14 Articles about How Companies are using AI

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11 Articles about the History of AI

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Fulfilling Our Purpose

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God creates each person as an individual and in effect says to each human being: “Become yourself, be the person I made you to be.” The person who is conscious that he lives “before God” thus gains the possibility of an identity that is not exhausted by human relations. Such a person is not forced simply to live like “the others,” but has the potential to say, “I need to live my life this way, since it is what God desires for me, even if it means that I have to break with my society’s accepted ways of doing things.”

C. Steven Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction

AI-created Video vs Human-made Video

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Researchers recently tested how audiences liked three types of video: human-made, partly automated and fully automated video. The human-made video did best with audiences, but only slightly better than the partly AI video. Both did much better than the fully AI-made video. The researchers think this supports the use of the hybrid form over fully automated since "audiences like their videos to have a human touch." A key part of making this work, I believe, will be identifying what the audience perceives as indicating a piece of media is AI or human-made. For instance, the researchers note that the audience associated nat sound with video that was (at least partly) human-created. This may translate to other forms of media creation as well. The study is published here and read more about it here.

Stephen Goforth

Learning Wisdom

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Taking our cue from the machinery and the data that dominate our world, we usually view knowledge as something that accumulates piecemeal over time. You start out with a little, and then you gradually pick up more and more. It’s like possessions: they pile up over time. But passive accumulation isn’t the way that you learn the most important things that you know about the world. First you are immersed in the knowledge, then you get distance from it (and even deny it) and then you return to a new relation with it.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

The Impact of AI on Creativity in a Dozen Recent Articles

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The experiment that got out of control

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Philip Zimbardo is one of the most controversial figures in psychology, said Katie Kilkenny in Pacific Standard. In 1971, the Stanford professor conducted a now notorious psychological experiment that placed 24 student volunteers as prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. The experiment quickly spun out of control, as the student guards became increasingly sadistic toward their prisoners and Zimbardo—who acted as prison superintendent—was accused of subjecting his volunteers to psychological torture. Four decades on, Zimbardo stands by his study—if only because it taught the world that anyone can be seduced by evil under the right circumstances. “[We like to think] our personality is relatively fixed, we are who we are, that we are not influenced by things around us,” says Zimbardo, 82. “This study says no, that might be true sometimes, but other times when you’re put in an unfamiliar situation where you don’t have any guidelines or rules that contain who you are, you could be anything.” He insists we’ve all witnessed this phenomenon: “Somebody you know suddenly begins to change because they’ve been given a certain role or authority.” Zimbardo admits that he, too, was corrupted by his prison role. “I lost my sense of compassion,” he says. “I totally lost that.”

The Week Magazine, August 7, 2015

17 Articles about Running an AI Company

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The Residue of the Relationship

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When individual members leave a family, whether through death, marriage, relocation, or a cutoff, the system will generally be quick to replace the person who is lost. Whoever the replacement is, new child or new spouse, new in-law or new boarder, clergyman or clergy woman, in the same generation or the next, he or she will replace in all the family triangles the person who has left. They will have grafted onto them all the expectations associated with the predecessor, and the un-worked-out problems that may have contributed to the predecessor’s leaving (or becoming symptomatic) are likely to resurface in the new relationships. Replacement is a function of grief, and grief is always proportional to the un-worked-out residue of the relationship that was lost.

Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation

What to let go of

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What it is time to let go of is not so much the relationship or the job itself, but rather the hopes, fears, dreams, and beliefs that we have attached to them. If you let go only of the job or the relationship, you’ll just find another one and attach the same hopes, fears, dreams and beliefs to it. A loss is best seen as the cue that it is time to let go of the inner thing.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition

Where AI Might Take Journalism

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Imagine having a written news story converted into a video by AI. The AI would not be taking away from the journalism but providing more options to access the information. Perhaps the story can be adjusted based on preferences. For instance, perhaps the reader doesn’t know much about economics and wants the material delivered in simple economic terms. Or the reader might want more detail in a story related to their field. AI would be used to adjust the complexity of the delivery. This may be the kind of journalism we are headed toward.

Resisting change

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We resist transition not because we can't accept the change, but because we can’t accept letting go of that piece of ourselves that we have to give up when and because the situation has changed. We also resist transition because it takes longer (often much longer) than change, and so it leaves us in limbo—or in the neutral zone, as I prefer to call it—while a replacement reality and a new self is gradually being formed.

William Bridges, The Way of Transition