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In November 2020, the AI group DeepMind announced it had developed a program called AlphaFold that could rapidly predict this information using an algorithm. Since then, it has been crunching through the genetic codes of every organism that has had its genome sequenced, and predicting the structures of the hundreds of millions of proteins they collectively contain.

Last year, DeepMind published the protein structures for 20 species – including nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans – on an open database. Now it has finished the job, and released predicted structures for more than 200m proteins.

“Essentially, you can think of it as covering the entire protein universe. It includes predictive structures for plants, bacteria, animals, and many other organisms, opening up huge new opportunities for AlphaFold to have an impact on important issues, such as sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases,”

In May, researchers led by Prof Matthew Higgins at the University of Oxford announced they had used AlphaFold’s models to help determine the structure of a key malaria parasite protein, and work out where antibodies that could block transmission of the parasite were likely to bind.

“Previously, we’d been using a technique called protein crystallography to work out what this molecule looks like, but because it’s quite dynamic and moves around, we just couldn’t get to grips with it,” Higgins said. “When we took the AlphaFold models and combined them with this experimental evidence, suddenly it all made sense. This insight will now be used to design improved vaccines which induce the most potent transmission-blocking antibodies.”

AlphaFold’s models are also being used by scientists at the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Enzyme Innovation, to identify enzymes from the natural world that could be tweaked to digest and recycle plastics. “It took us quite a long time to go through this massive database of structures, but opened this whole array of new three-dimensional shapes we’d never seen before that could actually break down plastics,” said Prof John McGeehan, who is leading the work. “There’s a complete paradigm shift. We can really accelerate where we go from here

“AlphaFold protein structure predictions are already being used in a myriad of ways. I expect that this latest update will trigger an avalanche of new and exciting discoveries in the months and years ahead, and this is all thanks to the fact that the data are available openly for all to use.”

Musk’s concern with bots isn’t only a bullshit tactic he’s using to snake out of a bad business deal and/or get a better price for Twitter; it’s also a great example of his shallow thinking. The man has at least some ability to oversee complex engineering systems that land rockets, but his narcissism affords him a two-dimensional understanding of the way information travels across social media.

He is drawn to the conspiratorial nature of bots and information manipulation, because it is a more exciting and easier-to-understand solution to more complex or uncomfortable problems. Instead of facing the reality that many people dislike him as a result of his personality, behavior, politics, or shitty management style, he blames bots. Rather than try to understand the gnarly mechanics and hard-to-solve problems of democratized speech, he sorts them into overly simplified boxes like censorship and spam and then casts himself as the crusading hero who can fix it all. But he can’t and won’t, because he doesn’t care enough to find the answers.

Musk isn’t playing chess or even checkers. He’s just the richest man in the world, bored, mad, and posting like your great-uncle.

agents will open up many more learning opportunities.

Already, AI can help you pick out a new TV and recommend movies, books, shows, and podcasts. Likewise, a company I’ve invested in, recently launched Pix, which lets you ask questions (“Which Robert Redford movies would I like and where can I watch them?”) and then makes recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past

Productivity

copilots can do a lot—such as turn a written document into a slide deck, answer questions about a spreadsheet using natural language, and summarize email threads while representing each person’s point of view.

before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it.

Helping patients and healthcare workers will be especially beneficial for people in poor countries, where many never get to see a doctor at all.

To create a new app or service, you won’t need to know how to write code or do graphic design. You’ll just tell your agent what you want. It will be able to write the code, design the look and feel of the app, create a logo, and publish the app to an online store

Agents will do even more. Having one will be like having a person dedicated to helping you with various tasks and doing them independently if you want. If you have an idea for a business, an agent will help you write up a business plan, create a presentation for it, and even generate images of what your product might look like

For decades, I’ve been excited about all the ways that software would make teachers’ jobs easier and help students learn. It won’t replace teachers, but it will supplement their work—personalizing the work for students and liberating teachers from paperwork and other tasks so they can spend more time on the most important parts of the job.

Mental health care is another example of a service that agents will make available to virtually everyone. Today, weekly therapy sessions seem like a luxury. But there is a lot of unmet need, and many people who could benefit from therapy don’t have access to it.

I don’t think any single company will dominate the agents business--there will be many different AI engines available.

The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.

They’ll replace word processors, spreadsheets, and other productivity apps.

Education

For example, few families can pay for a tutor who works one-on-one with a student to supplement their classroom work. If agents can capture what makes a tutor effective, they’ll unlock this supplemental instruction for everyone who wants it. If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today’s text-based tutors.

your agent will be able to help you in the same way that personal assistants support executives today. If your friend just had surgery, your agent will offer to send flowers and be able to order them for you. If you tell it you’d like to catch up with your old college roommate, it will work with their agent to find a time to get together, and just before you arrive, it will remind you that their oldest child just started college at the local university.

To see the dramatic change that agents will bring, let’s compare them to the AI tools available today. Most of these are bots. They’re limited to one app and generally only step in when you write a particular word or ask for help. Because they don’t remember how you use them from one time to the next, they don’t get better or learn any of your preferences.

The current state of the art is Khanmigo, a text-based bot created by Khan Academy. It can tutor students in math, science, and the humanities—for example, it can explain the quadratic formula and create math problems to practice on. It can also help teachers do things like write lesson plans.

