Mary Martin

The more you build your self-conception

on memory, which is notoriously unreliable, and the more you try to give yourself an identity

by constructing a narrative of your life, the less likely you are to understand who and what

you really are.

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.

A chatbot helped more people access mental-health services

Advising is hard. It’s a complex activity that involves negotiating someone’s difficulty in dealing with a problem and their responsibility for dealing with it. Often, it degenerates into telling people what to do or showing off how much we know. Perhaps if more of us understood advising a little better, we could avoid giving overbearing advice and... See more

Two weeks of 20-minute yoga nidra sessions led to a higher percentage of delta-waves in deep sleep and better memory, decision-making, and abstraction

To meet these challenges and increase the impact of foresight work, we need to rethink our approach from the very beginning of a project.

Unlike humans, AI can’t flexibly navigate changing environments yet because it does not have a notion of its “self” and what it can do with it.

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more