Mary Martin

Neuroscience now recognizes that the brain and the body are so intimately intertwined that they cannot be thought of separately.

The present findings also show that it is possible to develop systems that can instantly interpret emotional cues to provide immediate and intuitive feedback in a wide range of situations. This could lead to scalable, cost-efficient applications in various domains where understanding emotional context is crucial, such as therapy and interpersonal... See more

The results showed that people with a higher desire to so-cially connect were more likely to anthropomorphize the chatbot, ascribing humanlike mental properties to it; and people who anthropomorphized the chatbot more were also more likely to report that it had an impact on their social interactions and relationships with family and friends.

This is why the idea that speech is violence is so dangerous. It tells the members of a generation already beset by anxiety and depression that the world is a far more violent and threatening place than it really is. It tells them that words, ideas, and speakers can literally kill them. Even worse: At a time of rapidly rising political polarization... See more

Maybe AI doesn’t raise the bar. Maybe it reveals how low we’ve let the bar drop. In a world where ghosting is normal and attentiveness is rare, a chatbot that listens is radical.

AI Is Making the World a Dumber Place

I believe that in nearly every instance where science fiction has successfully ‘predicted’ a turn of events, it’s more true to say that it has inspired that turn of events.

it would appear the plague-clouds are within us, too. They illustrate the interconnectedness of our inner and outer worlds. They betray a certain flimsiness of human agency, painting our decision-making in strokes of environmental influence far bolder than our intuition suggests. And they throw the climate crisis into fresh, stark relief: because,... See more