Adam Gamwell
@anthrocurious
In pursuit of mutual thriving. Cultural Anthropologist, Technologist, Dad, musician, vibe maker-coder,
Adam Gamwell
anthrocurious.com
“There can be no experience of the world without the experiencer and that, my dear friends, is us.”
“Before anyone can make theories or get data or have ideas about the world, there must be the raw presence of being-in-the-world. The world doesn’t appear in the abstract to a disembodied perspective floating in space… it appears to us, exactly where... See more
“Before anyone can make theories or get data or have ideas about the world, there must be the raw presence of being-in-the-world. The world doesn’t appear in the abstract to a disembodied perspective floating in space… it appears to us, exactly where... See more
If AI starts to generate intelligence by itself, there’s no guarantee that it will be human-like. Rather than humans teaching machines to think like humans, machines might teach humans new ways of thinking.
Will Douglas Heaven • AI is learning how to create itself
Imagine if we could somehow show the people of the eighteenth century a simple child’s toy from today — say, a speaking doll.
The common folk would marvel at its ability to speak its few stock phrases. The scientists and engineers would marvel even more at its innards; at the minutely detailed silicon; at the bewildering complexity soon to be within... See more
The common folk would marvel at its ability to speak its few stock phrases. The scientists and engineers would marvel even more at its innards; at the minutely detailed silicon; at the bewildering complexity soon to be within... See more
Towards an experience of humanity
A short meditation on remembering where we place value
When we introduce new machines, we also disrupt social structures, games, and the rules of those games. With paradigm shifts come lots of progress, yes. But agents of progress are agents of chaos too. They create agitation and anxiety.
I see many shades of this, but I’ll narrow it down to three major types:
Anxiety of incompetence: my skills are devalued and i have to learn new ones
Anxiety of irrelevance: people might not relate to, value, or think about me
Anxiety of uncertainty: I don’t know what the future holds and it feels fickle
Everybody wants to have a village, but few are willing to be villagers. Building presence takes work. It requires vulnerability, patience, and the willingness to show up even when the room is not full. That might mean hosting an event for ten people when you have ten thousand followers. The cost of community is inconvenience.
Mouthwash Studio • There’s never been a better time to show up
Gathering is, in this way, not the act of aggregation alone. It is not an automated collection or the formal acquisition of works for an institution, nor is it the plundering or extraction of resources from a neighboring region. It is the tender and thoughtful collection of goods for your kin, and a moment for reunion, for celebration, and for... See more
Mindy Seu • On Gathering
The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more
Esther Dyson • Don’t Fuss About Training AIs. Train Our Kids
Creativity allows us to take the data we have, question our starting assumptions about what the data is telling us, and experiment until we make something useful out of it.