Category: ideas

The challenges created by this novelty should not obscure the fact that A.I. itself is not one technology, or even one singular development. Regulating an assemblage of technology we can’t clearly define is a recipe for poor laws and even worse technology.

“Another lesson from our brain imaging work is that illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, begin in the brain years—even decades—before people have any symptoms. But you can do something about it, and prevention seems to be key.”

“In a way, it’s startling how universal sleep is: In the midst of the hurried scramble for survival, across eons of bloodshed and death and flight, uncountable millions of living things have laid themselves down for a nice, long bout of unconsciousness. … Whatever sleep gives to the sleeper is worth tempting death over and over again, for a lifetime.” Reporter Veronique Greenwood visits a lab in Japan where scientists are trying to find the answer(s) to this question.

Paper has played “an essential role in the development of mankind”. And yet, for decades, civilisation has been trying to develop beyond paper, promoting a paper-free world that will run seamlessly, immaterially on pixels and screens alone. How did paper get here? Where does it go next? For that matter, why is paper – which does its job perfectly well – compelled to keep innovating?

“Virtually all types of institutions, be it political, educational, or business, are exhausting their internal energy in dealing with contentious, and seemingly irreconcilable, differences in basic identities and values — what it means to be American. In such an environment, identity trumps reason, ideology overwhelms politics, and moral convictions replace intellectual discourse.”

“The physicist’s worldview usually contains some aspect of physicalism (asserting the only “real” things are physical things, governed by physical laws), reductionism (asserting all observable phenomena are explicable in terms of their microscopic parts), and positivism or operationalism (asserting that the only meaningful concepts are empirically testable). And in recent generations more than any others, it seems, this web of attitudes permeates the zeitgeist. It is our inheritance from the success of 20th-century physics. This inheritance alters the way we frame questions about the mind and consciousness.”

“Much of [the book] Toward the Year 2018 might as well be science fiction today. With fourteen contributors, ranging from the weapons theorist Herman Kahn to the I.B.M. automation director Charles DeCarlo, penning essays on everything from ‘Space’ to ‘Behavioral Technologies,’ it’s not hard to find wild misses. … But for every amusingly wrong prediction, there’s one unnervingly close to the mark.”

Don’t do this, cities. Or maybe do do this, if you’re a marketer. But wow, what a tool of gentrification Instagram has become. For instance, in a Northeast D.C. neighborhood that is experiencing rapid gentrification: “The murals are fine ones; the splashes of color are nice. But most are very clearly Instagram bait in the service of developers.”

Words refer to objects, and they don’t actually live in our brains – only experience does, and we use words to convey our experiences. Or so is the claim. For instance: “What is an angel but a juggling of past experience: beautiful body, plus wings, as in a dream? What is dark matter if not a piece needed to complete a puzzle, a theory, made up of endless complex objects in the world? Sometimes, the imaginary object is a reshuffling of real objects and thus it is real in its own way; sometimes, it is nothing.”

Year-end lists go against this year’s tide: “For many Americans, 2017 has amounted to a permanent kind of jet lag: bodily schedules misaligned with social ones. There is so much happening, always. There is so much to know, unceasingly. There is so much that won’t be known. Which is also to say that there is so much that won’t be paid attention to. If one of the functions of the American media is to give order to the world’s messiness, to help people make determinations about what—and who—deserves their attention and care, 2017 was the year in which that ordering function lost some of its stability.”