Mary Martin

Novel technologies like artificial intelligence or neurotechnology are expected to have social implications in the future. As they are in the early stages of development, it is challenging to identify potential negative impacts that they might have on society. Typically, assessing these effects relies on experts, and while this is essential, there... See more

Memories are not a true or false picture of the past; they are a Monet lily pond.

Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.

Research has shown a staggering number of health benefits associated with dispositional optimism, from improvements in cardiovascular health, to how quickly wounds heal, to slower disease progression.

many of the quant-ities related to suffering are based on perceptions and similar uncertain infer-ences. The uncertainty will necessarily increase frustration since it means the predictions of reward often go wrong . More fundamentally, the computed reward loss can be uncertain, even illusory .