Smell has the power to evoke strong emotions and trigger vivid memories, making it an ideal candidate for enhancing children’s experiences in a living enactment of the story on a trail within the museum.
One might point out that movie characters or videogame NPCs give off a similarly deceiving impression of being conscious, and yet it would surely be extreme to condemn this. However, what makes the illusion particularly worrying in the case of AI companions is that it involves an interaction that is direct, mutual, and persistent: the feigned... See more
In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It... 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
contemporary societies seem to care about three things: national prosperity, social cohesion and stability, and personal well-being. But the personal attitudes that will lead towards these three ‘goods’ are not eternal: they depend on the nature of the world. So even if those three aspirations are taken for granted, educational values — the traits... See more