Category: ideas

Prince Mohammed envisions Neom as a hub for manufacturing, renewable energy, biotechnology, media, and entertainment, filled with skyscrapers, five-star hotels, and robots to free humans from repetitive labor. The website dedicated to the city proclaims that it will offer “an idyllic lifestyle…founded on modern architecture, lush green spaces, quality of life, safety, and quality in service of humanity paired with excellent economic opportunities.”

“Scientists have long claimed that our ability with numbers is indeed biologically evolved – that we can count because counting was a useful thing for our brains to be able to do. The hunter-gatherer who could tell which herd or flock of prey was the biggest, or which tree held the most fruit, had a survival advantage over the one who couldn’t. What’s more, other animals show a rudimentary capacity to distinguish differing small quantities of things: two bananas from three, say. Surely it stands to reason, then, that numeracy is adaptive. But is it really?”

Physicists are using statistical mechanics to study origami folds – and defects in the folds. Why? “Crease patterns are also networks—not of particles, but of folds. Using these conceptual tools normally reserved for gases and crystals, Assis is gaining some intriguing insights.”

So very much past time: “This is an all-pervasive problem. It is about how boys are hailed as geniuses and girls are not. It is about how men get given big-budget blockbusters to direct and women don’t. It is about how men get their plays on Broadway and women don’t. It is about how most of the critics are men. It is about how nearly all the talking heads on TV are men. And it is a vicious circle.” So, here’s a start of a new canon.

Culturally, mazes are now massively resurgent. Practically every country park has its hedge maze, mirror maze or maize maze – and so do a growing number of churches and cathedrals. In virtual reality, notably, the maze forms the basic substructure of innumerable videogames. So why do mazes draw us in? And what do they do to us while we are there?

“Last year at the annual computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH, they debuted a new version of the game, called I Am A Robot, that allowed groups of people to don headsets and become genderless robots at either a ballet recital, cocktail gathering, or dance party. The response from participants was surprising – men in suits who swore they wouldn’t dance became entirely different people when in the genderless VR world – but it was the experience of two volunteers that moved Daffy most: one had social anxiety and had struggled to enjoy herself at the conference until she put the headset on and, inhibitions gone, danced and laughed for the first time in days. Another said they felt comfortable being gender-free for the first time in their life.”

“After so much talking about the risks of ultraintelligent machines, it is time to turn on the light, stop worrying about sci-fi scenarios, and start focusing on AI’s actual challenges, in order to avoid making painful and costly mistakes in the design and use of our smart technologies.”

“Our declinist age is noteworthy in one important way. It’s not just the Westerns who are in trouble; thanks to globalisation, it’s the Resterners too. In fact, we are all, as a species, in this mess; our world supply chains and climate change have ensured that we are poised before a sixth mass extinction together. We should worry less about our lifestyle and more about life itself.”

Given that real fear can be scarring and unpleasant, there’s a temptation to believe that the best way to deal with it is to avoid it at all costs. But science and philosophy often suggest otherwise. Fear can be one of the great sources of personal improvement. In particular, fear can help people cultivate several classic virtues that religious figures, sages, and secular moral traditions have all seen as essential for living a well-ordered life.

“When scientists use medical scanners to repeatedly peer at the shapes and activities of the human brain, those brains tend to belong to wealthy and well-educated people. And unless researchers take steps to correct for that bias, what we get is an understanding of the brain that’s incomplete, skewed, and,  well, a little weird.”