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The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

view. For instance, in the mid-1700s David Hume wrote a lot about the “natural benevolence” of human beings. And a century later, even Charles Darwin himself attributed an “instinct of sympathy” to our species. But

Dalai Lama • The Art of Happiness, 10th Anniversary Edition: A Handbook for Living

“The trouble with the internet, Mr. Williams says, is that it rewards extremes. Say you’re driving down the road and see a car crash. Of course you look. Everyone looks. The internet interprets behavior like this to mean everyone is asking for car crashes, so it tries to supply them.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/technology/evan-williams-mediu

Empathy is a “capricious and irrational emotion that appeals to our narrow prejudices”. It encourages us to take shortcuts towards familiar and accessible feelings, values, and beliefs. Of course, all of this makes sense when we take an evolutionary perspective. As Bloom observes, “we are constituted to favour our friends and family over strangers,... See more

Ian Murray • Burst your bubble… about empathy | WARC

The Human Mind

Paul Bloom

amazon.com

Behavioral economics is demonstrating that humans don’t always act in self-interested ways, and that transactions themselves have an emotional component.

Clay Shirky • Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators

from Peter Watts: "We're not thinking machines, we're feeling machines that happen to think."

Since the generative AIs have been trained on the entirety of human work — most of it mediocre — it produces “wisdom of the crowd”-like results. They may hit the mark but only because they are average.

Kevin Kelly • Interview: Kevin Kelly, Editor, Author, and Futurist

People keep asking me about AI and I really think how you feel about AI comes down to whether you believe art is about producing things (images, objects, data files, “content”) or about a way of operating in the world as an intellectual, spiritual, and emotional creature.