Category: ideas

“If we engage in behaviour we feel bad about over and over again, does our emotional response to this behaviour adapt? If so, then we’ve got a prediction: since we know that emotional responses can constrain our willingness to be dishonest, if these responses decrease through adaptation, dishonesty ought to increase as a result.”

I’ve previously argued that the word “algorithm” has become a cultural fetish, the secular, technical equivalent of invoking God. To use the term indiscriminately exalts ordinary—and flawed—software services as false idols. AI is no different. As the bot author Allison Parrish puts it, “whenever someone says ‘AI’ what they’re really talking about is ‘a computer program someone wrote.’”

“Driven by an ever-deepening dearth of funding, against a background of economic uncertainty, global political turmoil, and ever-shortening time cycles, research criteria are becoming dangerously skewed toward conservative short-term goals that may address more immediate problems but miss out on the huge advances that human imagination can bring in the long term. Just as in Flexner’s time, the progress of our modern age, and of the world of tomorrow, depends not only on technical expertise, but also on unobstructed curiosity and the benefits — and pleasures — of traveling far upstream, against the current of practical considerations.”

Scientists may try to define or explain this, says a philosopher, but only philosophers can really do the job. “Human beings live in mutual accountability, each answerable to the other and each the object of judgment. The eyes of others address us with an unavoidable question, the question ‘why?'”

How does the tech hold up? Surprisingly well, as if Disney Channel movies of the late 1990s were like the Black Mirror of today. “It is truly unfortunate that we don’t pay closer attention to silly near-future children’s entertainment when guessing at what anxieties we might soon develop. It’s too late, but we can look back at them now and marvel.”

The young man at the heart of “The Chicken Connoisseur” – a series of YouTube reviews, using dense London slang, of fried chicken and chips places- has gone viral. He’s clearly a populist, but is that dangerous or wonderful?

The role of smell in cultural preservation is getting its own attention – and the tool of the preservationists is “a sampling device that looks like a contraption out of Jules Verne: a crystalline dome with plastic tubing snaking from its side. The sampler is placed gently on objects — rare books, furniture, carpets — to capture the escaping molecules that create a distinct smell.”

“The spectacular progress of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century was made possible by the exclusion of the mental from their purview. To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgment that we are nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain.”

“Until very recently, the practice of modern history centred on, and was dominated by, the nation state. Most history was the history of the nation. If you wander through the history and biography aisles of either brick-and-mortar or virtual bookstores, the characters and heroes of patriotism dominate. In the United States, authors such as Walter Isaacson, David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin have helped to give millions of readers their understanding of the past and the present. Inevitably, they wrote page-turning profiles of heroic nation-builders. Every nation cherishes its national history, and every country has a cadre of flame-keepers. Then, along came globalisation and the shake-up of old, bordered imaginations.”