At first blush, it might seem obvious. But history is full of failed, unfinished or underperforming scratch-built city projects, in California and elsewhere, and more are in the pipeline. - Bloomberg
A cultural dope is someone like me or you, a consumer of culture or a “creative content provider” who produces, or consumes, the preexisting cultural artifacts of the dominant political economy while functioning under the illusion that what they are creating or consuming is “new.” - Los Angeles Review of Books
We have established a culture that expects us to have opinions on everything, and even rewards us for unexpected and implausible ones. Those of us privileged to fall within the clicking and scrolling classes would like to have something to show for our daily efforts. - 3 Quarks Daily
Russia’s assault on Ukraine is shocking, therefore, not only for its violence, but for the fact that it reopens the question of war as such and thus also the question of history. - Chartbook
Human consciousness, in other words, in part consists of understanding abstract and indirect meanings. And it is precisely this sort of understanding that artificial intelligence is incapable of. - FreeThink
Almost every measure of mental health is getting worse, for every teenage demographic, and it’s happening all across the country. Since 2009, sadness and hopelessness have increased for every race. - The Atlantic
History writing is based on the faith that events, despite appearances, don’t happen higgledy-piggledy—that although individuals can act irrationally, change can be explained rationally. - The New Yorker
It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families. - The Atlantic
“There is no ‘I’ in AI.” Computers can beat a grandmaster in chess, but they don’t know that chess is a game. Jeff Hawkins argues that we can’t achieve artificial general intelligence “by doing more of what we are currently doing.” - GatesNotes
On the face of it, the gamification of reality looks like fun. But when everything becomes a game, it turns out, that game ends up dissolving into its merely apparent opposite: work. - Hinternet
"One way you can think about this neural network is transcendent beauty as a service,” says Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and chief scientist at OpenAI. “Every now and then it generates something that just makes me gasp." - MIT Review
It's not just that you’re the product. You’re also the laborer, the factory, and the logistician. You’re also the resource. And your boss is crowdsourced. - Wired
The data (as well as Aristotle’s intuition, per his question about the prominence of melancholics in the arts) suggest that the answer is yes. - LitHub
“If you define neuroaesthetics as the use of neuroscience to explain art and aesthetic experience, then it is not surprising that neuroaesthetics fails: art just isn’t a phenomenon (neurological or experiential) to be explained by neuroscience, psychology, or any other empirical science.” - Nautilus
Like the Delta blues or Yellowstone National Park, baseball is as indelibly American as it is painfully uncommercial. Left to fend for itself, the game will eventually disappear. The New York Times
