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Schools and parenting guides instruct children in how to cultivate empathy, as do workplace culture and wellness programs. You could fill entire bookshelves with guides to finding, embracing and sharing empathy. Few books or lesson plans extol sympathy’s virtues.

“Sympathy focuses on offering support from a distance,” a therapist explains on LinkedIn, whereas empathy “goes beyond sympathy by actively immersing oneself in another person’s emotions and attempting to comprehend their point of view.”

In use since the 16th century, when the Greek “syn-” (“with”) combined with pathos (experience, misfortune, emotion, condition) to mean “having common feelings,” sympathy preceded empathy by a good four centuries

Beneath almost all of the testimony, the manifestoes, the blog posts and the public declarations issued about A.I. are battles among deeply divided factions

Some are concerned about far-future risks that sound like science fiction.

Some are genuinely alarmed by the practical problems that chatbots and deepfake video generators are creating right now.

as Netanyahu soon made clear, when it comes to AI, he believes that bad outcomes are the likely outcomes. The Israeli leader interrogated OpenAI’s Brockman about the impact of his company’s creations on the job market. By replacing more and more workers, Netanyahu argued, AI threatens to “cannibalize a lot more jobs than you create,” leaving many people adrift and unable to contribute to the economy. When Brockman suggested that AI could usher in a world where people would not have to work, Netanyahu countered that the benefits of the technology were unlikely to accrue to most people, because the data, computational power, and engineering talent required for AI are concentrated in a few countries.

“You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”

The other panelists did not. Brockman briefly pivoted to talk about OpenAI’s Israeli employees before saying, “The world we should shoot for is one where all the boats are rising.” But other than mentioning the possibility of a universal basic income for people living in an AI-saturated society, Brockman agreed that “creative solutions” to this problem were needed—without providing any.

while labeling something parody might be bad for comedy, it can be essential for credibility. If people can’t tell whether an article was satirical or not, that chips away at trust that is essential for a news organization. But what’s good for comedy isn’t necessarily best practices for journalism or social media.

Even today when the lines between comedy and politics often blur — years after the press marveled that young people trusted Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” more than the news media, which now seems like a much darker development than it did back then — the idea that free speech might involve some trade-offs seems obvious.

But maybe not to Musk, who appears as naïve about comedy as he does about the economics of social media.

The bedlam of Twitter, fused with the brevity of its form, offers an interpretation of the virtual town square as a bustling, modernist city.

It’s easy to get stuck in a feedback loop: That which appears on Twitter is current (if not always true), and what’s current is meaningful, and what’s meaningful demands contending with. And so, matters that matter little or not at all gain traction by virtue of the fact that they found enough initial friction to start moving.

The platform is optimized to make the nonevent of its own exaggerated demise seem significant.

Critical historians who thought they were winning the fight for control within the academy now face dire retaliation from outside the academy. The dizzying turn from seeming triumph in 2020 to imminent threat in 2022 has unnerved many practitioners of the new history. Against this background, they did not welcome it when their association’s president suggested that maybe their opponents had a smidgen of a point.

a background reality of the humanities in the contemporary academy: a struggle over who is entitled to speak about what. Nowhere does this struggle rage more fiercely than in anything to do with the continent of Africa. Who should speak? What may be said? Who will be hired?

ne obvious escape route from the generational divide in the academy—and the way the different approaches to history, presentist and antiquarian, tend to map onto it—is for some people, especially those on the older and whiter side of the divide, to keep their mouths shut about sensitive issues

Legally, it appears as though LAION was able to scour what seems like the entire internet because it deems itself a nonprofit organization engaging in academic research. While it was funded at least in part by Stability AI, the company that created Stable Diffusion, it is technically a separate entity. Stability AI then used its nonprofit research arm to create A.I. generators first via Stable Diffusion and then commercialized in a new model called DreamStudio.

hat makes up these data sets? Well, pretty much everything. For artists, many of us had what amounted to our entire portfolios fed into the data set without our consent. This means that A.I. generators were built on the backs of our copyrighted work, and through a legal loophole, they were able to produce copies of varying levels of sophistication.

eing able to imitate a living artist has obvious implications for our careers, and some artists are already dealing with real challenges to their livelihood.

“We’re used to thinking that information about an object — say that a glass is half full — is somehow contained within the object.” Instead, he says, entanglement means objects “only exist in relation to other objects, and moreover these relationships are encoded in a wave function that stands outside the tangible physical universe.”

Einstein, though one of the founders of quantum theory, rejected it, saying famously, God did not play dice with the universe.In a 1935 paper written with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he tried to demolish quantum mechanics as an incomplete theory by pointing out that by quantum rules, measuring a particle in one place could instantly affect measurements of the other particle, even if it was millions of miles away.

