Mary Martin

Many experts are concerned about how the adoption of AI systems over the next decade will affect essential human traits such as empathy, social/emotional intelligence, complex thinking, ability to act independently and sense of purpose. Some have hopes for AIs’ influence on humans’ curiosity, decision-making and creativity.

I need a greater facility with multispecies languages. I am engaging in a conversation across cultural divides with other multitudes, whose languages and modes of perception we have only just begun to explore.

The nature cure: how time outdoors transforms our memory, imagination and logic

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.

In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It... See more

The discovery suggested to Robert that electrostatics can enable a plant-pollinator mutualism, a well-known example of coevolution. This dynamic — in which a bee feeds on a flower’s nectar and gathers pollen to feed larvae, and also propagates pollen from flower to flower, enabling plant reproduction — was already well established. The potential... See more

While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size. Intermolecular forces flex beneath the feet of water striders on a pond, capillary forces shoot water impossibly upward through a plant’s thin roots, and electrostatic forces can ensnare any oppositely charged flecks that lie in... See more

if an animal

’

s life is worth

living without having a point and without being meaningful in any of the usual senses, then

perhaps a human life can also be worth living without that.