Amy Zhen

One of my (many) contrarian beliefs is that we do not have strong enough preferences. We often blame social media or the speed of information as the reason why we’re easily distracted, but the real reason behind our inability to focus has less to do with the sheer quantity of media and more to do with our laziness when it comes to distinguishing... See more

The problem isn’t that machines are becoming more human-like, it’s that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.

I'm really inspired by also how they were really quiet for a really long time at the beginning. They were not trying to become the next new success story on the pages of every paper. They were much more just like, "We're just going to prove through the quality of our output over time that we are doing something interesting, and weird, and... See more

In her TED talk, Karen imagined a world in which AI and machine learning helped to bring us humans deeper into the world of animals. She closed by asking us to imagine an orca giving a TED talk:

And maybe one day in a speculative future, instead of a human here on stage, maybe bioacoustics would enable an orca to give a TED talk.

Our task is not to lose ourselves to

the mundane necessities,

but to courageously overcome

all that keeps us from hearkening

the eternal throb of the spir

Hedonic Treadmill : Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.

Her book The Sounds of Life , in many ways about AI -- how AI might help us communicate better with animals -- had just come out the previous fall, and was immediately wildly successful. She was on sabbatical at Harvard, gave a fantastic TED talk on the prospects of using AI to decipher animal communication, and was constantly doing podcasts and in... See more