Mary Martin

Many bad things happened in 2023. You already know them. Many tragic events were so terrible we will never forget them and we shouldn’t. You can easily find them all over the news. But the good things that happened are much harder to encounter, and it is easy to get the impression nothing good happened at all. In order to keep struggling to make... See more

Though our collective forgetting is enormous, it is mostly unremarkable to those who study the transmission of culture. What puzzles me, and others who study transmission, is why so much unwritten knowledge has survived. Despite the brittleness of cultural practices, skills proliferate with and without records, chaining generation to generation,... See more

Interestingly, many users who emotionally mourned the ‘loss’ of GPT-4o expressed complete awareness of its lack of consciousness. And yet, in many cases, the subjective grief that they felt was no less real. This demonstrates that the power of the illusion is such that a given user might not actually believe that their AI companion is conscious,... See more

Unlike tearing down monuments to white supremacy in the American South, purging statistics of the ghosts of its eugenicist past is not a straightforward proposition.

You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability.

a problem with mindfulness as a strategy

But what I think AI needs is a second mode where you're in an unfamiliar situation, something novel is happening that you've never experienced before. You become hyper aware, you become conscious of what's going on, and then you're able to make intuitive decisions about what to do."

The model was helpful—but only to an extent. They found that while AI improved the output of less creative writers, it made little difference to the quality of the stories produced by writers who were already creative.