“Almost all of the major advances in AI development are currently being made in silos, disparate laboratories, secret government facilities, elite academic institutions, and the offices of very large companies working independently throughout the world. Few private companies (as of this writing) are actively sharing their work with competitors, despite the efforts of such organizations as OpenAI, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and the Future of Life Institute to bring awareness to the importance of transparency in building AI.” – Nautilus
Category: ideas
David Brooks, Art Critic, Weighs In Again: This Time On Definitions Of Greatness
For most people, creativity is precisely the ability to pursue multiple interests at once, and then bring them together in new ways. “Without contraries is no progression,” William Blake wrote. – The New York Times
It’s Easy To Get Depressed About The World Ending (Climate Change And All). But Enter The Extremophiles…
Extremophiles tell us that everything we think we know about the fragility of life is wrong. Life is indeed extraordinary, not to mention precious and deserving of reverence – but not in any sense miraculous. – Aeon
What Happens When What You See Gets In The Way Of What You Know?
Most philosophers nowadays think that knowledge is fallible. In other words, they think that you can know something without its being certain for you. – 3 Quarks Daily
The Essential Ingredient That Makes “Wisdom Of The Crowd” Powerful
“In order for the wisdom of crowds to retain its accuracy for making predictions, every member of the group must be given an equal voice, without any one person dominating. As we discovered, the pattern of social influence within groups — that is, who talks to whom and when — is the key determinant of the crowd’s accuracy in making predictions.” – Harvard Business Review
The Invention Of Money Changed Everything About How The World Works
“Paper money, backed by the authority of the state, was an astonishing innovation, one that reshaped the world. That’s hard to remember: we grow used to the ways we pay our bills and are paid for our work, to the dance of numbers in our bank balances and credit-card statements. It’s only at moments when the system buckles that we start to wonder why these things are worth what they seem to be worth.” – The New Yorker
What If Time Really Doesn’t Have A Direction?
We think that the way things are now depends on how they were in the past, but not on how they are in the future; we think of the laws of nature as telling the Universe how to evolve from earlier to later, and not later to earlier. And so on. – Aeon
Finally Seeing Through Silicon Valley’s Shameless Ideas Of Disruption
“As if your moral responsibility could stop at the metaphorical front door, where food, cars, packages magically arrive for your use. We are discovering what a world devoid of moral responsibility looks like. It ain’t magical. Only lately have we come to see disruption as a dressed-up version of scab-ism. It does not make the world a better place.” – Wired
WeWork Is Now The Top Leaser Of Commercial Space In New York. It’s Changing The Way We Work
Co-working spaces are the spatial expression of the casualisation we see in the labour market. In theory, they cater to the “digital nomad”, offering a place and a community as an antidote to the isolation and loneliness of most casual forms of work. In practice, they are not about co-working per se, but about constructing and profiting from a workplace culture that is essentially based on trepidation. – The Guardian
Location Sharing Apps Were Supposed To Be Cool
Instead, we’re all living in an age of terrible anxiety over constant surveillance. What went wrong? – Wired