"Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant. It is still common for people to talk of “guilty” cultural pleasures—TV, dance music—about which no one has felt guilty in decades, and to apologize for them with an enthusiasm that looks a lot like pride. But the pretense of guilt is merely there to increase our pleasure; it adds...
With the rise of artificial intelligence, machine programming, and the ever more rapid automation of technical skills, many companies are seeking just the creative and humanist thinking that emerges from a study of the liberal arts. - Forbes
If we cannot slow down and grow cautiously, evenly, gradually into our new technological and political possibilities and responsibilities—even the potentially liberating ones—the last recognizably individual men and women may give place, before too many more generations, to the simultaneously sub- and super-human civilization of the hive. - Commonweal
"Between those who see meritocratic admissions as giving fair rewards to hard work and ability, and those who demand that schools focus on students’ identities rather than individual performance, there appears little room for compromise. But the two positions have unexamined common ground, coexisting in the consciousness of students and teachers." - Tablet
"We once obsessed about how to restrain machines we could not predict or control — now we worry about how to use machines to restrain humans we cannot predict or control. But the old problem hasn’t gone away: How do we know whether the machines will do as we wish?" - The New Atlantis
"Work, and the way it fits into one’s life, can be and often has been, less rigid and routinized than is common today. In modernized societies, work is organized around the clock, and most jobs are shoehorned into the same eight-hour schedule. In the past, and in some cultures still today, other factors–the seasons, the weather, tradition, the availability...
His character is a heavy-metal drummer who becomes deaf - very quickly. "You've got a character who is very focused on his daily grind. ... Just like we are as a culture and a society, on the treadmill - a workaholic culture. Then we have a health crisis that suddenly throws him into a kind of purgatory, and in...
Restrictions both from public health officials and venues will be in place. "Venues can also choose to separate people into sections based on their vaccination status. Those who are fully vaccinated could sit shoulder-to-shoulder, but they still must wear masks." - Los Angeles Times
Public space is different now than it was 15 months ago. Streets have been turned to outdoor eateries and pedestrian malls; Paris removed tons of street parking and converted the Rue di Rivoli into a biking haven. Will any of this decentralization of the car - and concurrent centralization of pedestrians and bikers - remain? - Fast Company
"The idea behind NFTs was, and is, profound. Technology should be enabling artists to exercise control over their work, to more easily sell it, to more strongly protect against others appropriating it without permission. By devising the technology specifically for artistic use, McCoy and I hoped we might prevent it from becoming yet another method of exploiting creative professionals....
“People are getting confused about the meaning of AI in discussions of technology trends—that there is some kind of intelligent thought in computers that is responsible for the progress and which is competing with humans,” he says. “We don’t have that, but people are talking as if we do.” - IEEE Spectrum
Is authenticity fading away as a personal ethic or is it something everyone wants to be? In fact, both are true – because the meaning of authenticity is changing. - Psyche
The story of the concept of ‘meritocracy’ has been well rehearsed in recent times, largely because of the way in which inequality and precarity have exposed its weaknesses. But some are still surprised to learn that the idea was conceived in the spirit of social satire, not the spirit of idealism. - Sydney Review of Books
Miller argues that AI-fueled art gains independence from its algorithmic parents and takes flight in works that bear the hallmarks of creativity and genius and will one day exceed human artists’ wildest imaginative dreams. Miller says he sympathizes with what I’m saying about the power of art coming from the connection with a human artist, plumbing their emotions and...
Clearly, asking questions about consciousness does not prove anything per se. But could an AI zombie formulate such questions by itself, without hearing them from another source or belching them out from random outputs? To me, the answer is clearly no. If I’m right, then we should seriously consider that an AI might be conscious if it asks questions...
