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Blueskyer Kenny Logins quotes Internet Hippo on the Tulip mania AI craze taking over the corporate world: They taught Al how to talk like a corporate middle manager and thought this meant the Al was conscious instead of realizing that corporate middle managers aren’t. Hippo seems to be channeling Nikhil Suresh here: There have been several occasions where I have seen someone, apropos of nothing, blurt out almost word-for-word “AI is changing everything”, only to concede moments later that their organisation does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT (frequently the free-tier). In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI. ...

Caroline Calloway in Byline, on taking Ozempic, writes two fine sentences that, together, punch way above their weight: I don’t have the self-discipline to change my psyche or the life span to fix the patriarchy. I’ll run out of time and die before I see the world stop treating thin women with more reverence and gentleness than the averagely plump girl I once was. Reverence and gentleness are prizes granted by the world to the thin. Self-discipline is put on the same plane as the ability to “fix” the patriarchy within a single lifetime. Is it any wonder that she lacks self-discipline–the discipline to keep herself thin, or to callous herself against the harshness apportioned to those who act like they don’t care? More than anything else, this is a despairing passage. (Also: averagely!) ...

Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff thinks AI-driven search is killing our curiosity, because it truncates the distance between questions and answers: Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out. Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints. The loss is not serious in any single case. But fewer detours and fewer unexpected discoveries will have a cumulative effect. Over time, people trained this way become better at extracting ready-made conclusions than building connections of their own. ...