Businesses that are separate today—search advertising, social networking with advertising, shopping, productivity software—will become one business.

other issues won’t be decided by companies and governments. For example, agents could affect how we interact with friends and family. Today, you can show someone that you care about them by remembering details about their life—say, their birthday. But when they know your agent likely reminded you about it and took care of sending flowers, will it be as meaningful for them?

In the computing industry, we talk about platforms—the technologies that apps and services are built on. Android, iOS, and Windows are all platforms. Agents will be the next platform.

A shock wave in the tech industry

Agents won’t simply make recommendations; they’ll help you act on them. If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision.

Agents will affect how we use software as well as how it’s written. They’ll replace search sites because they’ll be better at finding information and summarizing it for you

they’ll be dramatically better. You’ll be able to have nuanced conversations with them. They will be much more personalized, and they won’t be limited to relatively simple tasks like writing a letter.

Companies will be able to make agents available for their employees to consult directly and be part of every meeting so they can answer questions.

AI agents that are well trained in mental health will make therapy much more affordable and easier to get. Wysa and Youper are two of the early chatbots here. But agents will go much deeper. If you choose to share enough information with a mental health agent, it will understand your life history and your relationships. It’ll be available when you need it, and it will never get impatient. It could even, with your permission, monitor your physical responses to therapy through your smart watch—like if your heart starts to race when you’re talking about a problem with your boss—and suggest when you should see a human therapist.

If the number of companies that have started working on AI just this year is any indication, there will be an exceptional amount of competition, which will make agents very inexpensive.

Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.

Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.

The most exciting impact of AI agents is the way they will democratize services that today are too expensive for most people

The ramifications for the software business and for society will be profound.

In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.

You’ll also be able to get news and entertainment that’s been tailored to your interests. CurioAI, which creates a custom podcast on any subject you ask about, is a glimpse of what’s coming.

An agent will be able to help you with all your activities if you want it to. With permission to follow your online interactions and real-world locations, it will develop a powerful understanding of the people, places, and activities you engage in. It will get your personal and work relationships, hobbies, preferences, and schedule. You’ll choose how and when it steps in to help with something or ask you to make a decision.

even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. That’s the kind of thing that is only possible today with another human being, like a close friend or personal assistant.

In the distant future, agents may even force humans to face profound questions about purpose. Imagine that agents become so good that everyone can have a high quality of life without working nearly as much. In a future like that, what would people do with their time? Would anyone still want to get an education when an agent has all the answers? Can you have a safe and thriving society when most people have a lot of free time on their hands?

They’ll have an especially big influence in four areas: health care, education, productivity, and entertainment and shopping.

“When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, ‘I just don’t trust anything anymore,’” says David Rand, a professor at MIT Sloan who studies the creation, spread and impact of misinformation.

This problem, which has grown more acute in the age of generative AI, is known as the “liar’s dividend,

The combination of easily-generated fake content and the suspicion that anything might be fake allows people to choose what they want to believe, adds DiResta, leading to what she calls “bespoke realities.”

Examples of misleading content created by generative AI are not hard to come by, especially on social media

The signs that an image is AI-generated are easy to miss for a user simply scrolling past, who has an instant to decide whether to like or boost a post on social media. And as generative AI continues to improve, it’s likely that such signs will be harder to spot in the future.

“What our work suggests is that most regular people do not want to share false things—the problem is they are not paying attention,”

in the course of a lawsuit over the death of a man using Tesla’s “full self-driving” system, Elon Musk’s lawyers responded to video evidence of Musk making claims about this software by suggesting that the proliferation of “deepfakes” of Musk was grounds to dismiss such evidence. They advanced that argument even though the clip of Musk was verifiably real

are now using its existence as a pretext to dismiss accurate information

People’s attention is already limited, and the way social media works—encouraging us to gorge on content, while quickly deciding whether or not to share it—leaves us precious little capacity to determine whether or not something is true

If the crisis of authenticity were limited to social media, we might be able to take solace in communication with those closest to us. But even those interactions are now potentially rife with AI-generated fakes.

what sounds like a call from a grandchild requesting bail money may be scammers who have scraped recordings of the grandchild’s voice from social media to dupe a grandparent into sending money.

companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are trying to spin the altering of personal images as a good thing. 

With its latest Pixel phone, the company unveiled a suite of new and upgraded tools that can automatically replace a person’s face in one image with their face from another, or quickly remove someone from a photo entirely.

Joseph Stalin, who was fond of erasing people he didn’t like from official photos, would have loved this technology.

In Google’s defense, it is adding a record of whether an image was altered to data attached to it. But such metadata is only accessible in the original photo and some copies, and is easy enough to strip out.

The rapid adoption of many different AI tools means that we are now forced to question everything that we are exposed to in any medium, from our immediate communities to the geopolitical, said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who

To put our current moment in historical context, he notes that the PC revolution made it easy to store and replicate information, the internet made it easy to publish it, the mobile revolution made it easier than ever to access and spread, and the rise of AI has made creating misinformation a cinch. And each revolution arrived faster than the one before it.

Not everyone agrees that arming the public with easy access to AI will exacerbate our current difficulties with misinformation. The primary argument of such experts is that there is already vastly more misinformation on the internet than a person can consume, so throwing more into the mix won’t make things worse.

it’s not exactly reassuring, especially given that trust in institutions is already at one of the lowest points in the past 70 years, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, and polarization—a measure of how much we distrust one another—is at a high point.

“What happens when we have eroded trust in media, government, and experts?” says Farid. “If you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you, how do we respond to pandemics, or climate change, or have fair and open elections? This is how authoritarianism arises—when you erode trust in institutions.”

