Mary Martin

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

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.

We can use the shadow imagination as a mechanism for uncovering our future power. When we’re introduced to how bad things could get, we’re at a choice point. We can turn away, we can dive into the waters of the worst-case scenario and allow them to drown us, or we can touch the suffering that’s possible and remind ourselves of our own abilities. We... See more

Although the shift did not happen that quickly, there is certainly evidence to suggest that the role of mindfulness within psychological treatment is here to stay and will only increase as times goes on.

The comparison is anchored in The Cigarette Century ,12 which provides a detailed historical account of how cigarettes were engineered for addictiveness. From this foundation, a framework of industrial strategies—such as dose manipulation, delivery speed, use of additives, and health washing—was developed as the basis for comparison with UPFs.

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