Debbie Foster

ChatGPT effectively has anterograde amnesia—with the caveat that its active trace of what is going on is approximately book length—more generous than the half-minute-or-so typical of a human amnesia patient.

Helmholtz resonator

When my usual vocabulary is broken apart, and reconstituted, something new flickers forth. It feels like a flash in the dark, or a chain that had been wrapped around my brain snapping. Sometimes the joy I feel escapes me in a burst of laughter.

For grasping and impatient people like me, the sensation of not knowing is an irritant. Sitting with that sensation—doing nothing about it—well, that is nearly intolerable.

What can this person teach me?” is a much more productive question than “How is this person wron

… 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

Shamanism is not an elaborate hoax put on by tricksy con artists. To the contrary, it is a dazzling institution that culturally evolves, assuring specialist and client alike of the practitioner's otherworldly powers.

The nature of user-generated content means that anyone can have a platform, removing agency from the prescriptive powers that be and kick-starting an entirely new decolonization of language.

The meaning of life—the truth that tells us how to feel about the whole residual cosmos—would lie in our halting, perhaps perpetual, progress toward justice in this world.