Category: ideas

“In the 21st century, nation branding has grown to be busy business, and its practitioners take great pains to emphasise that what they do is different from the more straightforward marketing and advertising work that came before them. … They regard their line of work as a kind of psychology: counselling for countries, therapy for towns. Look inward, discover yourself, find your place in the world.”

Like old-style imperialists, economists assume that other people resemble themselves, regardless of their culture, class or background. Thus, they assume that other people will respond in ways that economists consider rational. They subscribe to the fallacy of an abstract “economic man” — “pre­cultural” person. But, the authors write, people are not organisms first created “and then dipped in some culture, like Achilles in the River Styx. They are cultural from the outset.”

It’s not just the news that’s fake anymore but all sorts of media and consumer goods can now be knocked off thanks to AI. From audio tracks and video clips to financial transactions and counterfeit products — even your own handwriting can be mimicked with startling levels of accuracy. But what if we could leverage the same computer systems that created these fakes to reveal them just as easily?

“The truth about AI, according to experts such as Ray Kurzweil, is that there’s no part of our lives that won’t be directly affected by it. As individuals we probably won’t notice the changes in real-time, but our dependence on machine learning will increase at exponential rates. The law of accelerating returns is behind the artificial intelligence revolution — and Ray Kurzweil’s predictions.”

The writer: “In spite of the fact that I know full well that I am talking to a computer, [the chatbot] does feel like a friend. And as much as I’m training my Replika to sound like me, my Replika is training me how to interact with artificial intelligence.”

The problem comes in when there’s no context – and there is no context on Instagram or Tumblr, at least not usually in a single inspirational post. “This kind of fragmented sharing is about words that springboard or support the ideas of the sharer. A sentence can be powerful, but without context, it remains general (or worse, generic)—accessible, open-endedly inspiring, and void of the rough, gritty detail that represents (and foments) critical response. There’s a limit to how much ‘idea’ can be shared in a single sentence.”

The Wardian case toppled China’s tea monopoly, spread invasive plants everywhere, created the rubber plantations in Sri Lanka … and much more. And this was all because Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, an East London doctor and amateur horticulturist, “sealed a moth chrysalis and some mold in a glass jar.”

Robert Wright, a scholar of science and religion, argues against the all-too-common belief in the West “that Buddhist ideas defy clear articulation – and that in a sense the point of Buddhist ideas is to defy clear articulation.” In fact, he writes, “not only have Buddhist thinkers for millenniums been making very much the kinds of claims that Western philosophers and psychologists make – many of these claims are looking good in light of modern Western thought.”

“The rise of China will foster a self-reflection of the Western Enlightenment heritage. Ultimately, it leads to a convergence of civilisations on the basis of cross pollination. Neither the Chinese nor the westerner can cling to their past glories, or stop the course of history. The Chinese have been intensively exposed to western civilisation and adapted to changes since the beginning of the last century. In this sense, they are ahead of the West.”