Debbie Foster

We have an inbuilt cognitive and behavioural resistance to the new; we work to try to make our ‘now’ just another version of our ‘then,’ so that nothing new needs to be decided, no extra effort needs to be made, no discomfort felt. But a tendency to get stuck in old ways, even in the face of new demands, can become a source of our trembling and

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

My journalist brain turned on. The light in the waiting room started to take on texture. Background sounds moved into the foreground, demanded engrossment. I felt close to something, the way some days when the air was cold and the sun was bright, I felt more alive. My mom used to describe these kinds of days as baking-soda days—when everything was

if we want to build truly purposeful LLMs, then we need to endow them with a goal-based system - one that explicitly searches for the right thing to say or do, with a view to achieving a specific objective. In AI research, this is usually referred to as building LLMs that are capable of planning.

Planning is a mental process that involves thinking

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.

My whole life I had believed that understanding myself required to keep others at a distance, lined up on the far side of a river. That evening of counting I had not felt so certain. That evening I felt like a room with doors open, for others to explore, and that from their explorations I could start to ascertain my shape. We are not the people we

Our blind trust in algorithms helps us believe in the categories assigned to us. Even though personalized recommendations are probabilistic —trying to predict what we like—we often treat them as deterministic , as if they already know what we like. Through that attitude, we become "calcified in our digital identities," each of which can be uniquely

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.