Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:
I increasingly find people asking me “does AI damage your brain?” It’s a revealing question. Not because AI causes literal brain damage (it doesn’t) but because the question itself shows how deeply we fear what AI might do to our ability to think. So, in this post, I want to discuss ways of using AI to help, rather than hurt, your mind. But why the obsession over AI damaging our brains?
Part of this is due to misinterpretation of a much-publicized paper out of the MIT Media Lab (with authors from other institutions as well), titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” The actual study is much less dramatic than the press coverage. It involved a small group of college students who were assigned to write essays alone, with Google, or with ChatGPT (and no other tools). The students who used ChatGPT were less engaged and remembered less about their essays than the group without AI.
More here.
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George Slavich recalls the final hours he spent with his father. It was a laughter-packed day. His father even broke into the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over dinner. “His deep, booming, joyful voice filled the entire restaurant,” says Slavich. “I was semi-mortified, as always, while my daughter relished the serenade.”
Does anyone write love letters anymore? We send emails. Or worse, texts, emoji. Fast, short, disposable. Once, love letters were slow to make and slower to arrive. They were keepsakes, confessions, feelings made physical. They had form. They were a genre unto themselves: often florid, achingly raw, very private. I’ve written them. Maybe you have, too. Now they’ve all but vanished — and with them, a particular architecture of emotion.
Scholarship on populism has dominated the last two decades but is now retreating in the face of a new concept that seems better equipped to capture the current transformations in our society: that of illiberalism. Illiberalism emerged first in the transition studies field (one may recall Fareed Zakaria’s famous “
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Fish Tales, released this spring in a new edition and still pioneering decades after its first run, slices into the flesh of the novel of ideas with events and characters who loom so large they leave no room for indulgent ideological abstractions; they are busy being sluts and disasters at the exact moment you might expect more recognizable or coherent archetypes to buckle begrudgingly into the routines of adult life and surrender to them for the sake of reputation, supposed stability, or ego. Transgressive to the point of exhilarating, Nettie Jones’s prose avoids etiquette or the impulse to virtue signal: this perspective of a girl molested by her schoolteacher, whose life subsequently becomes so centered on male approval she pretends she’s sexually liberated instead of a victim of circumstance and tragic hero, makes no excuses for the procession of orgies and nervous breakdowns that becomes the novel’s plot. Hedonism grows banal as we’re trapped in bed with the protagonist, her demons, and the doom disguised as suitors, flatterers, and one husband, Woody, who after a brief attempt at real union becomes Lewis’s overseer and benefactor, allowing her to hire prostitutes or travel to New York to meet with lovers while he takes his own new girlfriend. All the while he sustains Lewis, “his favorite woman,” with an allowance and a roof over her head.
In the recent K-Drama Our Unwritten Seoul, a simple wooden chair emerges as the iconic stand-in (or sit-in) for a young farmer’s late grandfather, whose favorite chair it had once been. Broken and mended multiple times, patched together with tape, glue, and hastily hammered braces, the chair, on its last legs, gets tossed out by an over-zealous new employee. The young farmer is devastated.