Category: ideas

Yes, we still get lost … sort of. “The proliferation of digital maps has definitely changed the landscape, if you will, of when and how people lose their way.”

Sure, Black Panther features a black superhero (or several, if you include the women), and it’s breaking box office records, but one of the most groundbreaking things is that “it is told from an Afrocentric point of view; it breaks with the spirit of derision that has always saturated Hollywood films about Africans.”

The race to dominate the personal AI space—to build the artificial intelligence that each of us will use as an all-purpose digital assistant—is closer to being over than most people realize. And Google is poised to win. And if ever there was a business that we can’t let any one company dominate, it’s AI.

“Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places,” co-author Paul Pettitt of Durham University said in announcing the findings, which are published in the journal Science. That ability has long been seen as “one of the main pillars of what makes us human,” in the words of the study’s lead author, Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute. So this news may be a bit deflating to our collective ego.

Samir Chopra: “The Buddha and David Hume considered the self to be a bundle of ever-changing perceptions and thoughts and images. Similarly, I propose a ‘self-as-bundled-anxieties’ theory: we are a bundle of anxieties; by examining them, to see what vexes us, what makes us anxious, we come to know who we are. Anxiety is a reminder that our selves are rather more diffuse and disorderly than we might imagine, that there are more bits to be seized as they swirl ‘about’ and ‘inside’ us.”

“‘I think there is a domination of Western philosophy, so to speak, in AI ethics,” said [technology ethicist] Dr. Pak-Hang Wong … ‘By that I mean, when we look at AI ethics, most likely they are appealing to values … in the Western philosophical traditions, such as value of freedom, autonomy and so on.’ Wong is among a group of researchers trying to widen that scope, by looking at how non-Western value systems – including Confucianism, Buddhism and Ubuntu – can influence how autonomous and intelligent designs are developed and how they operate.” (audio)

Erasmus was an internationalist who sought to establish a borderless Christian union; Luther was a nationalist who appealed to the patriotism of the German people. Where Erasmus wrote exclusively in Latin, Luther often used the vernacular, the better to reach the common man. Erasmus wanted to educate a learned caste; Luther, to evangelize the masses. For years, they waged a battle of ideas, with each seeking to win over Europe to his side, but Erasmus’s reformist and universalist creed could not match Luther’s more emotional and nationalistic one.

Like many émigrés, Theodor Adorno was initially disoriented by US mass culture, which had not yet overrun Europe as it would after the war. This disorientation became a principled distrust. He claimed that capitalist popular culture – jazz, cinema, pop songs, and so on – manipulates us into living lives empty of true freedom, and serves only to distort our desires. Popular culture is not the spontaneous expression of the people, but a profit-driven industry – it robs us of our freedom and bends us to conform to its needs for profit.

“I decided to take a page out of William Gibson’s playbook and go and find some artists and criminals and see what they were doing with new technologies. As I see it, artists and criminals have something in common: Neither is constrained by social conventions. In a later interview Gibson said, “Criminals are in effect entrepreneurs with the brakes off. They look at whatever the latest technology is and think, ‘What can I do with this?’ Artists are unconstrained by the limits of business and societal conventions.”

There is a kind of optimism that it takes to be an inventor. But the father of the Internet thinks inventors need the artists. “It’s the mind-stretching practice of trying to think what the implications of technology will be that makes me enjoy science fiction,” Cerf says. “It teaches me that when you’re inventing something you should try to think about what the consequences might be.” The artists are the ones who recognize a fundamental truth: Human nature hasn’t changed much since Shakespeare’s time, no matter what fancy new tools you give us.