Debbie Foster

… when imagining worrisome AI capabilities, we don't have to think ahead to a time when 1.7 trillion parameters seem as dinky as 1.7 billion do today. Even current AI systems, equipped with diverse objectives and allowed to interact, have the potential to wreak havoc. When personal AI systems are deployed to buy and sell on eBay, send and receive

There is a crazy-wild delight that comes over you when you discover something new, something extraordinary. If you try to share that and people look at you blankly, it's crushing. But if there's someone else there to say really?! and take fire with enthusiasm alongside you—well, that will keep you going for a long time.

For me, as for Proust, writing is an attempt to put into language what the world is like from where I stand in it. The language doesn't exist before the attempt begins; it's the attempt itself that conjures the language into existence. One doesn't need to have published anything to recognize that feeling. One needs only to be human. But to be a

“To collect is to organize the world in your own image, and Aurora Sedge clearly had a very strong sense of who she was. You can tell a lot about a person by what they collect.

Augustine asks us to imagine a Janus-faced self: a conscious one with eyes looking in one direction, with an unavowed one laminated to its back, looking behind. Other people can see that Augustine is self-divided, but he cannot; he is not blind, yet he cannot see his own misery. And so it takes a divine force to reveal him to himself. God peels off

Despite having more options than ever, we may see true individuality flattened in favor of what a select group of others like, because that's what algorithms do. They don't recommend content for you ; they recommend content based on others similar to you.

we can enlarge and enrich experience by recognizing how Greek authors, prior to modern science, represented the thing that is both closest to us and yet is still, in some sense, quite mysterious—our own essence as a human self. Many of their ideas are utterly remote from the individualistic and secular contexts of our body-centered market

Our language-based theories of how our minds work don't often succeed in explaining how our minds actually work, for so many layers of the mind's operations occur prior to the stories and explanations we offer with language. Neuroscience is helpful in capturing more subconscious processes.

Knowing is not enough. Knowing too much can encourage us to procrastinate. There's a certain point when continuing to know at the expense of doing allows the mess to grow further