Following what it described as Meta’s unsatisfactory response to its complaints, Match began canceling Meta advertising for some of its apps, such as Tinder, in October. It has since halted all Reels advertising and stopped promoting its major brands on any of Meta’s platforms. “We have no desire to pay Meta to market our brands to predators or place our ads anywhere near this content,” said Match spokeswoman Justine Sacco.

The Journal set up the test accounts after observing that the thousands of followers of such young people’s accounts often include large numbers of adult men, and that many of the accounts who followed those children also had demonstrated interest in sex content related to both children and adults

The Journal also tested what the algorithm would recommend after its accounts followed some of those users as well, which produced more-disturbing content interspersed with ads.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection, a child-protection group, separately ran similar tests on its own, with similar results.

Meta said the Journal’s tests produced a manufactured experience that doesn’t represent what billions of users see. The company declined to comment on why the algorithms compiled streams of separate videos showing children, sex and advertisements, but a spokesman said that in October it introduced new brand safety tools that give advertisers greater control over where their ads appear, and that Instagram either removes or reduces the prominence of four million videos suspected of violating its standards each month. 

The Journal reported in June that algorithms run by Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, connect large communities of users interested in pedophilic content. The Meta spokesman said a task force set up after the Journal’s article has expanded its automated systems for detecting users who behave suspiciously, taking down tens of thousands of such accounts each month. The company also is participating in a new industry coalition to share signs of potential child exploitation.

“Our systems are effective at reducing harmful content, and we’ve invested billions in safety, security and brand suitability solutions,” said Samantha Stetson, a Meta vice president who handles relations with the advertising industry. She said the prevalence of inappropriate content on Instagram is low, and that the company invests heavily in reducing it.

Even before the 2020 launch of Reels, Meta employees understood that the product posed safety concerns, according to former employees.

Robbie McKay, a spokesman for Bumble, said it “would never intentionally advertise adjacent to inappropriate content,” and that the company is suspending its ads across Meta’s platforms.

Meta created Reels to compete with TikTok, the video-sharing platform owned by Beijing-based ByteDance. Both products feed users a nonstop succession of videos posted by others, and make money by inserting ads among them. Both companies’ algorithms show to a user videos the platforms calculate are most likely to keep that user engaged, based on his or her past viewing behavior

The Journal reporters set up the Instagram test accounts as adults on newly purchased devices and followed the gymnasts, cheerleaders and other young influencers. The tests showed that following only the young girls triggered Instagram to begin serving videos from accounts promoting adult sex content alongside ads for major consumer brands, such as one for Walmart that ran after a video of a woman exposing her crotch. 

When the test accounts then followed some users who followed those same young people’s accounts, they yielded even more disturbing recommendations. The platform served a mix of adult pornography and child-sexualizing material, such as a video of a clothed girl caressing her torso and another of a child pantomiming a sex act.

Experts on algorithmic recommendation systems said the Journal’s tests showed that while gymnastics might appear to be an innocuous topic, Meta’s behavioral tracking has discerned that some Instagram users following preteen girls will want to engage with videos sexualizing children, and then directs such content toward them.

Instagram’s system served jarring doses of salacious content to those test accounts, including risqué footage of children as well as overtly sexual adult videos—and ads for some of the biggest U.S. brands.

Preventing the system from pushing noxious content to users interested in it, they said, requires significant changes to the recommendation algorithms that also drive engagement for normal users. Company documents reviewed by the Journal show that the company’s safety staffers are broadly barred from making changes to the platform that might reduce daily active users by any measurable amount.

The test accounts showed that advertisements were regularly added to the problematic Reels streams. Ads encouraging users to visit Disneyland for the holidays ran next to a video of an adult acting out having sex with her father, and another of a young woman in lingerie with fake blood dripping from her mouth. An ad for Hims ran shortly after a video depicting an apparently anguished woman in a sexual situation along with a link to what was described as “the full video.”

Current and former Meta employees said in interviews that the tendency of Instagram algorithms to aggregate child sexualization content from across its platform was known internally to be a problem. Once Instagram pigeonholes a user as interested in any particular subject matter, they said, its recommendation systems are trained to push more related content to them.

Part of the problem is that automated enforcement systems have a harder time parsing video content than text or still images. Another difficulty arises from how Reels works: Rather than showing content shared by users’ friends, the way other parts of Instagram and Facebook often do, Reels promotes videos from sources they don’t follow

In an analysis conducted shortly before the introduction of Reels, Meta’s safety staff flagged the risk that the product would chain together videos of children and inappropriate content, according to two former staffers. Vaishnavi J, Meta’s former head of youth policy, described the safety review’s recommendation as: “Either we ramp up our content detection capabilities, or we don’t recommend any minor content,” meaning any videos of children.

At the time, TikTok was growing rapidly, drawing the attention of Instagram’s young users and the advertisers targeting them. Meta didn’t adopt either of the safety analysis’s recommendations at that time, according to J.

Stetson, Meta’s liaison with digital-ad buyers, disputed that Meta had neglected child safety concerns ahead of the product’s launch. “We tested Reels for nearly a year before releasing it widely, with a robust set of safety controls and measures,” she said. 

After initially struggling to maximize the revenue potential of its Reels product, Meta has improved how its algorithms recommend content and personalize video streams for users

Among the ads that appeared regularly in the Journal’s test accounts were those for “dating” apps and livestreaming platforms featuring adult nudity, massage parlors offering “happy endings” and artificial-intelligence chatbots built for cybersex. Meta’s rules are supposed to prohibit such ads.

