Techocalypse
Most of modern life is designed to get you out of your deepest self and into your head, where you are more vulnerable to anxiety (the grease between the wheels of technocratic capitalism).
Catherine Shannon • On cultivating intuition
Thoughts on AI (particularly generative AI) in no particular order of development or importance:
The widespread use of AI is resulting in the largest collective brain drain of the human experience. But is this the result of COVID (remote learning, overreliance on online experiences, mental decline from Long COVID) and AI is the tool used to
You might think of this chart as the shape of attention. After clicking to start, thousands rapidly exited, some immediately, some after a minute or two. But if you could make it past three minutes, you were more likely to finish than to give up. And once you hit five minutes, your odds of completing the exercise were very high. A quarter who... See more
Larry Buchanan • ‘Weird and Daunting’: 7,000 Readers Told Us How It Felt to Focus
1 The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2 It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3 It should do work that is clearly and demon-strably better than the one it replaces.
4 It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5 If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6 It
... See moreI Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age
archive.ph
Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus.
I’d be even more aware from now on! I’d remember that machine learning has been defined by the people who want me to believe it works the way they say it does. But an algorithm can’t really observe anything. So it can’t really measure my behavior, and so it can’t really discover anything for me, or about me!
Are overnight oats ads proof that Instagram is changing reality?
The average American has fewer than three friends, fewer than three people they would consider friends. And the average person has demand for meaningfully more. I think it's something like 15 friends or something.
The implication is that Meta will close that friendship gap with AI companions. Zuckerberg clarified they won't replace relationships... See more
kyla scanlon • The Most Valuable Commodity in the World Is Friction
It’s not just that he wants us to have more friends, he wants our new friends to be his AI creations. Gross.
But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans... See more
archive.ph
This is what a frictionless world looks like. Everything accelerates, until you forget what it means to try.