The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories

As Donald Knuth put it: “Ai has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do without thinking …”

What do we have left that is ours and ours alone? Sensorimotor skills that are all but automatic, yes. Consciousness, yes. Emotions. Instinct. Appetites, impulses and dr... See more

Something fundamental in our culture has ended. What exactly, I can’t quite put my finger on. As many things in the liminal, it’s hard to grasp. But if we want to birth something new out of it, we have to come to terms with endings. We have to come to terms with the ultimate ending, the very thing Covid-19 forces us to look at: our inevitable death... See more

Let me answer your implicit complaint: “The Turing Test will be eventually passed.” That’s right (in some settings, Turing’s original prediction has been already achieved), but the truth is that any human relationship — even digital ones, even those not especially intimate like the ones between writers and readers (I love you, though) — requires mu... See more

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different f

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