Connection

Turkle referenced the issue of behavioral metrics dominating AI research, and her concern that the interior life was being overlooked, and concluded by saying that the human cost of talking to machines isn’t immediate, it’s cumulative. 'What happens to you in the first three weeks may not be...the truest indicator of how that’s going to limit you,... See more

Oscar Wilde, on bad reply game:

"A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company."

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.

Isn’t it wild how much power our words have?

How easily they can cast spells on people, how they have ripple effects in all directions?

And yet how often we shy away from using them, even when all they would do is bring more beauty into the world?

So what are you waiting for?

Not only are we failing to consider other species, we are flailing in our connection with one another.

But great technological innovations always come with tradeoffs, and the shift to AI therapy has deeper implications than 1 million mental health professionals potentially losing their jobs. AI therapists, when normalized, have the potential to reshape how we understand intimacy, vulnerability, and what it means to connect.

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.