Mary Martin

Racist attitudes like Galton’s were not uncommon among the British aristocracy at the heights of colonialism, but Galton gave them scientific backing. He had the authority of a world traveler, in the tradition of Victorian naturalists like his half-cousin aboard the Beagle. His assessment of the supposed inferiority of others to white Britons was... See more

people's

Mindfulness-Based Exposure Therapy (MBET) is a 16-week non-trauma-focused intervention developed for combat-related PTSD. Integrating mindfulness strategies with exposure, the therapy was found to reduce symptom severity amongst veterans with clinical levels of PTSD.

In February, scientists formed a new field, called organoid intelligence (OI), which is now considered the next frontier of biocomputing. To meet AI's growing computational needs, there's a shift away from traditional Von Neumann architecture towards more innovative approaches. One is neuromorphic computing, inspired by the brain's structure, which

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A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more

While early tech leaders hoped to liberate humanity from hierarchical governments, their products instead multiplied the available channels for exerting control.

But great technological innovations always come with tradeoffs, and the shift to AI therapy has deeper implications than 1 million mental health professionals potentially losing their jobs. AI therapists, when normalized, have the potential to reshape how we understand intimacy, vulnerability, and what it means to connect.

Hope is a flower of a different order, one that blooms in a striving acknowledgment, even celebration, of finitude and whatever we can bear through its innumerable relations.

This is particularly important because there are already indications that many people who often interact with chatbots attribute consciousness to these systems. At the same time, the consensus among experts is that current AI systems are not conscious.