BBC: Lego has unveiled Smart Bricks - tech-filled versions of its small building blocks - which it says will bring sets to life with sound, light and reaction to movement. However, the new product range is causing unease among play experts, who say it risks undermining what makes Lego special for children in an increasingly digital world. Wired: Smart Play revolves around Lego's patented sensor- and tech-packed brick. It's the same size as a standard 2 x 4 Lego brick, but it is capable of connecting to compatible Smart Minifigures and Smart Tags and interacting with them in real time. By pairing these components, kids big and small can create context-appropriate sounds and light effects as they play with the Danish company's toys.

Aphantasia - an interesting variant in human experience (New Yorker archive link) Nick knew that whenever Zeman talked about aphantasia he was at pains to emphasize that it was not a disorder, or even a bad thing... Some people he interviewed were unbothered—there was definitely a range of responses—but others saw it as a curse.Many could remember very little about their lives, and even with the events they did remember they could not muster the feeling of what they'd been like. They knew that some things had made them happy and others had made them sad, but that knowledge was factual—it didn't evoke any emotions in the present.

When I read the very 1st paragraph of this article, I had a series of mini revelations about how my mind works, and perhaps the minds of others. I'd appreciate it if you read it first (just the 1st paragraph), and then came back here to explore with me why I think it was interesting... Thanks for coming back!

So, my question is slightly loaded, because I have what is called 'aphantasia', and reading this paragraph made me wonder whether the way non-aphants think (around 96% of the population) was fairly represented by this writer.

When you pictured the scene, how specific was it? Did the follow-up descriptions the writer gives fairly mirror your own experience?

Because when I read it, I didn't get a visual 'picture' in my head, (there is nothing visual in my head, because I am an aphant) but I did imagine the scene conceptually. The thing is, for me the scene I imagined was absolutely abstracted. It was the idea of a person washing hands at a sink. There was little to no specificity. There was no bathroom or kitchen, circular or square sink in my inner imagination. There was no specific person, man or woman, black or white, no specific way their hands moved, no specific relationship between the redness of the liquid, and what it might be (i.e. blood or paint). I just imagined an abstracted set of related ideas: person, washing hands, sink, red. That was it.

So when the writer goes on to then assume everyone pictured something really specific, that made me wonder: is the abstractness of aphantasic thinking universal? Do aphants always imagine in a kind of realm of Platonic ideals? Do none aphants always picture specific things? How much of the writer's assumption here is fair, given that we ALL sit on the spectrum of mental visual imagination? What are the social implications of these different ways of thinking?

What happened in your mind when you read this paragraph? I am intrigued to know, and where you usually sit on the spectrum of visual imagination.

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 artificial intelligence models, showcasing just how smart the likes of ChatGPT’s GPT-4o, Google Ge

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 based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.

Neural Networks – Intuitively and Exhaustively Explained

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

After unbearable levels of speculation and leaks, Japanese gaming giant Nintendo finally announced the Switch 2 today, surprising nobody. Most of the leaked features were verified by the trailer, but in traditional Nintendo fashion the mysterious 'C' button was rendered blank. What could this little anonymous square be for?

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 levels—high school, college, and beyond—to share reflections about teaching writing in the era of generative AI.

Archival Images of AI Playbook

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 is shaped by the people selling services that rely on that infrastructure.

Documenting our lives for Snapchat and Instagram can decrease the likelihood of retaining those moments as a significant memory. This story appears in VICE Magazine's Truth and Lies Issue. Click HERE to subscribe.

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 existing internet which has led some to fear there may not be enough new data left to train future iterations.

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, Change Your Life and The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership: A New Paradigm for Sustainable Succes

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 go down a terribly wrong path, and end up leaving totally forseeable, but ultimately inevitable ruin in their wake.

Daniël de Zeeuw: A combination of genuine concerns and moral panics over AI (often fueled by the tech moguls themselves) has reached a new high in recent years, particularly with the introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI.

Doomsaying can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

Let me start by saying a few things that seem obvious,” Geoffrey Hinton, “Godfather” of deep learning, and one of the most celebrated scientists of our time, told a leading AI conference in Toronto in 2016.

The introduction to the book Metaverse Evolution Theory by Japanese VTuber and writer Virtual Girl Nem has now been published in English. The 5,000-word introduction is available at her official Medium page, and aimed at generating discussion about her book in the English-speaking community.