ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

IDEAS

The Rise Of “Sleep Tourism”

"People often associate travel with decadent meals, extending their bed times, the attractions and the things you do while you're traveling, really almost at the cost of sleep. Now, I think there's just been a huge seismic shift in our collective awareness and prioritization on wellness and well being." - CNN

Chess’s Cheating Scandal Demonstrates How Computers Have Changed The Game

 In the past 15 years, widely available AI software packages, known as “chess engines,” have been developed to the point where they can easily demolish the world’s best chess players—so all a cheater has to do to win is figure out a way to channel a machine’s advice. - The Atlantic

“Brazen Heads” — Legends Of The Robots Of Medieval Europe

"Let's take a look at three of these stories — builders of brazen heads and the ruin that visited them — and see if those warnings did us any good."  The ill-fated Icarusses in question: Pope Sylvester II, Saint Albert, and Roger Bacon. - Tedium

“The Personal Is Political” — Where The Slogan Came From And How It Went Wrong

"To understand disagreements about race, sex and gender dividing the West now, we could do worse than go back to where the sentiment began – with second-wave feminists (in the late) 1960s, and with serious ideas that have been cheapened and weaponised at both ends of the political spectrum today." - Psyche

Opportunity Isn’t The Same as Equality

What we should want is to make outcomes more equal – not opportunity. Antiegalitarians resist calls for equality via the ideology that if people have equal opportunity, then the outcome, whatever it is, is justified. - 3 Quarks Daily

“Seeing” Without Seeing: Perception and Consciousness

Blindsight is now a well-established clinical phenomenon. When first discovered, it seemed theoretically shocking. No one had expected there could possibly be any such dissociation between perception and sensation. - Aeon

We Each Perceive The World In A Different Way

We are strongly influenced by context. From the effect of shadows on how we perceive the brightness of a surface, to our tendency to interpret facial expressions depending on what we think is happening, context permeates all our conscious experiences. - The Guardian

How Did “Utopia” Become A Bad Word?

For the Victorians the word “utopian” did not carry the negative connotations of impossibility, naïveté, and dunderheadedness that it does for us now—the writers and thinkers who used that word were for the most part engaged in actual utopian projects, whether literal or literary (or both). - 3 Quarks Daily

Why Fear AI-Generated Art?

The idea that art is only art when it shows evidence of the artist’s handicraft is, at this point, so ludicrous that it barely needs addressing. People who say that anyone can make AI art are the latest in a long line of people who said the same thing about some of the most important art of the 20th...

Humans Have A Hard Time Walking Away

How do we know when to quit? (And we don't mean "quiet quitting.") - Slate

The Problems With Therapy Chat Bots

AI "therapists" are always online, always available, unlike the humans who invented them - but also unlike the humans who trained for years to know how to respond to, say, reports of sexual abuse. "It’s creating the illusion of help," says one ethicist. - Wired

Why A Gaming Designer Won’t Let His Kids Play Video Games

"Using the data we collected, we experimented with every feature of our games to see which versions allowed us to extract the most time and money from our players. For us, game addiction was by design: It meant success for our business." - The New York Times

Oh, The Humanities

Humanities departments have to face up to what's happening to their students, both undergrad and (here, the news is even worse) graduate students. Where can history majors, for instance, get jobs? "We must do a much better job of providing students with windows into careers." - Inside Higher Ed

How Your Brain Rewires Itself In Your 40s

The brain begins becoming less connected within those separate networks and more connected globally across networks. By the time we reach our 80s, the brain tends to be less regionally specialized and instead broadly connected and integrated. - Big Think

How A Texas Court Ruling On First Amendment Could Break The Internet

A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. - The Atlantic

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