Category: ideas

“Cities traded rich architectural histories — marked by encounters and conflicts between Native Americans, the Spanish, the French, and later arrivals from Europe and the Caribbean — for easy money in the form of modern coastal development. This makes sense; there is money in waterfront property. But this is no charming Nantucket or Cape Cod; my city doesn’t even pull a San Francisco and have a touristy wharf.”

“It tears conversations apart, and it’s really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline. It makes it extremely hard to follow events, and destroys one of the core values of Twitter, in my opinion.”

“Even as my unease and disappointment increased with each passage like this, I began to feel a strangely pleasurable tingling. There was no escaping the fact that I was reading a bad book by a very fine writer, but it occurred to me that this was actually a good thing.”

Three decades of studies seemed to “point in the same, troubling direction: We don’t really have free will. In fact, until recently, many neuroscientists would have said any decision you made was not truly free but actually determined by neural processes outside of your conscious control. Luckily, for those who find this state of affairs philosophically (or existentially) perplexing, things are starting to look up.”

To generate creative ideas, it’s important to start from an unusual place. But to explain those ideas, they have to be connected to something familiar. That’s why so many startups are introducing themselves as the “Uber for X.”

“The truth is that even the experts don’t completely understand how neural nets work. But they do work. If you feed enough photos of a platypus into a neural net, it can learn to identify a platypus. If you show it enough computer malware code, it can learn to recognize a virus. If you give it enough raw language—words or phrases that people might type into a search engine—it can learn to understand search queries and help respond to them. In some cases, it can handle queries better than algorithmic rules hand-coded by human engineers. Artificial intelligence is the future of Google Search, and if it’s the future of Google Search, it’s the future of so much more.”

“It reflects a very human thing, a thing that has been part of culture, and for that matter of religion, for millennia: the desire to share our meals with other people. … To take a picture of a meal, and to share that picture with friends and family with the help of the World Wide Web – that may be an act of performance, but it’s also an act of invitation. It’s extending, basically, the number of people at one’s table.”

“Strangely enough, the more ‘alien’ the language, the more we can learn about our own messy human languages and how ‘weird’ they can seem. Marc Okrand, the creator of Klingon, explains how he deliberately tried to violate human language universals in order to make Klingon seem alien, from the unusual set of sounds in its phoneme inventory to using uncommon syntactic rules, such as the object-verb-subject word order seen only in about 1% of the world’s languages.”

“So many artists whose potential is unlimited, and who have already worked on visible, prestige (and in some cases commercial) projects, are still barely scraping by. This is not a new thing, although of course the current funding situation tightens the screws. It reflects the fact that a great deal of the increased funding that went into theatre over the last 20 years found its way into buildings and administrative posts, leaving artists to apparently exist on thin air.”

“The making of art — popular or fine, abstruse or accessible, sacred or profane — is one of the glories of our species. We are uniquely endowed with the capacity to fashion representations of the world and our experience in it, to tell stories and draw pictures, to organize sound into music and movement into dance. Just as miraculously, we have the ability, even the obligation, to judge what we have made.”