Connection

I think that a fairly reliable mark of high intelligence is the capacity to recognize the signal within the noise of someone's 'wrong' take.

Pseudo-intelligence gleefully pours out the bathwater, raw intelligence finds & nurtures the baby.

The dead internet theory is not really claiming that most of your personal interactions on the internet are fake.

It is, however, an interesting lens through which to view the internet. That it is no longer for humans, by humans – this is the sense in which the internet we knew and loved is “dead”.

Nowadays everybody is so scared of life and of risk and of anything that comes from it, that we've developed brittle shells around ourselves which make us rather lonely beings.

— Iain McGilchrist

Maybe AI doesn’t raise the bar. Maybe it reveals how low we’ve let the bar drop. In a world where ghosting is normal and attentiveness is rare, a chatbot that listens is radical.

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.