Category: ideas

“Like in journalism, in all the creative occupations, there’s no stability unless you’re a superstar of some sort. ” – New York Times Magazine

To give users a personalised experience, the deep learning bot gathers information about conversation partners by asking them questions, adapts to their conversational style and, over time, attempts to mimic them. Beyond companionship, Replika’s creators believe that the technology could eventually serve as a conversational stand-in for deceased loves ones. – Aeon

Michael Kimmelman: “The coronavirus undermines our most basic ideas about community and, in particular, urban life. Historians tell us that cities emerged thousands of years ago for economic and industrial reasons — technological leaps produced a surplus of agricultural goods, which meant not everyone had to keep working the land. Still, cities also grew, less tangibly, out of deeply human social and spiritual needs. The very notion of streets, shared housing and public spaces stemmed from and fostered a kind of collective affirmation, a sense that people are all in this together.” – The New York Times

“Advertising was like art, and more and more art was like advertising. Ideally, the only difference would be the logo. Advertising could take up the former causes of art—philosophy, beauty, mystery, empire. There are no ethics in fashion. There are no ethics in magazines. There are no ethics in advertising.” – New York Review of Books

Virginia Woolf insisted on the need for a room of one’s own, but only the upper middle classes could have afforded one at the time. In the 19th century, only 1% of the British population lived on their own; in 2011 it was 31%, or some 8 million people. Yet as urbanisation and large families pitched people together, the anonymous world of industrial capitalism also split them apart. Rural life may have been rough, but at least you knew who lived next door. So if a longing to be alone became more acute, so did a sense of being forsaken. – The Guardian

Daydreaming is taken very seriously within scientific circles, where it is more accurately referred to as mind wandering. The level of interest in this area runs more or less parallel to that of the default network, and that is no coincidence either. The neural activity that can be observed when a person is daydreaming is very similar to that found in the default network. The control situation when taking neural measurements is also one in which the brain is not performing any tasks, and so we start daydreaming. We let our thoughts run free and start associating different memories with each other. – LitHub

This economic catastrophe is blowing up the myth of the worker robot and AI takeover. We’ve been led to believe that a new wave of automation is here, made possible by smarter AI and more sophisticated robots. Yet our economy still craters without human workers, because the machines are far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity. You’re more likely to have a machine automate part of your job, not destroy your job entirely. – Wired

Magic challenges our sense of what’s real; Houdini wanted to challenge the ultimate reality of death, by risking it over and over. That risk, he later wrote, is what “attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the ‘human fly,’ who scales the walls of the same building. If we knew that there was no possibility of either one of them falling or, if they did fall, that they wouldn’t injure themselves in any way, we wouldn’t pay any more attention to them than we do a nursemaid wheeling a baby carriage. – The New Yorker

How many of us today are able to free ourselves from the page and head out the door when we rise from our desks? Even abiding by the dictates of nature, breathing deeply out in the open air as we set our legs into motion, it’s likely we need to accomplish the undertaking as quickly and efficiently as possible. But in so doing, perhaps we still miss the essence of the activity itself. We forego the art of walking. – Aeon