Debbie Foster

Personalized AI will need to store details of past conversations, so that it can write our likes and dislikes to memory, and choose appropriate words and actions even if weeks or months have since gone by. Unfortunately, however, LLMs are deep neural networks, which learn in minuscule increments from millions of repeated data samples. They don't

Rather than knowing you, then, the algorithm moreso guides you into who you will become.

Reality is something qualitatively different from fiction, and fiction is only dangerous when we don't respect that difference—when we forget that it serves a fundamentally different purpose and appeals to different needs.

When I read Quentin Bell's biography of Woolf, I stop at 1940 because I don't want to kill her. If I hold back the page, she'll never reach the river.

We want to rush past our bitter moments, to a place of facility and ease, we want to be old at this new thing, but rushing won’t do it. Only time and repetition bring ease. Then it’s second nature, a walk in the park.

The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers.

The more we identify with a limited and fixed version of our self, the more vulnerable this self is to hurt and harm, to the effects of change, accident and turbulence. If it has no flexibility, it is fragile.

Unreasonable distributions of wealth have always turned their fire on reason.

I have a stronger memory of visiting Bekonscot Model Village, "the world's oldest and original model village" … We encountered the village as the scholar Yael Padan argues tourists often do, as a representation of the nation in which—like an orrery—time and space are condensed. Bekonscot was first opened to the public in 1929, and while some of the