Intelligence Is

Machine intelligence meets or surpasses humanlike abilities in many areas—but being an embodied human is complex, and our grasp of intelligence has grown significantly. - Scientific American

Drawing A Line: As 21st-Century Pop Culture Got Stale, The Counterculture Became Right Wing

In place of the bohemian idealism of previous countercultural movements, this counter-counterculture embraced cynicism, scoffing at inclusivity and progress. - The New York Times

The Venerated, Exploited Legacy Of Anne Frank

“It is not uncommon for a visitor to refuse to leave the Annex, convinced she is Anne Frank reincarnate. This degree of identification perplexes the director. Calling her by her first name, as some of his colleagues do, troubles him as well.” - LitHub

What The Ed Sheeran Documentary Shows About Culture Is, Honestly, A Little Depressing

Not because of the skill of the one-take camera crew. “We know, of course, that being a very famous person these days involves having phones shoved in your face. But to see it like this, minute by minute, is bleak viewing, no matter how catchy the tunes are.” - Slate

Research: Students Learning With AI Say They Learn Less

The data revealed a consistent pattern: People who learned about a topic through an LLM versus web search felt that they learned less, invested less effort in subsequently writing their advice, and ultimately wrote advice that was shorter, less factual and more generic. - The Conversation

The Surveillance Workplace Is Coming For Us

For many workers, both remote and in person, the workplace has quietly shifted into a site of constant measurement—where every pause can trigger scrutiny and where productivity is no longer just about results but continuous presence. - The Walrus

So What Is Progress, Really? Some Limits Are Good

“Modernity is a machine for destroying limits." This attack on limits is legible in a host of current phenomena, including mass immigration, free-market orthodoxy, the rise of AI, overseas labor exploitation, the clear-cutting of rainforests, and new ideas about gender. - The Atlantic

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