15 Articles about AI & the Bigger Questions

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Conserve Your Willpower: It Runs Out

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Ever wonder why your resolve to hit the gym weakens after you’ve slogged through a soul-sapping day at work? It’s because willpower isn’t just some storybook concept; it’s a measurable form of mental energy that runs out as you use it, much like the gas in your car.

Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University, calls this “ego depletion,” and he proved its existence by sitting students next to a plate of fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies. Some were allowed to snack away, others ordered to abstain. Afterward, both groups were asked to complete difficult puzzles. The students who’d been forced to resist the cookies had so depleted their reserves of self-control that when faced with this new task, they quickly threw in the towel. The cookie eaters, on the other hand, had conserved their willpower and worked on the puzzles longer.

But there are ways to wield what scientists know about willpower to our advantage. Since it’s a finite resource, don’t spread yourself thin: Make one resolution rather than many. And if you manage to stick with it by, say, not smoking for a week, give your willpower a rest by indulging in a nice dinner. Another tactic is to outsource self-control. Get a gym buddy. Use Mint.com to regulate your spending or RescueTime.com to avoid distracting websites.

As John Tierney, coauthor with Baumeister of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength explains, “People with the best self-control aren’t the ones who use it all day long. They’re people who structure their lives so they conserve it.” That way, you’ll be able to stockpile vast reserves for when you really need it.

Judy Dunn, Wired Magazine

The AI Lens

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Striving to create an AI strategy will likely force employees to look at everything through an AI lens. Right now, it seems like AI is seen as the solution, whatever the problem is.  But just because it’s getting all the attention today doesn’t mean that will continue. There will be other technologies that are coming downstream, and focusing too much on AI will crowd out other solutions to other problems a company might have. -Wall Street Journal

Memories are Overrated

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A comment I heard from a member of the audience after a lecture illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing memories from experiences. He told of listening raptly to a long symphony on a disc that was scratched near the end, producing a shocking sound, and he reported that the bad ending “ruined the whole experience.” But the experience was not actually ruined, only the memory of it. The experience itself was almost entirely good, and the bad end could not undo it, because it had already happened. My questioner had assigned the entire episode a failing grade because it had ended very badly, but that grade effectively ignored 40 minutes of musical bliss. Does the actual experience count for nothing?

Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion – and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keep score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self.

We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory (represents) the most intense moments of an episode of pain or pleasure and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preferences for long pleasure and short pains.

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Who creates better memes—humans or AI?

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Researchers in the EU found:

  • When humans got help from an AI, there were more ideas produced with less work, but the quality wasn’t better.  

  • AI memes did better than human-only collaborative creations though the top-performing memes were human-created

The researchers concluded: “These findings highlight the complexities of human-AI collaboration in creative tasks. While AI can boost productivity and create content that appeals to a broad audience, human creativity remains crucial for content that connects on a deeper level.” 

Read more about the research

Imagineering

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Imagine yourself as reaching into your mind and one by one removing your worries. A small child possesses an imaginative skill superior to that of adults. A child responds to the game of kissing away a hurt or throwing away a fear. This simple process works for the child because in his mind he believes that that is actually the end of it. The dramatic act is a fact for him and so it proves to be the end of the matter. Visualize your fears being drained out of your mind and the visualization will in due course be actualized.  

Imagineation is a source of fear, but imagination may also be the cure of fear. “Imagineering” is the use of mental images to build factual results, and it is an astonishingly effective procedure. However, it is not enough to empty the mind, for the mind will not long remain empty. It must be occupied by something.  It cannot continue in a stat of vacuum. Therefore, upon emptying the mind, practice refilling it. Fill it with thought of faith, hope, courage, expectancy.

A half-dozen times each day crowd your mind with such thoughts as those until the mind is overflowing with them. In due course these thoughts of faith will crowd out worry. Day by day, as you fill your mind with faith, there will ultimately be no room left for fear.  

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

Why Most Companies Shouldn’t Have an AI Strategy

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Studies show that most organizations are immature when it comes to AI. By that, I mean that throughout the ranks—from the top executives through the rank and file—there is little knowledge of, and experience with, AI and its capabilities, and a reluctance to embrace data-assisted decision-making. All of this will mean any AI strategy will be misguided and inexecutable.  If you are the leadership team and you aren’t familiar with AI, how are you going to build a strategy for AI? You can’t. -Wall Street Journal

Lax AI Security in Schools

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The implementation of AI surveillance tools has surged since the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent investigation revealed that reporters from The Seattle Times and Associated Press inadvertently accessed nearly 3,500 sensitive student documents due to inadequate security measures surrounding the district's surveillance technology. These documents included personal writings about depression, bullying, and even LGBTQ+ struggles — information that should have remained confidential. -Read more at Mic

Underlying Emptiness

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Think of the person (who) loses a job or a girlfriend and then finds himself in despair. The real cause of the despair is not the man’s loss of the job or the girlfriend. What the loss of the job or girlfriend really reveal is that the person was in despair all along, that his identity was built on something too fragile to be the basis of selfhood. When this fragile basis for identity is shattered, the self’s underlying emptiness was revealed.

C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction

AI Definitions: Convolutional neural networks

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Convolutional neural networks (CNNs or ConvNet) – These deep learning artificial neural networks, often used in computer vision for object recognition, are trained on thousands of images—and even then, they often fail when they encounter the same objects under new lighting conditions or from a different angle. CNNs were first introduced in 1989 by NYU professor Yann LeCun and have been used with autonomous vehicles and security camera systems.

More AI definitions here.

The Paradox of Emotions

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CS Lewis wrote, “A desire (or emotion) is turned not to itself but to its object. Not only that, but it owes all its character to its object. It is the object which makes the desire harsh or sweet, coarse or choice, ‘high’ or ‘low.’ It is the object that makes the desire itself desirable or hateful.”

In other words, if you want to love your wife then concentrate, not on love, but on her. Likewise, if you wish more faith in God, do not concentrate on faith. Focus on God. 

Stephen Goforth