Category: ideas

“Now some prominent scientists are arguing that, though the impulse was well-intentioned, decades of knee-jerk avoidance of all things anthropomorphic may have mostly served to hold this field back.” Says one researcher, “It’s ruined the field. It prevented people from even asking those questions for about 40 years.”

“When graphic designer Yang Liu moved from Beijing to Berlin at age 13, she found herself in culture shock. ‘I discovered – almost on a daily basis – that things were quite the contrary of what I was used to, starting with social customs and extending all the way to fundamental ways of thinking.” (pictured: “Sunshine” and “Leisure Time”)

“Teens are free to express their low self-esteem on Tumblr, but they have confidence in one thing: Everyone will steal their jokes. A study by Priceonomics found that Tumblr is the top source for BuzzFeed’s viral content. The site’s biggest story in 2015—a photo of a dress that looked blue-and-black or white-and-gold—was found on Tumblr.”

“What if the failure of language itself were the cause of the enhanced creativity, one form of expression compensating for the loss of another?”

“It’s fitting that the scenario of ‘WarGames’ — which aroused Reagan’s curiosity and led to the first national policy on reducing the vulnerability of computers — owed a crucial debt to the man who’d first warned that they were vulnerable.”

The original concept of average is, after all, mathematical: the mean of a set of numbers. That measurement came to signify “normal” and even “exemplary” thanks to a frustrated Belgian astronomer who got caught on the wrong side of a revolution.

“I’m talking about the failure of the social sciences to develop a satisfactory theory of ethical life. A theory that could explain why humans are constantly judging and evaluating, and why we care about other people and what they think of us. A theory that could explain something so trivial as the fact that social scientists care about data fudging.”

“Another way of saying this is that the stories are surrogate memories for an AI that cannot ‘grow up’ immersed in a society the way people are and must quickly immerse itself in a society by reading about [it].”

“There was more activity, or communication, among the portions of their brains that process stress-related reactions and other areas related to focus and calm.”