Dr. Clauser, who has a knack for electronics and experimentation and misgivings about quantum theory, was the first to perform Bell’s proposed experiment. He happened upon Dr. Bell’s paper while a graduate student at Columbia University and recognized it as something he could do.

Mastodon is a part of the Fediverse, or federated universe, a group of federated platforms that share communication protocols.

Unlike Twitter, Mastodon presents posts in chronological order, rather than based on an algorithm.

It also has no ads; Mastodon is largely crowdfunded

Use this hiatus to do something you would never have done if this emergency hadn’t hit. When the lockdown lifts, move to another state or country. Take some job that never would have made sense if you were worrying about building a career—bartender, handyman, AmeriCorps volunteer.

If you use the next two years as a random hiatus, you may not wind up richer, but you’ll wind up more interesting.

The biggest way most colleges fail is this: They don’t plant the intellectual and moral seeds students are going to need later, when they get hit by the vicissitudes of life.

The Hwang Woo-suk saga is illustrative of the serious deficiencies in the self-regulation of science. His fraud was uncovered because of brave Korean television reporters. Even those efforts might not have been enough, had Dr. Hwang’s team not been so sloppy in its fraud. The team’s papers included fabricated data and pairs of images that on close comparison clearly indicated duplicity.

Yet as a cautionary tale about the price of fraud, it is, unfortunately, a mixed bag. He lost his academic standing, and he was convicted of bioethical violations and embezzlement, but he never ended up serving jail time

Although his efforts at cloning human embryos, ended in failure and fraud, they provided him the opportunities and resources he needed to take on projects, such as dog cloning, that were beyond the reach of other labs. The fame he earned in academia proved an asset in a business world where there’s no such thing as bad press.

what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?

The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender.

It may be that what’s in your pants is less important than what’s between your ears.

John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so

One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks

nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.

Christopher Lasch, the historian and social critic, posed a banger of a question in his 1991 book, “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics.”

“How does it happen,” Lasch asked, “that serious people continue to believe in progress, in the face of massive evidence that might have been expected to refute the idea of progress once and for all?”

A review in The New York Times Book Review by William Julius Wilson, a professor at Harvard, was titled: “Where Has Progress Got Us?”

major social platforms have grown less and less relevant in the past year. In response, some users have left for smaller competitors such as Bluesky or Mastodon. Some have simply left. The internet has never felt more dense, yet there seem to be fewer reliable avenues to find a signal in all the noise. One-stop information destinations such as Facebook or Twitter are a thing of the past. The global town square—once the aspirational destination that social-media platforms would offer to all of us—lies in ruins, its architecture choked by the vines and tangled vegetation of a wild informational jungle

Musk has turned X into a deepfake version of Twitter—a facsimile of the once-useful social network, altered just enough so as to be disorienting, even terrifying.

At the same time, Facebook’s user base began to erode, and the company’s transparency reports revealed that the most popular content circulating on the platform was little more than viral garbage—a vast wasteland of CBD promotional content and foreign tabloid clickbait.

Health care

Entertainment and shopping

Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.

Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the real world. Especially in the United States, people egregiously undersave for retirement—even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on expenses, and even when they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retirement plans when they contribute.

hen people hear the word bias, many if not most will think of either racial prejudice or news organizations that slant their coverage to favor one political position over another. Present bias, by contrast, is an example of cognitive bias—the collection of faulty ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human brain. The collection is large. Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” contains 185 entries, from actor-observer bias (“the tendency for explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation … and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to do the opposite”) to the Zeigarnik effect (“uncompleted or interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”)

If I had to single out a particular bias as the most pervasive and damaging, it would probably be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation, and to discount or ignore any piece of evidence that seems to support an alternate view

In our combined years of experience helping people talk about difficult political issues from abortion to guns to race, we’ve found most can converse productively without sacrificing their beliefs or spoiling dinner

It’s not merely possible to preserve your relationships while talking with folks you disagree with, but engaging respectfully will actually make you a more powerful advocate for the causes you care about.

The key to persuasive political dialogue is creating a safe and welcoming space for diverse views with a compassionate spirit, active listening and personal storytelling

The fact is, we still don’t know what life is.

since the days of Aristotle, scientists and philosophers have struggled to draw a precise line between what is living and what is not, often returning to criteria such as self-organization, metabolism, and reproduction but never finding a definition that includes, and excludes, all the right things.

If you say life consumes fuel to sustain itself with energy, you risk including fire; if you demand the ability to reproduce, you exclude mules. NASA hasn’t been able to do better than a working definition: “Life is a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.”