Bumper Sticker Catch Phrases

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We need to be careful about staking the important ethical decisions in our lives on bumper sticker catch phrases. The problem is that the ideas expressed in these bite-sized pronouncements have broader implications.

While the ethical aspect that is explicit in the bumper sticker may look good at first glance, other ideas that follow from it may not be so attractive. Most of us have heard or used the cliché “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” and it can sound like worthwhile advice. But what if the standard practices of the “Romans” stand in direct conflict with your moral or religious convictions? The is why we need to get behind the cliché’ itself.

Before we commit ourselves to any bumper sticker, we want to make certain that we can accept all that is implied in the slogan.

Steve Wilkens, Beyond Bumper Sticker Ethics

The Impact of AI on Creativity in 9 Articles

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Get in a creative mood by visiting large spaces

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If you’re in a cramped space, say your office is a little cubicle, your visual attention can’t spread out. It’s focused in this narrow space. Just as your visual attention is constricted, your conceptual attention becomes narrow and focused, and your thinking is more likely to be analytical.

But if you’re in a large space – a big office, with high ceilings, or outside — your visual attention expands to fill the space, and your conceptual attention expands.

That’s why a lot of creative figures like to be outdoors, to take long walks in nature, and they get their inspiration from being in the wide, open spaces. If you can see far and wide, then you can think far and wide.

Brigid Schulte writing in the Washington Post

Tech created a global village — and puts us at each other’s throats

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As we get additional information about others, we place greater stress on the ways those people differ from us than on the ways they resemble us, and this inclination to emphasize dissimilarities over similarities strengthens as the amount of information accumulates. On average, we like strangers best when we know the least about them.

The effect intensifies in the virtual world, where everyone is in everyone else’s business. Social networks like Facebook and messaging apps like Snapchat encourage constant self-disclosure. Because status is measured quantitatively online, in numbers of followers, friends, and likes, people are rewarded for broadcasting endless details about their lives and thoughts through messages and photographs. To shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. One study found that people share four times as much information about themselves when they converse through computers as when they talk in person.

Progress toward a more amicable world will require not technological magic but concrete, painstaking, and altogether human measures: negotiation and compromise, a renewed emphasis on civics and reasoned debate, a citizenry able to appreciate contrary perspectives. At a personal level, we may need less self-expression and more self-examination.

Technology is an amplifier. It magnifies our best traits, and it magnifies our worst.

Nicholas Carr writing in the Boston Globe

Technology that makes us less human

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Like an episode out of Black Mirror, the machines have arrived to teach us how to be human even as they strip us of our humanity. Artificial intelligence could significantly diminish humanity, even if machines never ascend to superintelligence, by sapping the ability of human beings to do human things. “We’re seeing a general trend of selling AI as ‘empowering,’ a way to extend your ability to do something, whether that’s writing, making investments, or dating,” AI expert Leif Weatherby explained. “But what really happens is that we become so reliant on algorithmic decisions that we lose oversight over our own thought processes and even social relationships.” What makes many applications of artificial intelligence so disturbing is that they don’t expand our mind’s capacity to think, but outsource it. - Tyler Austin Harper writing in The Atlantic

Performance Ratings Don’t Tell Us What You Think They Do

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A significant body of research has demonstrated that each of us is a disturbingly unreliable rater of other people’s performance. The effect that ruins our ability to rate others has a name: the Idiosyncratic Rater Effect, which tells us that my rating of you on a quality such as “potential” is driven not by who you are, but instead by my own idiosyncrasies—how I define “potential,” how much of it I think I have, how tough a rater I usually am. This effect is resilient — no amount of training seems able to lessen it. And it is large — on average, 61% of my rating of you is a reflection of me. In other words, when I rate you, on anything, my rating reveals to the world far more about me than it does about you.  

13 Articles about How Companies are using AI

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Revealing ourselves without realizing it

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When we talk about ourselves, telling others who we are, researchers say the same part of our brain lights up as when we brainstorm ideas, discuss our dreams, or speak extraneously. Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found this to be the case, even when musicians improvise. The same area of the brain is at work in these off-handed dispatches, displaying a musical autobiography of sorts.

When we are engaged in these intensely personal pursuits, we not only reveal intimate parts of ourselves, researchers say a part of the brain involved in self-control and planning is shut down.

Stephen Goforth

Eros as God

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We must not give unconditional obedience to the voice of Eros when he speaks most like a god. The real danger seems to me not that the lovers will idolize each other but that they will idolize Eros himself. The couple whose marriage will certainly be endangered by (lapses), and possibly ruined, are those who have idolized Eros. They expected that mere feeling would do for them, and permanently, all that was necessary. When this expectation is disappointed, they throw the blame on Eros or, more usually, on their partners.

CS Lewis
The Four Loves