Category: ideas

Ehrenreich contemplates with some satisfaction not just the approach of her own death but also the passing of her generation. As the boomers have aged, denial of death, she argues, has moved to the center of American culture, and a vast industrial ecosystem has bloomed to capitalize on it. Across twelve chapters, Ehrenreich surveys the health care system, the culture of old age, the world of “mindfulness,” and the interior workings of the body itself, and finds a fixation on controlling the body, encouraged by cynical and self-interested professionals in the name of “wellness.”

The most consistent finding out of this vast literature, the one fundamental result, is that personal space expands with anxiety. If you score high on stress, or if the experimenter stresses you ahead of time—maybe you take a test and are told that you failed it—your personal space grows with respect to other people.

Two numbers colleges used to rely on – SAT scores and GPAs – just aren’t that reliable anymore, admissions people say. So how to judge student applications? The answer is not good: “Admissions officers at about half of the institutions surveyed said an applicant’s ‘ability to pay’ was of at least ‘some importance’ in application decisions.”

From personal assistant robots acting as companions, to robots who offer reminders of daily tasks when our memories fail, to surgical precision robots that remove human error, the future of aging looks a lot different from today. Today’s strategy is to develop basic AI capabilities in home companion robots while technology develops. But how far is too far?

“As a philosophy major in college before medical school, I believe I learned what it means to be a good doctor equally from my humanities classes as from my science classes. Studying the humanities helps students develop critical-thinking skills, understand the viewpoints of others and different cultures, foster a just conscience, build a capacity for empathy, and become wise about emotions such as grief and loss. These are all characteristics that define a good doctor.”

“These seven moral rules – love your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to authority, be fair, and respect others’ property – appear to be universal across cultures. My colleagues and I analyzed ethnographic accounts of ethics from 60 societies (comprising over 600,000 words from over 600 sources). We found that these seven cooperative behaviors were always considered morally good.”

“We read about computers that can master ancient games and drive cars. [Turing Award-winning researcher Judea] Pearl is underwhelmed. As he sees it, the state of the art in artificial intelligence today is merely a souped-up version of what machines could already do a generation ago: find hidden regularities in a large set of data. … The key, he argues, is to replace reasoning by association with causal reasoning” – that is, teach machines to process cause and effect.

Hidden civilizations offer one possible answer to the Fermi Paradox, which raises the question of why we haven’t found evidence of intelligent alien life if many such races exist out there. Rather than support Enrico Fermi’s theory that intelligent life is unique to Earth, Dark Forest Theory raises the possibility that alien life is too intelligent to be detected, either because it’s hiding and/or because it’s plotting another race’s destruction.

Thomas Nagel argued that when we sense that something – or everything – in life is absurd, we’re experiencing the clash of two perspectives from which to view the world. One is that of the engaged agent, seeing her life from the inside, with her heart vibrating in her chest. The other is that of the detached spectator, watching human activity coolly, as if from the distance of another planet.