Laura Pike Seeley

In her ideal world, we’d halt work on making AI more powerful for the next five to 10 years. In the meantime, society could get used to the very powerful systems we already have, and experts could do as much safety research on them as possible until they hit diminishing returns. Then they could make AI systems slightly more powerful, wait another

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The ability to connect and form strong social bonds is fundamental to human experience and emerged through unique structures in our brains. But ever-more-powerful technologies and ubiquitous access to media have hijacked our need to connect intimately and emotionally with others.

This blog post is about how to manage information overload in the digital age. It discusses how technology has made information more accessible and easier to share, but also how this can lead to anxiety. The author describes how to counter some of the effects of information overload, including by using Mem’s latest feature, Mem It for Twitter.

“In a forest there is a lot of diversity and yet there is no chemical fertilization, there is no control, there is no use of insecticides or herbicides, and a forest is super productive and resilient,” says Alejandro Hernandez, TNC’s Chiapas coordinator, who has worked on conservation issues with communities in the region for more than 40 years.... See more

Emotional regulation is the process of experiencing an emotion, allowing the sensations to pass through the body (rather than trying to distract oneself with, say, drugs or alcohol or an iPhone or food), identifying it (‘I am angry right now’ or ‘I am sad’), and breathing through it until it eventually passes. The practise of emotional regulation

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Very few issues worthy of debate are black and white. That’s why we need to grapple with the gray areas of life, of which there are many. It’s always tempting to reduce issues to binary choices between right and wrong, good and evil, beneficial and destructive. But it’s ultimately self-defeating; binary thinking discourages complex reasoning while... See more

What would it look like to answer the demanding cries of Earth, to be accountable to the needs of the planet? Given that these questions are likely already familiar to the readers of this publication, perhaps we need to ask something different: Can those of us willing to be accountable do enough to counter the choices of those bent on destruction?... See more

Writing is important, of course, and hopefully, the dialogue, anti-description, and subtext I created illustrates the enormous chasm between a human’s turn of phrase and that of a machine. But even so, if that chasm were to close — years or decades into the future, if ever — I hope every copywriter reading this finds solace in the fact that writing... See more