Amira

"From ancient Egyptian religions to Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat to the latest I Can Haz Cheeseburger meme, felines, literature, and culture have enjoyed a long love affair. But perhaps no other feline has walked through history in quite the fashion that a Mediterranean cat did when it left paw prints across the pages of a 15th century manuscript from Dubrovnik, Croatia." - Amira

"In [Hilary Putnam’s] view, there is no reason to suppose that a complete account of reality can be given using a single set of concepts. That is, it is not possible to reduce all types of explanation to one set of objective concepts. (...) The full scope of reality is simply too complex to be fully described by one method of explanation. The problem with all of this, and one that Putnam has struggled with, is what sort of picture of reality we are left with once we accept these three central arguments: the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy, the truth of semantic externalism and conceptual relativity. (...)" - Amira

"We could—like Putnam before the 1970s—become robust realists and simply accept that values and norms are no less a part of the world than ,elementary particles and mathematical objects. We could—like Putnam until the 1990s—become “internal realists” and, in a vaguely Kantian move define reality in terms of mind-dependent concepts and idealised rational categories. Or we could adopt Putnam’s current position—a more modest realism which argues that there is a mind-independent world out there and that it is compatible with our ordinary human values. Of course Putnam has his reasons for believing what he does now, and they largely derive from his faith in our ability to represent reality correctly. But the strength of his arguments convincing us to be wary of the scientific stance leave us with little left of trust in it." http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blog... - Amira

"We do know that limp binding was used in the 14th & 15th centuries and that it became a quite popular style in the 16th century, with some library collections having over 50% of their works bound in this fashion thanks to the efforts of scholar-publishers. (...) One of the examples that stood out for me was a limp binding with a linen cloth cover, held by the National Library of Sweden. It's a document from 1451-1452, which is simply referred to as the Vadstena Observance. Vadstena was a monastery. (...) It's a simple way of binding things. I can't help but feel that these books are meant for use; a copy meant for wear, rather than a library reference, which would be the grander version of the manuscript that you'd want to keep nice. Some of the records from 14th and 15th century convent libraries certainly agree as most of these books were in the hands of the nuns, with only 9% of the books in the library being limp bound. That doesn't mean these books weren't of value though. They still contained information and have even been documented as being taken as part of the spoils of war." - Amira

"They don’t always have enough to eat, they may lack education, they despair at daily injustices and some want to emigrate. But most Africans no longer fear a violent or premature end and can hope to see their children do well. That applies across much of the continent, including the sub-Saharan part, the main focus of this report. African statistics are often unreliable, but broadly the numbers suggest that human development in sub-Saharan Africa has made huge leaps. Secondary-school enrolment grew by 48% between 2000 and 2008 after many states expanded their education programmes and scrapped school fees. Over the past decade malaria deaths in some of the worst-affected countries have declined by 30% and HIV infections by up to 74%. Life expectancy across Africa has increased by about 10% and child mortality rates in most countries have been falling steeply." - Amira

"A booming economy has made a big difference. Over the past ten years real income per person has increased by more than 30%, whereas in the previous 20 years it shrank by nearly 10%. Africa is the world’s fastest-growing continent just now. Over the next decade its GDP is expected to rise by an average of 6% a year, not least thanks to foreign direct investment. FDI has gone from $15 billion in 2002 to $37 billion in 2006 and $46 billion in 2012 (...) Nigeria produces more movies than America does. Film-makers, novelists, designers, musicians and artists thrive in a new climate of hope. Opinion polls show that almost two-thirds of Africans think this year will be better than last, double the European rate. (...)" - Amira

"Many [African countries] have stopped fighting. War and civil strife have declined dramatically. Local conflicts occasionally flare up, but in the past decade Africa’s wars have become a lot less deadly. Perennial hotspots such as Angola, Chad, Eritrea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are quiet, leaving millions better off, and even Congo, Somalia and Sudan are much less violent than they used to be. (...) This report covers plenty of places where progress falls short. But their number is shrinking." - Amira

"Afraid you will miss “something important”? From my experience, if something really important happens, you will hear about it, even if you live in a cocoon that protects you from the news. Friends and colleagues will tell you about relevant events far more reliably than any news organization. They will fill you in with the added benefit of meta-information, since they know your priorities and you know how they think. You will learn far more about really important events and societal shifts by reading about them in specialized journals, in-depth magazines or good books and by talking to the people who know. (…) The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. (…)" - Amira

"Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. (…) [F]ewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Less than 1% are truly investigative. And only once every 50 years do journalists uncover a Watergate. (...) The copying and the copying of the copies multiply the flaws in the stories and their irrelevance." - Amira

“When people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.” — Adam Gopnik - Amira

"Medieval manuscripts often begin with a portrait of the author, a practice taken from Roman books. When this copy of 'About Virginity' was made, an artist drew on the first page a man writing, presumably meant as a 'portrait' of Aldhelm. The drawing was done with a stylus, indented into the surface of the vellum, but it was never inked in or painted. Later in the 10th century, when many of the glosses in Old English were added, the drawing was partly redrawn with ink, leaving part of the indented original drawing is clearly visible." http://www.bl.uk/onlineg... - Amira

"Saul Steinberg (June 15, 1914 – May 12, 1999) was a Jewish Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker. (...) He studied philosophy for a year at the University of Bucharest, then later enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano, studying architecture and graduating in 1940." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... More info: http://www.saulsteinbergfounda... - Amira

Abstract: "In the largest false memory study to date, 5,269 participants were asked about their memories for three true and one of five fabricated political events. Each fabricated event was accompanied by a photographic image purportedly depicting that event. Approximately half the participants falsely remembered that the false event happened, with 27% remembering that they saw the events happen on the news. Political orientation appeared to influence the formation of false memories, with conservatives more likely to falsely remember seeing Barack Obama shaking hands with the president of Iran, and liberals more likely to remember George W. Bush vacationing with a baseball celebrity during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. A follow-up study supported the explanation that events are more easily implanted in memory when they are congruent with a person's preexisting attitudes and evaluations, in part because attitude-congruent false events promote feelings of recognition and familiarity, which in turn interfere with source attributions." - Amira

See also: Creating False Memories by Elizabeth F. Loftus http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus... - Amira

...and just the opposite: Harvard researchers found that 83% of radiologists didn't notice the gorilla in this image http://www.npr.org/blogs... :-) - Amira

"Why does the music that to some people is lovely, even transcendent, sound to others like a lot of noise? Researchers at the University of Melbourne attribute to the amount of pleasure we take in music to how much dissonance we hear -- the degree of "perceived roughness, harshness, unpleasantness, or difficulty in listening to the sound." The team played both "pure tones" and various chords for participants -- a mixed group of trained musicians studying at the school's conservatory and members of the general public -- and had them rate the sounds for perceived dissonance, and for familiarity, on a five-point scale. Trained musicians, perhaps predictably, were more sensitive to dissonance than lay listeners. But they also found that when listeners hadn't previously encountered a certain chord, they found it nearly impossible to hear the individual notes that comprised it. Where this ability was lacking, the chords sounded dissonant, and thus, unpleasant." - Amira

"The ability to identify tones and thus enjoy harmonies was positively correlated with musical training. Said study co-author Sarah Wilson, "This showed us that even the ability to hear a musical pitch (or note) is learned." (...) The more ambitious implication of the findings, according to lead author Neil McLachlan, is that it "overturns centuries of theories that physical properties of the ear determine what we find appealing." As they explain in their discussion, the basic, 12-tone do re mi scale isn't "naturally" harmonious. Instead, it was first introduced by Pythagoras (yes, he of the theorem), who developed a system of "tuning based on successive 2/3 proportions of string length." It was a logical, mathematical method that in turn gave us "the simple mathematical relationships [that] can be found between the harmonics of common Western chords" that we've since learned to love." - Amira

"The librarian in Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities only scans titles and tables of contents: his library symbolises the impossibility of reading everything today. The proliferation of lists of novels that you must, allegedly, have perused in your lifetime, reflects this problem while compounding it. On a recent visit to a high street bookshop, I ogled a well-stacked display table devoted to "great" novels "you always meant to read". We measure out our lives with unread books, as well as coffee spoons. (...) The problem, as Kierkegaard observed, is that "more and more becomes possible" when "nothing becomes actual". Literature was a blank canvas that increasingly dreamed of remaining blank." - Amira

could not find that any blank books in Borges' library... perhaps he did not catalogue them, or maybe the reference links were voided :-) No, he meant for you to read the world-in-itself. - Adriano

