Category: ideas

“Every worldly example of continued personal identity involves tremendous transformations – whether it is developing language, sociality or morals; discovering a hidden passion; coming out of our closets; changing careers; falling in or out of love; growing or finding a family. Such dynamism does not throw our identities into question; instead, these changes represent some of the most significant aspects of our selves.”

“The news here is that the lives of most of our progenitors were better than we think. We’re flattering ourselves by believing that their existence was so grim and that our modern, civilized one is, by comparison, so great. Still, we are where we are, and we live the way we live, and it’s possible to wonder whether any of this illuminating knowledge about our hunter-gatherer ancestors can be useful to us.”

No matter how radical these predictions are, they tend to take the long-term durability of capitalism utterly for granted: Responding to decades of stagnating wages and sliding labor force participation, the Institute for the Future’s report “10 Strategies for a Workable Future” (which is in many ways quite sharp and informative) acknowledges deep problems with our current labor ecosystem and digs into important issues of benefits, collective bargaining, and education. But it doesn’t even consider the idea that the challenges it identifies are inherent to a system whose primary objective and value is capital accumulation, not equity and the common good.

Le monde anglo-saxon. Le modèle anglo-saxon. Le capitalisme anglo-saxon. L’hégémonie anglo-saxonne. You hear and read the term more and more in France these days, almost always for something opposed to the way the French do things and usually for something undesirable or worse. Yet before the mid-19th century, “anglo-saxon” was used in France only to refer to pre-Norman Conquest England. Emile Chabal lays out how the word went from historical designation to disparaging epithet. (It’s not really about English-speakers at all.)

After years of stagnation, the computer is evolving again, and this behind-the-scenes migration to a new kind of machine will have broad and lasting implications. It will allow work on artificially intelligent systems to accelerate, so the dream of machines that can navigate the physical world by themselves can one day come true.

The prize for medicine went to neuroscientists who explored the reasons some people are disgusted by cheese, while medical researchers who found that learning to play the didgeridoo strengthens the muscles that control breathing and can reduce snoring received the peace prize. And since one definition of a liquid is matter that takes the shape of its container, the physics prize was given to a scientist who suggests that cats (see photo) are arguably liquid as well as solid.

On the grounds that “philosophy is about everything and games are about everything”, the authors of Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us advance the thesis that gaming is a forum for learning about key subjects like the nature of consciousness, logic and ethics.

A survey of high-school students that has been repeated for the past 60 years presents a startling picture. In 1950, 12 percent of students agreed with the statement, “I am a very important person.” By 1990 that had risen to 80 percent. Other scholars have found that student scores on an index of empathy have been going down over the same period. Moreover, recent research in cognitive science suggests that media overload (often implicated in iCreativity) may reduce compassion, empathy, moral reasoning, and tolerance. For many young people, if they cannot insert themselves into an experience—capture it in what some observers call “life-catching”—and share it online with friends, then it is not worth the effort.

Over the past year, the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other global tech giants have all said, in different ways, that they now run “AI-first” companies. I can’t remember a single senior news exec ever mentioning AI and machine learning at any industry keynote address over the same period. Of course, that’s not necessarily surprising.

“Slate has noticed a wily hedging mechanism among Silicon Valley soothsayers to circumvent these uncertainties—make predictions for “five to 10 years out.” It hits that sweet spot: just close enough that people can begin to taste it, but just far enough away that (almost) no one is going to call you out if it doesn’t become true. A review of press releases and tech articles stretching back to the 1990s finds that these Goldilocks forecasts are abundant.”