Sparks 👁️

“Food can either be the safest form of medicine or the slowest form of poison”

Free-Range Kids

The result is that most people have thought jobs without being given much time to think, which is the equivalent of making a ditch-digger work without a shovel. Maybe this is why productivity growth is half of what it used to be.

Work, in fact, is interfering with my work,

and I want to work less so that I can have more time to work.

I need another word.

— Eula Biss, Having and Being Had

“Children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves.” - Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

In a world that is completely without rituals and wholly profane, all that is left are consumption and the satisfaction of needs.

As economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has explained,“under capitalism, ‘growth’ is not about increasing production to meet human needs. It is about increasing production in order to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective.”

I have long been a subscriber to the idea that any intelligence needs to be embodied and situated. The very first problems a baby has to solve are, How do I move my body? How do I move around in the world? Those tasks are entirely missing from existing large language models. And, as many people noted, the phrase “large language model” is a... See more