Is Artificial Intelligence becoming increasingly real? Are we now in a new era of the “AIs”? To consider this issue, it’s time to grow up. Enough already with the science fiction and the movies, Star Maker, Blade Runner, 2001, Her, The Matrix, “The Borg”.
Category: ideas
Some Odd Research: Want Someone To Better Appreciate Surrealist Art? Remind Them They’re Going To Die First
“It finds people are more likely to forge a positive emotional connection with surrealistic art if they have just been reminded of their own mortality.”
Are We All Born With Synaesthesia?
“The under-examined complexities of ordinary perception, some neuroscientists and developmental psychologists contend, suggest that, like the Nabokovs, we all inhabit the synaesthetic spectrum – we just need to look back in time, to when we were infants with developing brains.”
Disrupt Culture? (Better Figure Out What’s Being Disrupted)
“Data suggests that audiences are agnostic in their habits of cultural consumption — and increasingly ambivalent about the platform by which they consume that culture. The Innovators Dilemma suggests that those who look with condescension upon the competitive emergence of cheaper, arguably poorer quality cultural products do so at their own peril.”
Absence Of Satire – Has America Become A Parody Of Itself?
It’s a stunning moment, although it hardly seems satirical any longer, in a world where people obsess over the Kardashians and “Duck Dynasty.” This, in turn, suggests a bigger problem — that, as the literary critic Harold Bloom once insisted, “In the United States, satire is no longer possible. America has turned into a satire of itself.”
It’s Frightening How Easy It Is To Make People Falsely Remember Committing A Crime
“By the end of the third interview, after a bunch of carefully crafted nudging to do their best to remember, a full 70 percent of the students [in the study] said, ‘Yep, I committed that crime when I was younger,’ and they ‘volunteered … detailed false account[s]’ of those crimes.”
Kierkegaard Gets Right To The Heart Of Boredom
In a section of his 1843 masterwork Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, … the Danish philosopher defines boredom as a sense of emptiness and examines it not as an absence of stimulation but as an absence of meaning – an idea that also explains why it’s possible, today more than ever, to be overstimulated but existentially bored.”
24 Pieces Of Life Advice From Werner Herzog
“Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.”
Dear Leon Wieseltier, Technology Is *Not* Ruining Culture
“When Wieseltier references his paranoia of numerics and metrics, he ignores the fact that numbers and humanity are not incompatible — in fact, they’re inseparable.”
The (Extremely Specific) Time When We All Kill Our Inner Children
“This shift begins even earlier than previously believed, and it may be driven by a crucial cognitive development that’s arguably the basis of all human social interaction.”