The Journal informed Meta in August about the results of its testing. In the months since then, tests by both the Journal and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection show that the platform continued to serve up a series of videos featuring young children, adult content and apparent promotions for child sex material hosted elsewhere. 

As of mid-November, the center said Instagram is continuing to steadily recommend what the nonprofit described as “adults and children doing sexual posing.”

Meta hasn’t offered a timetable for resolving the problem or explained how in the future it would restrict the promotion of inappropriate content featuring children. 

The Journal’s test accounts found that the problem even affected Meta-related brands. Ads for the company’s WhatsApp encrypted chat service and Meta’s Ray-Ban Stories glasses appeared next to adult pornography. An ad for Lean In Girls, the young women’s empowerment nonprofit run by former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, ran directly before a promotion for an adult sex-content creator who often appears in schoolgirl attire. Sandberg declined to comment. 

Through its own tests, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection concluded that Instagram was regularly serving videos and pictures of clothed children who also appear in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s digital database of images and videos confirmed to be child abuse sexual material. The group said child abusers often use the images of the girls to advertise illegal content for sale in dark-web forums.

The nature of the content—sexualizing children without generally showing nudity—reflects the way that social media has changed online child sexual abuse, said Lianna McDonald, executive director for the Canadian center. The group has raised concerns about the ability of Meta’s algorithms to essentially recruit new members of online communities devoted to child sexual abuse, where links to illicit content in more private forums proliferate.

“Time and time again, we’ve seen recommendation algorithms drive users to discover and then spiral inside of these online child exploitation communities,” McDonald said, calling it disturbing that ads from major companies were subsidizing that process.

this is like if Russell Moore came out and said that, on the whole, Christianity turns out to be a bad thing. It’s that big of a deal.

Thompson’s case centers around constraints and supply, particularly as they apply to content creation.

In the pre-internet days, creating and distributing content was relatively expensive, which placed content publishers—be they newspapers, or TV stations, or movie studios—high on the value chain.

The internet reduced distribution costs to zero and this shifted value away from publishers and over to aggregators: Suddenly it was more important to aggregate an audience—a la Google and Facebook—than to be a content creator.

Audiences were valuable; content was commoditized.

What has alarmed Thompson is that AI has now reduced the cost of creating content to zero.

what does the world look like when both the creation and distribution of content are zero?

Hellscape

We’re headed to a place where content is artificially created and distributed in such a way as to be tailored to a given user’s preferences. Which will be the equivalent of living in a hall of mirrors.

What does that mean for news? Nothing good.

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “news media” because there are fundamental differences between publication models that are driven by scale.

So the challenges the New York Times face will be different than the challenges that NPR or your local paper face.

Two big takeaways:

(1) Ad-supported publications will not survive

Zero-cost for content creation combined with zero-cost distribution means an infinite supply of content. The more content you have, the more ad space exists—the lower ad prices go.

Actually, some ad-supported publications will survive. They just won’t be news. What will survive will be content mills that exist to serve ads specifically matched to targeted audiences.

(2) Size is determinative.

The New York Times has a moat by dint of its size. It will see the utility of its soft “news” sections decline in value, because AI is going to be better at creating cooking and style content than breaking hard news. But still, the NYT will be okay because it has pivoted hard into being a subscription-based service over the last decade.

At the other end of the spectrum, independent journalists should be okay. A lone reporter running a focused Substack who only needs four digits’ worth of subscribers to sustain them.

But everything in between? That’s a crapshoot.

Technology writers sometimes talk about the contrast between “builders” and “conservers” — roughly speaking, between those who are most animated by what we stand to gain from technology and those animated by what we stand to lose.

in our moment the builder and conserver types are proving quite mercurial. On issues ranging from Big Tech to medicine, human enhancement to technologies of governance, the politics of technology are in upheaval.

Dispositions are supposed to be basically fixed. So who would have thought that deep blue cities that yesterday were hotbeds of vaccine skepticism would today become pioneers of vaccine passports? Or that outlets that yesterday reported on science and tech developments in reverent tones would today make it their mission to unmask “tech bros”?

One way to understand this churn is that the builder and the conserver types each speak to real, contrasting features within human nature. Another way is that these types each pick out real, contrasting features of technology. Focusing strictly on one set of features or the other eventually becomes unstable, forcing the other back into view.

Studies have found that simply talking on the phone while walking actually slows down and disrupts our gait

When our brain is processing complex emotions and stressors, it hinders our ability to function at our best.

As I tell my students, remember to play your whole movie — not just the clip of your latest stumble on repeat

If a phone call is enough to disrupt our performance of basic tasks, we should be especially mindful of cognitive loads associated with grief, loss and general uncertainty about what is to come. All are major triggers for depression and anxiety, and profoundly affect our ability to perform even the most routine, practiced tasks.

holding tightly on to our latest failures is a common phenomenon, thanks to the recency effect — a cognitive bias that prioritizes our most recent experiences over past ones. This natural tendency sends our brain the wrong messages, and makes us forget how skilled, credentialed or qualified we really are

Adult depression and anxiety has climbed by 5.1 percent since the start of the pandemic.

Those things won’t matter nearly as much as their willingness to try again.

