Mary Martin

AI Is Making the World a Dumber Place

I eat real meat, because plant-based meat is so ultra-processed 🍔🙄

Right?

Wrong. And here is why 👇

1️⃣ Both of these are ultra-processed.

all of this information, plus your appearance and voice, are used to create a moving, talking version of yourself that sits in a little screen above the phone’s main screen. You summon it by pressing a square button on the side of the phone, then you ask it to do things.

There is indirect evidence to support this idea. For instance, individuals tend to act in a way that is consistent with or constrained by how they have imagined themselves in those situations (Johnson and Sherman, 1990), implying that some record of that simulation influences later behavior. There is typically a high correspondence of stated... See more

Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.

Metaphors are (metaphorically) woven into the fabric of our language and thought, shaping how we grasp and articulate abstract concepts. We should therefore feel free to prudently explore alternative metaphors and judge whether they perform better. A collective effort to notice and change the metaphors we use has enormous potential to reduce... See more