Parker C

But you’ll notice

what I slipped in there – I said we should focus first on preventing AI-assisted crimes before they happen – wouldn’t such prevention mean banning AI? Well, there’s another way to prevent such actions, and that’s by using AI as a defensive tool . The same capabilities that make AI dangerous in the hands of bad guys with bad goals... See more

Can two hours

a day chatting to a bot possibly be healthy? On the one hand, you’re spending those two hours talking to an imaginary friend, which seems a bit worrisome. On the other hand, the typical American spends more time than this watching TV—an average of two and a half hours a day—and TV is about as interactive as a brick. Your brain gets a... See more

Attention is all we have. According to philosopher Simone Weil, it is sacred — the rarest form of generosity:

“Attention alone, that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears, is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it onto that which cannot be conceived.”

Confidence is the ability to be in your body and breathe

Historically, every new

technology that matters, from electric lighting to automobiles to radio to the Internet, has sparked a moral panic – a social contagion that convinces people the new technology is going to destroy the world, or society, or both. The fine folks at Pessimists Archive have documented these technology-driven moral panics over the... See more

The emotional stickiness

of conversational bots raises the question of manipulation. After all, the people making the bots have an incentive to keep people chatting for as long as possible, so they do things to make the bots as addictive as possible.