In 2016, the group made its recommendation that the Anthropocene should be considered as the new epoch. This recommendation was later forwarded to higher ICS organs for consideration and voting. A series of votes was expected, but the proposal was rejected early on in the process in March 2024. - Aeon
As a wide range of social scientists, pollsters, and trendspotters have observed, a sense of fatalism has increasingly suffused the attitudes of many millennials and zoomers. - Drift Magazine
Roughly speaking, globalization flattens space and pares away cultural particularity; neoliberalism flattens value, reducing everything to its going rate on the market; the internet, and especially social media, flatten transactions and relationships into their barest, most instrumentalized form. - Commonweal
The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. - The New Yorker
Although many have outward-facing aspects, a hobby is ultimately a form of self-cultivation, pursued for reasons of personal satisfaction. Our society values publicity and productivity: perhaps that’s one reason that hobbies seem like they’re in decline. - The New Yorker
After the architects’ convention in 1900, public officials turned to specialists to address questions of aesthetic and space planning that had previously been matters of politics and patronage. Over the decade that followed, most public-building projects in D.C. came under a system of formal design review. - The Atlantic
AI’s automating powers are indiscriminate. They are affecting blue-collar manufacturing jobs and white-collar office jobs. Many who spent years, and thousands of dollars, developing specialized skills now need to live with the fact that AI can do their job faster and often better. It is a terrifying reality. - The Walrus
The more these systems anticipate and deliver what we want, the less we notice what’s missing—or remember that we ever had a choice in the first place. But remember: If you’re not choosing, someone else is. - The Atlantic
The collapse of the institutions where young people learn to make and critique art stands to greatly benefit companies like OpenAI, which, in the absence of human artists and critics, can both make the stuff and tell us it’s good. - LA Review of Books
As animation studios wither, one indie animator, whose fan-supported series has now been picked up by Amazon Prime: “I’ve been online since, like, late middle school. … So I have gone through every level of being cringe, being a dumb teenager, making mistakes, drawing really weird stuff.” - Slate
Cognitivism, which has permeated society—as evidenced by the omnipresence of the terms “cognitive” and “cognition”—has perpetuated a traditional view of thought and intelligence as phenomena of inextricable complexity, and therefore phenomena that we can hardly imagine recreating artificially. - AI & Society
By now we’ve moved beyond a post-literature culture into what some are calling a post-literate age, taking us back several thousand years to communication by images and symbols. - The Atlantic
Common knowledge — awareness of mutual understanding — can explain the emergence of social-media shaming mobs, academic cancel culture and revolutions that seem to erupt from nowhere. - Nature
