Things didn't go well: "Because an AI program can’t 'be there,' it ends up, like a lazy college freshman, culling what material it can find floating around the internet and regurgitating it in a generic format." And the factual errors weren't great either. - Dallas Morning News
Transhumanism emerged as a distinct school of thought in the 1980s, when philosophers, scientists, and artists began to think intensively about how technology might transform human bodies and minds. - American Scholar
It's all going to plan. But also, "Anime's fans are largely online, and the pandemic — when people were suddenly able to focus on at-home or online interests — helped fuel growth." - NPR
"You might be desperate to find a grant ... to allow you to write for two weeks. Or you might have all the money in the world, but other hindrances to you getting to the page. How do we overcome that and live a life that’s dedicated to art?" - Slate
Since 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been investigating what makes people flourish. After starting with 724 participants the study incorporated the spouses of the original men and, more recently, more than 1,300 descendants of the initial group. - The Atlantic
Smart Questions are, typically, kind of dumb. And, just as typical, questions that might initially seem dumb or underinformed, or downright unintelligent, are the smartest way to learn stuff if you’re a journalist, an academic, or anybody else. - The Atlantic
While there will always be a need for essays and written assignments – especially in the humanities, where they are essential to help students develop a critical voice – do we really need all students to be writing the same essays and responding to the same questions? - The Conversation
For Herbert Read, “culture” is capitalism’s breaking apart of life and art, and the subsequent fencing off of the poet, the architect, and the painter into separate institutions, giving politicians titles such as Minister for Culture, and making artists subservient not to the “natural” forms of life but the will of political power. - Jacobin
What if alcohol was not merely a vice, but one of the triggers that sparked the dawn of human civilization — in essence, the very thing that shifted us from hunter-gatherers to agrarians? - Salon
The new finding of Mr. Park and his colleagues suggests that investments in science are caught in a spiral of diminishing returns and that quantity in some respects is outpacing quality. - The New York Times
In recent years the idea that our universe, including ourselves and all of our innermost thoughts, is a computer simulation, running on a thinking machine of cosmic capacity, has permeated culture high and low. - The New York Times
We are used to hearing such petulant ressentiment, especially in connection with the 20th-century avant-garde in the figurative arts: “I could have entered a urinal in an exhibition, too”; “I could have painted an all-white monochrome, too”; etc. The simplest response is, “Yes, but you didn’t”. - Unherd
Escape behavior offers useful insight into the brain’s inner workings because it engages nervous system networks that originated in the early days of evolution. - Smithsonian
Mathematics belongs firmly within, not outside, the Modernist revolution in art and thought that reconfigured minds and lives. So why would any writer who cares about the origins of the ideas not wish to understand the intellectual core of arithmetic to the technological transformation of our world? - Prospect
Only connect: "The strongest predictors for people to maintain their happiness and health throughout the course of their lives were people who described their relationships as having satisfying levels of quality and warmth." - NPR
