Category: ideas

Sometimes, the only way to help someone seems to be a cruel or nasty approach – a strategy that may leave the ‘helper’ feeling guilty and wrong. Now research from my team at the Liverpool Hope University in the UK sheds light on how the process works.

“Every group of people I ask,” says Hans Rosling, “thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless — in short, more dramatic — than it really is.” And because the media know drama interests us, they offer frightening, violent, dramatic news of fresh disasters. Good news is no news.

Which is to say, zero. “The invention of the zero was a hugely significant mathematical development, one that is fundamental to calculus, which made physics, engineering and much of modern technology possible. But what was it about Indian culture that gave rise to this creation that’s so important to … the modern world?”

Pick up any newspaper and you’ll find stories – survivors of terrible plane or automobile crashes, or patients with dread diseases who live past their predicted expiration date. Invariably they are described as hugely lucky. That’s puzzling on the face of it; you’d think that somebody really lucky wouldn’t have got cancer or been in a terrible wreck to start with. Such cases raise interesting questions about the nature of luck. Is it something real or is it purely subjective, just a matter of how we happen to feel about the things that happen?

A vast number of traditions have existed over time that one could conceivably categorise as religions. But in order to decide one way or the other, an observer first has to formulate a definition according to which some traditions can be included and others excluded. As Jonathan Zitell Smith wrote in the introduction to Imagining Religion: ‘while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterised in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious – there is no data for religion’.

This is a moment to be savored, even as we sound new notes of care and caution about the speed, nature and range of these changes. Part of this process involves getting used to the alien nature and pervasive reach of the many new subintelligences that now surround us. These are the algorithms that talk with us, that watch us, that trade for us, that select dates for us, that suggest what we might buy, sell, or wear. They are the algorithms that pool information about us, and that will slowly permeate the full range of human-built environments, from bridges to roads to cities and more minor intelligent devices.

Recent research suggests that experiencing not-so-happy feelings actually promotes psychological wellbeing. A study published in the journal Emotion in 2016 took 365 German participants aged 14 to 88… The team found that the link between negative mental states and poor emotional and physical health was weaker in individuals who considered negative moods as useful. Indeed, negative moods correlated with low life satisfaction only in people who did not perceive adverse feelings as helpful or pleasant.

“State-of-the-art results are not the exclusive domain of big companies,” says Jeremy Howard, one of Fast.ai’s founders and a prominent AI entrepreneur. Howard and his cofounder, Rachel Thomas, created Fast.ai to make AI more accessible and less exclusive.

With TripAdvisor and Yelp, everything is so documented that travel stories have become a thing of the past. Or have they?

Just in case you were worried, sex is going to keep happening – between (and among) humans, even when we have sex robots – and humans will still need other humans to take care of them as well, not just care robotos. “This is an intimacy that does not make room for human empathy or what human beings in their bodies experience as the fear of death, loneliness, illness, pain. We diminish as the seeming empathy of the machine increases. It is technology forcing us to forget what we know about life.”