Connection

Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.

Every conversation has multiple layers. Some people hide behind masks. Others lie to others (and themselves). And others say one thing with their mouth and another with their body. It only takes seeing through one of these layers for somebody to call you a genius.

‘Wonder requires a person not to forget themselves but to feel themselves so acutely that their connectedness to every created thing comes into focus. In sacred awe, we are a part of the story.’ - CA Riley

Compassion, as well as the way it metabolizes pain, is decidedly analog.

If an AI companion becomes someone’s most consistent emotional presence, the right question isn’t “how do we stop this?” It’s “what does that say about the world around them?” Technological relationships are not new. What’s new is how effective they’ve become; and how clearly they mirror the gaps we’ve refused to address.

We’ve tried prohibition... See more

starting to suspect having a good conversation and feeling connected is not primarily eye contact or asking a lot of questions or not talking about yourself or whatever, or even curiosity, but some yet more fundamental thing that drives all of it like ... joie de vivre??

i get the sense the core thing is actually quite simple, and all the indicators... See more