Daniel Rourke /stream

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Have you read The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis? As usual: no worries if not (I’ll summarize it in a second). But: recommended.

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Did you know some of the smartest people on the planet create benchmarks to test AI’s capabilities at replicating human intelligence? Well, scarily enough most AI benchmarks are easily completed by…

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Humans have always lived alongside monsters, both real and imagined. The etymological root of the word also gives us “demonstrate,” and monsters have always been used by humans to demonstrate the…

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Late​ last year, Rishi Sunak interviewed Elon Musk in front of an invited audience after the Bletchley Park summit on AI safety.

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Welcome to the first of what we hope will be many posts about teaching writing in the age of AI! The Important Work is a space for writing instructors at all…

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Octavia Butler was an author of moving and prophetic science fiction novels. She wrote an essay in 2000 for Essence Magazine that teaches us the capacity we have to understand the…

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When I was nine or ten years old, my grandmother gave me a book full of so many random, interesting facts and tidbits of science and history I sometimes think it’s…

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Emulations of photography generated by artificial intelligence are beginning to look so convincing that they can no longer be distinguished from images made by a film camera.

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Dig, if you will, a small slice of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — a cursed masterpiece that the public may never be allowed to see.

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The Silicon Valley New Right and the Neo-reactionary quest to “disrupt” democracy.

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Aside from the physical heft of data centers seen from highways and the fiber optic cables crawling into homes and offices, the digital world mostly exists in our imagination. That imagination…

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Elizabeth Sandifer is the author of Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays On and Around the Alt-Right.

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I was nineteen, maybe twenty, when I realized I was empty-headed. I was in a college English class, and we were in a sunny seminar room, discussing “For Whom the Bell…

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Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences. Introduction Two years ago, Sarah Shomstein…

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To my own shame, I have become a jaded reader in recent years. By this I mean that my enthusiasm and curiosity, my drive to experience new worlds, have all been…

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When did you encounter your first paradigm shift? Not the phenomenon itself, but the term? Perhaps at an airport bookstore, where bestselling authors of books with titles like Change Your Paradigm,…

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It’s no easy task, but developing your tone of voice can build trust, reduce conflict, and set the stage for more learning in your classroom, research shows. Using your voice to…

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Have you read The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis? As usual: no worries if not (I’ll summarize it in a second). But: recommended.

Bookmark

Did you know some of the smartest people on the planet create benchmarks to test AI’s capabilities at replicating human intelligence? Well, scarily enough most AI benchmarks are easily completed by…

Bookmark

When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance…

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Humans have always lived alongside monsters, both real and imagined. The etymological root of the word also gives us “demonstrate,” and monsters have always been used by humans to demonstrate the…

Bookmark

Late​ last year, Rishi Sunak interviewed Elon Musk in front of an invited audience after the Bletchley Park summit on AI safety.

Bookmark

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture.

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Welcome to the first of what we hope will be many posts about teaching writing in the age of AI! The Important Work is a space for writing instructors at all…

Bookmark

Octavia Butler was an author of moving and prophetic science fiction novels. She wrote an essay in 2000 for Essence Magazine that teaches us the capacity we have to understand the…

Bookmark

How can a person make up for seven decades of misrepresentation and willful distortion in the time allotted to a sound bite? Recently, an Australian-Palestinian friend of mine was invited to…

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Dig, if you will, a small slice of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — a cursed masterpiece that the public may never be allowed to see.

Bookmark

The Silicon Valley New Right and the Neo-reactionary quest to “disrupt” democracy.

Bookmark

Aside from the physical heft of data centers seen from highways and the fiber optic cables crawling into homes and offices, the digital world mostly exists in our imagination. That imagination…

Bookmark

Elizabeth Sandifer is the author of Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays On and Around the Alt-Right.

Bookmark

I was nineteen, maybe twenty, when I realized I was empty-headed. I was in a college English class, and we were in a sunny seminar room, discussing “For Whom the Bell…

Bookmark

Large language models like those offered by OpenAI and Google famously require vast troves of training data to work. The latest versions of these models have already scoured much of the…

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To my own shame, I have become a jaded reader in recent years. By this I mean that my enthusiasm and curiosity, my drive to experience new worlds, have all been…

Bookmark

It’s no easy task, but developing your tone of voice can build trust, reduce conflict, and set the stage for more learning in your classroom, research shows. Using your voice to…

Bookmark

I don't think Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a bad guy, or that he has nefarious plans for Nvidia, but the most consequential villains in history are rarely evil. They just…