On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all. Sometimes consumer prices are an incomplete, even misleading, signal of economic well-being. - The Atlantic
This is a moment that philosophers have warned us about for years. Before his death, philosopher and neuroscientist Daniel Dennett wrote that we face a grave peril from AI systems that emulate people: “These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history … distracting and confusing us. - Wired
Botto is a decentralized semi-autonomous artistic agent created in 2021 by the German artist Mario Klingemann; Simon Hudson, a media entrepreneur; and Ziv Epstein, a computer scientist and designer. - Wired
In speaking to hundreds of experts, consumers, and skeptics of AI over the past few years, four strongholds for humans keep coming up. - Harvard Business Review
Rousseau was, in effect, the diagnostician of despair who captured the affliction of alienation in all of its dimensions. The source of our affliction was the very thing we thought made us better: civilization. - The American Scholar
Contemporary America segregates debility and death, and it’s costing us, body and soul, writes Duke University historian James Chappel. - The American Scholar
Where you are, what you’re looking at, and what you like is being tracked more or less constantly—either you’re doing it to yourself voluntarily, by taking a video with your phone and posting it online, say, or a corporate entity is doing it for you. - The New Yorker
We talk a lot these days about Big Data, those heaping stores of digitized information that, fueling search and recommendation engines, social media feeds, and, now, artificial intelligence models, govern so much of our lives today. But we don’t give much notice to what might be called little data... - Hedgehog Review
If you feel empty in this way, you might find that bad news doesn’t make you feel upset, that good news doesn’t make you feel happy. Some part of you knows you should feel something when important things happen, but you don’t. - Psyche
These days, the favored term for an Internet powerhouse is “creator,” and in the course of this year a threshold of creatordom was passed. We don’t talk so much about podcasters, musicians, authors, or pundits anymore; they are simply creators, a catchall for people who are famous for making stuff across any number of platforms. - The New Yorker
I’m worried about pop culture — worried that the relationship between art and commerce isn’t working as it should, worried that even if the rest of American society starts moving, our storytelling is still going to be stuck. - The New York Times
“While we can’t claim to know what was going through Callas’ mind as she neared the end, we can nevertheless examine how much the external world referenced in Maria resembles the real thing.” - Slate (MSN)
Dennett was important because his work signalled a sea change in the concerns and methods employed by philosophers of mind. In the years BD (‘before Dennett’), philosophers assumed that their job was to chart the contours of our ordinary thought and talk about the mind. - Aeon
The cultural ideas (what was originally meant by ‘memes’) that are most suited to global dominance crowd out cultural ideas that developed locally and have deep meaning to the communities that created them. - Psyche
