Category: ideas

“It is now possible to conceive of adulthood as the state of being forever young. Childhood, once a condition of limited autonomy and deferred pleasure (“wait until you’re older”), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and delight. Grown people feel no compulsion to put away childish things.”

“We wanted to find out if one could communicate directly between two people by reading out the brain activity from one person and injecting brain activity into the second person, and do so across great physical distances by leveraging existing communication pathways.”

Rebecca Mead: “As popularly conceived, however, the bucket list … partakes of a commodification of cultural experience, in which every expedition made, and every artwork encountered, is reduced to an item on a checklist to be got through, rather than being worthy of repeated or extended engagement.”

“The relics and heirlooms of African-American families, the Smithsonian says, can help tell the story of America — and should be preserved. To that end, the museum is educating people about how to take care of their own history, making ordinary people collectors of the nation’s heritage.”

Yes, and that can be created: “A community’s ‘soul’ is not just some ineffable or magical quality. Urban planning and local laws actually affect it.”

“People do not react to their particular historical conundrums as a monolithic group. This is often where trend pieces get into trouble, when they start attributing one possible reaction to the group as whole.”

“You might think you remember your 3rd birthday party when what you really remember are the pictures, or you might believe you have a very vivid memory from elementary school that in reality happened to your brother. Or, you might even be lifting your memories from the books and movies you loved as a child.”

“It does not matter whether the new machines never achieve full human-like consciousness, or even real intelligence, they can almost certainly achieve just enough to do your job – not as well as you, perhaps, but much, much more cheaply.”

“What’s emerging from these studies isn’t just a theory of language or of metaphor. It’s a nascent theory of consciousness. Any algorithmic system faces the problem of bootstrapping itself from computing to knowing, from bit-shuffling to caring.”

Theodor Adorno, on an LA Times astrology column that advised, “Accept all invitations.”: “The consummation of this trend is the obligatory participation in official ‘leisure-time activities’ in totalitarian countries.” Alex Ross considers how Adorno and Walter Benjamin “were pioneers in thinking critically about pop culture – in taking that culture seriously as an object of scrutiny.”