It’s a trap, which maybe seeking out a little more deliberate boredom – also known as stillness - could help us avoid

Thomas Merton, whose praises I have sung in these pages before, framed it:

Our being is not to be enriched merely by activity or experience as such. Everything depends on the *quality* of our acts and our experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and of experiences only half lived exhausts and depletes our being. By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt

But the purity of our conscience has a natural proportion with the depth of our being and the quality of our acts: and when our activity is habitually disordered, our malformed conscience can think of nothing better to tell us than to multiply the *quantity* of our acts, without perfecting their quality. And so we go from bad to worse, exhaust ourselves, empty our whole life of all content, and fall into despair

There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform: and often it is quite beyond his power.

being bored might be a good start for healing what ails us.

even with all the excitement, I couldn’t sustain any. I was bored by the excitement. Or rather, I craved boredom, finding all the excitement dull in a not-this-shitshow-again sort of way. For the last decade or so, we’ve been too over-excited, over-provoked, and overstimulated.

It would be easy to conclude that an absurdist view of life rules out happiness and leads anyone with any sense to despair at her very existence. And yet in his book, Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy

this unexpected twist in Camus’ philosophy of life and happiness can help you change your perspective and see your daily struggles in a new, more equanimous way.

he argues that despite the hardships of this world, against all apparent odds, human beings regularly experience true happiness. People in terrible circumstances bask in love for one another. They enjoy simple diversions

Even Sisyphus was happy, according to Camus, because “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Simply put, he had something to keep him busy.

Instead of feeling desperation at the futility of life, Camus tells us to embrace its ridiculousness. It’s the only way to arrive at happiness, the most absurd emotion of all under these circumstances

We shouldn’t try to find some cosmic meaning in our relentless routines—getting, spending, eating, working, pushing our own little boulders up our own little hills

Instead, we should laugh uproariously at the fact that there is no meaning, and be happy anyway.

Happiness, for Camus, is an existential declaration of independence. Instead of advising “Don’t worry, be happy,” he offers a rebellious “Tell the universe to go suck eggs, be happy.”

If embracing the ridiculous seems impossible to you, Camus says it’s only because of your pride.

“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness,”

In fact, each of us can consciously implement Camus’ absurdism in order to forge a happier life. Here are three practical ways to find joy in the ridiculous.

1. Stand up to your ennui.

You can’t necessarily change your perception of the world, but, as I have written, you most certainly can change your response to that perception. Meet that feeling of despair with a personal motto, such as “I don’t know what everything means, but I do know I am alive right now, and I will not squander this moment

2. Look for opportunities to do a little good.

One of the best ways to cultivate futility is by focusing on the big things you can’t control—war, natural disasters, hatred—as opposed to the little things you can.

Those little things include bringing a small blessing or source of relief to others.

if your commute to work is a soul-sucking existential nightmare, don’t ruminate on the cars stopped ahead of you. Rather, focus on making space for that poor sap stuck in the wrong lane who’s desperately trying to merge

3. Be fully present.

Absurdity tends to sting only when we see it from the “outside”; for example, when you think about how meaningless it has been to wash the dishes every day in the past only to find them dirty again right now—and imagine the countless dish washings that the rest of your life will comprise.

Confronting the absurd is much more comfortable when you do so with mindfulness.

“While washing the dishes one should only be washing the dishes, which means that while washing the dishes one should be completely aware of the fact that one is washing the dishes.

When the broad sweep of life brings you horror, concentrate on this moment, and savor it. The pleasure and meaning you can find right now are real; the meaninglessness of the future is not.

Some mornings, I wake up seeing only boulders and can’t face pushing them once again up that hill

Those are the days when my old friend Camus comes in handy. Instead of despairing of the absurdity of life, I lean into it, laugh at it, and start my day in a light mood. Then I gather my beloved boulders and set out for the nearest hill.

The pandemic’s descent from medical emergency to political flash point can be mapped as a series of surges of bickering over that one simple phrase. “Follow the science!” people on both sides insisted, as the guidance from politicians and public health officials shifted over the past two years from anti-mask to pro-mask to “keep on masking” to more refined recommendations about which masks to wear and now to a spotty lifting of mandates.

demands that the other side “follow the science” are often a complete rejection of another person’s cultural and political identity: “It’s not just people believing the scientific research that they agree with. It’s that in this extreme polarization we live with, we totally discredit ideas because of who holds them.

“I’m struggling as much as anyone else,” she said. “Our job as informed citizens in the pandemic is to be like judges and synthesize information from both sides, but with the extreme polarization, nobody really trusts each other enough to know how to judge their information.

Many people end up putting their trust in some subset of the celebrity scientists they see online or on TV. “Follow the science” often means “follow the scientists” — a distinction that offers insight into why there’s so much division over how to cope with the virus,

although a slim majority of Americans they surveyed don’t believe that “scientists adjust their findings to get the answers they want,” 31 percent do believe scientists cook the books and another 16 percent were unsure.

Those who mistrust scientists were vastly less likely to be worried about getting covid-19 — and more likely to be supporters of former president Donald Trump,

A person’s beliefs about scientists’ integrity “is the strongest and most consistent predictor of views about … the threats from covid-19,”

When a large minority of Americans believe scientists’ conclusions are determined by their own opinions, that demonstrates a widespread “misunderstanding of scientific methods, uncertainty, and the incremental nature of scientific inquiry,” the sociologists concluded.

