“The Internet itself is just patterns—so much of what we do online is just knee-jerk, meme reactions to everything, which means that most of the responses to things on the Internet are fairly predictable. So this is just showing that.” - The New Yorker
We can imagine “heights of flourishing” that tower above the life we know now, but human minds and bodies are capable of climbing only so high. There is a limit to how much we can feel, how deeply we can think, how fast we can move. - American Scholar
Beyond the traditional five senses, neuroscientific research also examines proprioception (sensing your muscles, their location, and their movements) and the vestibular system, which regulates the sense of orientation and balance in space. - The Conversation
Human beings may make choices that are not predictable or even completely determined. The hard question of free will is whether, at the time of making a choice, we could have done otherwise (leaving aside randomness or chance). - The Wall Street Journal
It occurs to us, strolling past a pair of broken BuzzFeed Shopping–approved AirPods, that the new ugliness has beset us from both above and below. - n+1
ChatGPT feels different. Smarter. Weirder. More flexible. It can write jokes (some of which are actually funny), working computer code and college-level essays. It can also guess at medical diagnoses, create text-based Harry Potter games and explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty. - The New York Times
The application of game design principles like leaderboards, progress bars, points, badges, levels, challenges, and activity streaks to nongame ends has seeped into just about every domain of modern life, from sleeping and exercising to studying and social credit systems. - The New Republic
Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled, elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an adverse effect, fuelling our familiar, modern malaise of dissatisfaction, disconnection and burnout. - Psyche
"I’m a scientist myself, but I find it a bit unsettling that a brain scientist or computer might accurately predict whom I’ll fall in love with. At the same time, I admire the spectacular progress of science in understanding human beings and where we fit in the grand scheme of things. - The Atlantic
Art’s primary task, Perl asserts, is not to “promote a particular idea of ideology, or perform some clearly defined civic or community service.” Art is meaningful, valuable, and exciting precisely because of its irrelevance to our most immediate, surface-level concerns. - Commonweal
In order for future fans to experience the amazing things on your list, they will need to be technologically empowered to participate in the experience. - Shelly Palmer
No surprise, after decades of concerted campaigns to destroy the tribes and their languages. But there's a plan: "The Biden administration announced an effort to address this at the Tribal Nations Summit, putting forth a draft of a 10-year national plan to revitalize Native languages." - NPR
This year, we’ve seen a flurry of AI products that seem to do precisely what the Oxford researchers considered nearly impossible: mimic creativity. Language-learning models such as GPT-3 now answer questions and write articles with astonishingly humanlike precision and flair. - The Atlantic
