Explainaways protect the system from unwanted evidence by ignoring or dismissing it. But when the weight of such evidence grows, they stop sounding persuasive.
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The research mainly shows that there is more than one route to animal intelligence and shaking up Darwin’s tree can be productive.
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Reading for entertainment alone will become increasingly rare. I expect we will return to a culture where people who read are mainly looking for new ideas.
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Despite good reasons to be optimistic about reading’s ultimate survival, Horowitch and Harrington are putting their fingers on something real and concerning. Even for someone like me, who grew up reading books, the allure of digital distraction is often overpowering.
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I spent 55 years as an eyewitness to this disaster, watching a relatively lean and efficient enterprise turn into a distended, barely recognizable caricature.
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The answer to Micro Softy 87 depends on understanding which number a given sequence of the code represents.
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Some tech bros are even questioning the corporate benefits from generative AI, a year after academic analyses started questioning them.
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The whole Darwinian paradigm of natural selection falls apart when you’re dealing with the human mind. It’s a very different thing.
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Once euthanasia starts, it picks up steam year by year by year as hastened death becomes normalized.
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AI “immigrants” like me tend to approach artificial intelligence with a healthy measure of skepticism. AI natives, who grew up with it, should learn this too.
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I can’t recall a single time where an entire movie, let alone a trilogy, is completely driven by such choices and coincidences.
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We can’t do more than wonder but the main thing to see here is that the special position of humans might enable it.
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If you don’t want conflict or controversy, don’t pretend you want to be where the news is. And don’t be surprised if your platform mostly appeals to conventional people who all agree with each other.
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Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles about every two years. But Moore’s Law must eventually stop at the Planck length.
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As an editor, I have often quietly substituted more reliable sources for information than Wikipedia when preparing various authors’ work for publication.
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In the United States, the change plays out as a boom in centenarians. The population of persons aged 100 or more grew by 50% between 2010 and 2020.
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Thanks to AI chatbots, a phrase I probably coined phrase has become so recognizable that most people think C. S. Lewis himself said it!
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Meta and Google recently lost a bellwether case accusing them of exacerbating children’s mental health struggles by intentionally addicting them to unhealthy social media.
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The simulation argument quietly replaces one proposition with the other. It begins with evidence about the world we observe and ends with a conclusion about a world we can no longer observe.
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To solve last week’s puzzle, look up the definition of “calorie.” Are we using the word to mean the same thing?
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