Americans’ confidence in science has declined in recent decades, especially among Republicans, according to Gallup polls

The survey found last year that 64 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in science, down from 70 percent who said that back in 1975

Confidence in science jumped among Democrats, from 67 percent in the earlier poll to 79 percent last year, while Republicans’ confidence cratered during the same period from 72 percent to 45 percent.

The fact that both sides want to be on the side of “science” “bespeaks tremendous confidence or admiration for a thing called ‘science,’ ”

Even in this time of rising mistrust, everybody wants to have the experts on their side.

That’s been true in American debates regarding science for many years

Four decades ago, when arguments about climate change were fairly new, people who rejected the idea looked at studies showing a connection between burning coal and acid rain and dubbed them “junk science.” The “real” science, those critics said, showed otherwise.

“Even though the motive was to reject a scientific consensus, there was still a valorization of expertise,”

“Even people who took a horse dewormer when they got covid-19 were quick to note that the drug was created by a Nobel laureate,” he said. “Almost no one says they’re anti-science.”

“There isn’t a thing called ‘the science.’ There are multiple sciences with active disagreements with each other. Science isn’t static.”

The problem is that the phrase has become more a political slogan than a commitment to neutral inquiry, “which bespeaks tremendous ignorance about what science is,”

t scientists and laypeople alike are often guilty of presenting science as a monolithic statement of fact, rather than an ever-evolving search for evidence to support theories,

while scientists are trained to be comfortable with uncertainty, a pandemic that has killed and sickened millions has made many people eager for definitive solutions.

“I just wish when people say ‘follow the science,’ it’s not the end of what they say, but the beginning, followed by ‘and here’s the evidence,’

As much as political leaders may pledge to “follow the science,” they answer to constituents who want answers and progress, so the temptation is to overpromise.

It’s never easy to follow the science, many scientists warn, because people’s behaviors are shaped as much by fear, folklore and fake science as by well-vetted studies or evidence-based government guidance.

“Science cannot always overcome fear,”

Some of the states with the lowest covid case rates and highest vaccination rates nonetheless kept many students in remote learning for the longest time, a phenomenon she attributed to “letting fear dominate our narrative.”

“That’s been true of the history of science for a long time,” Gandhi said. “As much as we try to be rigorous about fact, science is always subject to the political biases of the time.”

A study published in September indicates that people who trust in science are actually more likely to believe fake scientific findings and to want to spread those falsehoods

The study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, found that trusting in science did not give people the tools they need to understand that the scientific method leads not to definitive answers, but to ever-evolving theories about how the world works.

Rather, people need to understand how the scientific method works, so they can ask good questions about studies.

Trust in science alone doesn’t arm people against misinformation,

Overloaded with news about studies and predictions about the virus’s future, many people just tune out the information flow,

That winding route is what science generally looks like, Swann said, so people who are frustrated and eager for solid answers are often drawn into dangerous “wells of misinformation, and they don’t even realize it,” she said. “If you were told something every day by people you trusted, you might believe it, too.”

With no consensus about how and when the pandemic might end, or about which public health measures to impose and how long to keep them in force, following the science seems like an invitation to a very winding, even circular path.

We need not wonder what the basic objections will be: Third Wave Antiracism isn’t really a religion; I am oversimplifying; I shouldn’t write this without being a theologian; it is a religion but it’s a good one; and so on

our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it?

I am not writing this thinking of right-wing America as my audience.

This is not merely a complaint.

Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy in missing the futility of “dialogue” with them. Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher.

It is not an argument against protest

My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matte

We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.

We will term these people The Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence.

they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.

“The Elect” is also good in implying a certain smugness, which is sadly accurate as a depiction.

But most importantly, terming these people The Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are

Following the religion means to pillory people for what, as recently as 10 years ago, would have been thought of as petty torts or even as nothing at all; to espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists;

o pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism; and to almost hope that it doesn’t because this would deprive you of a sense of purpose.

There were plenty of books about Black people, but they tended to be about poor or working-class Black people and often depicted Black lives proscribed by discrimination and inequality

I was aware of two instances of myself in fiction of the time. One was the nerdy teenage middle-class Black girl in Louise Fitzhugh’s “Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change.” Then there was “Sarah Phillips” by Andrea Lee in 1984. That one was a near-sacred experience for me, in depicting a middle-class Black girl who grew up outside Philadelphia, went to Harvard and then moved to Europe. Here was someone I could have been, a variation on some people I knew

But I neither needed nor sought out more such books. How much me did I need? I read to learn about what I didn’t know.

when I started my graduate study, I explicitly did not want to study Black English. It was too close to home.

What fascinated me, and still does, are languages utterly unlike the one I grew up with. This is what I do my academic work on. I am happy to write about Black English, but I do it out of civic duty. What first hooked me on languages was hearing someone speak Hebrew

This idea that one, if brown, is to seek one’s self in what one reads and watches gets around quite a bit.

But still, the idea that Black people are deprived in not exploring what they already relate to is not as natural as it sounds.

This position is rooted, one suspects, as a defense against racism, in a sense that learning most meaningfully takes place within a warm comfort zone of cultural membership. But it’s a wide, wide world out there, and this position ultimately limits the mind and the soul.

I question its necessity in 2023. The etymology of the word “education” is related to the Latin “educere,” meaning to lead outward, not inward.

It can be especially ticklish to hear white people taking up the idea that Black people stray from their selves when taking up things beyond Blackness

I sense the idea that real Blackness means ever seeking yourself in your reading and viewing is a post-1966 thing, to refer to what I wrote here last week.

W.E.B. Du Bois had no such idea. He wrote: “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

Du Bois adapted these “white” works to his own needs and predilections. Even the naked racism he lived with daily did not lead him to draw a line around “white” things as something alien to his essence

Rather, he insisted that these works were, in fact, part of his self, regardless of how wider society saw that self or how figures like Shakespeare and Aristotle would have seen him.

Du Bois, in this, was normal. Today I sit with “Succession,” Steely Dan and Saul Bellow, and they wince not. I see myself in none of them. Yes, Bellow had some nasty moments on race, such as a gruesomely prurient scene in “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” But I’m sorry: I cannot let that one scene — or even two — deprive me of the symphonic reaches of “Herzog” and “Humboldt’s Gift.” What they offer, after all, becomes part of me along with everything else.

the truth is that characters I can see as me are now not uncommon on television in particular. Andre Braugher’s Captain Holt on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” was about as close to me as I expect a sitcom character ever to be, for example. That was fun. But honestly, I didn’t need it. I live with me. I watch TV to see somebody else.

Just like midlife, quarterlife can bring its own crisis — trying to separate from your parents or caregivers and forge a sense of self is a struggle. But the generation entering adulthood now faces novel, sometimes debilitating, challenges.

Many find themselves so mired in day-to-day monetary concerns, from the relentless crush of student debt to the swelling costs of everything, that they feel unable to consider what they want for themselves long term

“We’ve been constrained by this myth that you graduate from college and you start your life,” she said. Without the social script previous generations followed — graduate college, marry, raise a family — Ms. Byock said her young clients often flailed around in a state of extended adolescence.

nearly one-third of Gen Z adults are living with their parents or other relatives and plan to stay there.

Many young people today struggle to afford college or decide not to attend, and the “existential crisis” that used to hit after graduation descends earlier and earlier

Ms. Byock said to pay attention to what you’re naturally curious about, and not to dismiss your interests as stupid or futile.

Experts said those entering adulthood need clear guidance for how to make it out of the muddle. Here are their top pieces of advice on how to navigate a quarterlife crisis today.

She recommends scheduling reminders to check in with yourself, roughly every three months, to examine where you are in your life and whether you feel stuck or dissatisfied

From there, she said, you can start to identify aspects of your life that you want to change.

“Start to give your own inner life the respect that it’s due,”

But quarterlife is about becoming a whole person, Ms. Byock said, and both groups need to absorb each other’s characteristics to balance themselves out

However, there is a difference between self-interest and self-indulgence, Ms. Byock said. Investigating and interrogating who you are takes work. “It’s not just about choosing your labels and being done,” she said.

Be patient.

Quarterlifers may feel pressure to race through each step of their lives, Ms. Byock said, craving the sense of achievement that comes with completing a task.

But learning to listen to oneself is a lifelong process.

Instead of searching for quick fixes, she said, young adults should think about longer-term goals: starting therapy that stretches beyond a handful of sessions, building healthy nutrition and exercise habits, working toward self-reliance.

“I know that seems sort of absurdly large and huge in scope,” she said. “But it’s allowing ourselves to meander and move through life, versus just ‘Check the boxes and get it right.’”

take stock of your day-to-day life and notice where things are missing. She groups quarterlifers into two categories: “stability types” and “meaning types.”

“Stability types” are seen by others as solid and stable. They prioritize a sense of security, succeed in their careers and may pursue building a family.

“But there’s a sense of emptiness and a sense of faking it,” she said. “They think this couldn’t possibly be all that life is about.”

On the other end of the spectrum, there are “meaning types” who are typically artists; they have intense creative passions but have a hard time dealing with day-to-day tasks

“These are folks for whom doing what society expects of you is so overwhelming and so discordant with their own sense of self that they seem to constantly be floundering,” she said. “They can’t quite figure it out.”

That paralysis is often exacerbated by mounting climate anxiety and the slog of a multiyear pandemic that has left many young people mourning family and friends, or smaller losses like a conventional college experience or the traditions of starting a first job.

Stability types need to think about how to give their lives a sense of passion and purpose. And meaning types need to find security, perhaps by starting with a consistent routine that can both anchor and unlock creativity.

perhaps the prototypical inspiration for staying calm in chaos: Yoda. The Jedi master is “one of the few images we have of what feeling quiet amid extreme pain and apocalypse can look like,

Even when there seems to be little stability externally, she said, quarterlifers can try to create their own steadiness.

establishing habits that help you ground yourself as a young adult is critical because transitional periods make us more susceptible to burnout

He suggests building a practical tool kit of self-care practices, like regularly taking stock of what you’re grateful for, taking controlled breaths and maintaining healthy nutrition and exercise routines. “These are techniques that can help you find clarity,”

Don’t be afraid to make a big change.

It’s important to identify what aspects of your life you have the power to alter, Dr. Brown said. “You can’t change an annoying boss,” he said, “but you might be able to plan a career change.”

That’s easier said than done, he acknowledged, and young adults should weigh the risks of continuing to live in their status quo — staying in their hometown, or lingering in a career that doesn’t excite them — with the potential benefits of trying something new.

quarterlife is typically “the freest stage of the whole life span,

Young adults may have an easier time moving to a new city or starting a new job than their older counterparts would.

Know when to call your parents — and when to call on yourself.

Quarterlife is about the journey from dependence to independence, Ms. Byock said — learning to rely on ourselves, after, for some, growing up in a culture of helicopter parenting and hands-on family dynamics.

there are ways your relationship with your parents can evolve, helping you carve out more independence

That can involve talking about family history and past memories or asking questions about your parents’ upbringing

“You’re transitioning the relationship from one of hierarchy to one of friendship,” she said. “It isn’t just about moving away or getting physical distance.”

Every quarterlifer typically has a moment when they know they need to step away from their parents and to face obstacles on their own

That doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t, still depend on your parents in moments of crisis, she said. “I don’t think it’s just about never needing one’s parents again,” she said. “But it’s about doing the subtle work within oneself to know: This is a time I need to stand on my own.”

The internet stripped institutions of their gatekeeping powers, thus making it possible for anyone to publish—and making it inevitable that many writers would create audiences independent of media institutions.

The internet destroyed the apprenticeship system that had dominated American journalism for generations. Under the old system, an aspiring writer took a low-level job at a media institution and worked her way up the ladder until she was trusted enough to write.

Under the new system, people started their careers writing outside of institutions—on personal blogs—and then were hired by institutions on the strength of their work.

In practice, these outsiders were primarily hired not on the merits of their work, but because of the size of their audience.

what it really did was transform the nature of audiences. Once the internet existed it became inevitable that institutions would see their power to hold audiences wane while individual writers would have their power to build personal audiences explode.

this meant that institutions would begin to hire based on the size of a writer’s audience. Which meant that writers’ overriding professional imperative was to build an audience, since that was the key to advancement.

Twitter killed the blog and lowered the barrier to entry for new writers from “Must have a laptop, the ability to navigate WordPress, and the capacity to write paragraphs” to “Do you have an iPhone and the ability to string 20 words together? With or without punctuation?”

If you were able to build a big enough audience on Twitter, then media institutions fell all over themselves trying to hire you—because they believed that you would then bring your audience to them.2

If you were a writer for the Washington Post, or Wired, or the Saginaw Express, you had to build your own audience not to advance, but to avoid being replaced.

For journalists, audience wasn’t just status—it was professional capital. In fact, it was the most valuable professional capital.

Everything we just talked about was driven by the advertising model of media, which prized pageviews and unique users above all else. About a decade ago, that model started to fray around the edges,3 which caused a shift to the subscription model.

Today, if you’re a subscription publication, what Twitter gives you is growth opportunity. Twitter’s not the only channel for growth—there are lots of others, from TikTok to LinkedIn to YouTube to podcasts to search. But it’s an important one.

Twitter’s attack on Substack was an attack on the subscription model of journalism itself.

since media has already seen the ad-based model fall apart, it’s not clear what the alternative will be if the subscription model dies, too.

All of which is why having a major social media platform run by a capricious bad actor is suboptimal.

And why I think anyone else who’s concerned about the future of media ought to start hedging against Twitter. None of the direct hedges—Post, Mastodon, etc.—are viable yet. But tech history shows that these shifts can happen fairly quickly.

a 2022 Reuters investigation found that some American clinics were quite aggressive with treatment: None of the 18 U.S. clinics that Reuters looked at performed long assessments on their patients, and some prescribed puberty blockers on the first visit.

As Cass writes in her report, “The toxicity of the debate is exceptional.” She continues, “There are few other areas of health care where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior.”

The report’s greatest strength is its epistemic humility. Cass is continually asking, “What do we really know?” She is carefully examining the various studies — which are high quality, which are not. She is down in the academic weeds.

he notes that the quality of the research in this field is poor. The current treatments are “built on shaky foundations,” she writes in The BMJ. Practitioners have raced ahead with therapies when we don’t know what the effects will be. As Cass tells The BMJ, “I can’t think of another area of pediatric care where we give young people a potentially irreversible treatment and have no idea what happens to them in adulthood.”

She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.

her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.” She realizes that this conclusion will not please many of the young people she has come to know, but this is where the evidence has taken her.

In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called “The Ethics of Belief.” In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases.

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,” Clifford wrote

A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, “the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.”

Since the Trump years, this habit of not consulting the evidence has become the underlying crisis in so many realms. People segregate into intellectually cohesive teams, which are always dumber than intellectually diverse teams. Issues are settled by intimidation, not evidence

Our natural human tendency is to be too confident in our knowledge, too quick to ignore contrary evidence. But these days it has become acceptable to luxuriate in those epistemic shortcomings, not to struggle against them. See, for example, the modern Republican Party.

The students who’d been told they were almost always right were, on average, no more discerning than those who had been told they were mostly wrong.

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong.

Once again, midway through the study, the students were informed that they’d been misled, and that the information they’d received was entirely fictitious. The students were then asked to describe their own beliefs

The students who’d received the first packet thought that he would avoid it. The students in the second group thought he’d embrace it.

One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor,” they write, is that there’s “no sharp boundary between one person’s ideas and knowledge” and “those of other members” of the group

Humans’ biggest advantage over other species is our ability to coöperate. Coöperation is difficult to establish and almost as difficult to sustain

Reason is an adaptation to the hypersocial niche humans have evolved for themselves

Consider what’s become known as “confirmation bias,” the tendency people have to embrace information that supports their beliefs and reject information that contradicts them

Of the many forms of faulty thinking that have been identified, confirmation bias is among the best catalogued; it’s the subject of entire textbooks’ worth of experiments

Even after the evidence “for their beliefs has been totally refuted, people fail to make appropriate revisions in those beliefs,” the researchers noted. In this case, the failure was “particularly impressive,”

reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context