"Technology has changed the speed and the scope of social influence and has really transformed our realities. (...) I see that most of our learning is by social modeling and through indirect experiences. Errors can be very costly and you can’t afford to develop our values, our competences, our political systems, our religious systems through trial and error. Modeling shortcuts this process. (…) With new technologies, we’re essentially transcending our physical environment and more and more of our values and attitudes and behavior are now shaped in the symbolic environment – the symbolic environment is the big one rather than the actual one. The changes are so rapid that there are more and more areas of life now in which the cyber world is really essential. One model can affect millions of people worldwide, it can shape their experiences and behaviors. We don’t have to rely on trial and error. (...)" - Amira

"The revolutionary tendency of technology has increased our sense of agency. If I have access to all global knowledge, I would have fantastic capacities to educate myself. (…) The important thing in psychology is that we need a theory of human agency, rather than arguing that we’re controlled by neural networks. In every aspect of our lives we now have a greater capacity for exercicing agency." - Amira

We assume that aggression is inbred, but some societies are remarkably pacifistic. And we can also see large variations within a society. But the most striking example might be the transformation from warrior societies into peaceful societies. Switzerland is one example. Sweden is another: Those vikings were out mugging everyone and people would pray for protection: - Elestirel Gunluk

"The natural phenomenon, called 'murmuration', has become rare as starling populations have declined. Professor Yossi Leshem, director of the International Center for the Study of Bird Migration at Tel Aviv University, said the birds' synchronized movements are a way to communicate the location of food sources to other starling, as well create a defence mechanism against birds of prey. The spectacle lasted 20 minutes before dissipating." More: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Amira

Check out also http://www.youtube.com/watch... (in HD) - Amira

"This nobel prize winning physicist is well known for his interesting and amusing lectures. However, not many know that he was also an artist, working under the pseudonym Ofey. Most of his work bears the Ofey signature and his primary area was drawing." - Amira

excellent - çakır

"An alpine town, the Eiffel Tower, the whole Manhattan skyline… China is replicating the world's architectural gems. (...) The issue of China and its attitude to intellectual property rights has now been reignited, following claims that a project in Beijing by Zaha Hadid is ­being replicated by "pirate ­architects" in Chongqing, the megacity in the south. It could even be finished ­before the original is completed next year. The British architect's globular ­complex of pebble-shaped towers – an office and retail development called Wangjing Soho – is itself something of a copy of her recently completed Galaxy Soho, also in Beijing, and both projects are in keeping with the city's new vernacular of bulbous UFOs, kicked off in 2007 by Paul Andreu's ­National Grand Theatre. (...) It also launched an advertising slogan in response to the furore: "Never meant to copy, only want to surpass." - Amira

"In many copycat cases, though, the architects are either long gone or ­impossible to name. In ­Tianducheng, near Shanghai, a 108m-high Eiffel Tower rises above Champs Elysées Square; while in Chengdu, to the south-west, a residential complex for 200,000 recreates Britain's Dorchester. The ­attention to detail can be ­astonishing: a ­doppelganger Queen's Guard ­patrols Shanghai's Thames Town, which abounds with statues of Winston Churchill; gleaming ­replicas of the White House dot ­Chinese cities. It all adds up to a surreal ­catalogue of ­"duplitecture", brilliantly ­documented in the book Original ­Copies: ­Architectural Mimicry in ­Contemporary China by Bianca Bosker." - Amira

See also: China spends $940 million to clone one of Austria's most picturesque villages http://friendfeed.com/world-p... - Amira

"The lautenwerck, or lute-harpsichord (lute-clavier), was a European keyboard instrument of the Baroque period. It was similar to a harpsichord, but with gut rather than metal strings, producing a mellow tone. The instrument was favored by J. S. Bach, who owned two of the instruments at the time of his death, but no specimens have survived to the present day. It was revived in the 20th century and two of its most prominent performers are the early music specialists Gergely Sárközy and Robert Hill." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

here is http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Terra Barselonevî

"A pair of Indiana University researchers has found that a pair of predictive modeling techniques can make significantly better decisions about patients’ treatments than can doctors acting alone. How much better? They claim a better than 50 percent reduction in costs and more than 40 percent better patient outcomes. (...) The researchers worked with “clinical data, demographics and other information on over 6,700 patients who had major clinical depression diagnoses, of which about 65 to 70 percent had co-occurring chronic physical disorders like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.” They built a model using Markov decision processes — which predict the probabilities of future events based on those immediately preceding them — and dynamic decision networks — which extend the Markov processes by considering the specific features of those events in order to determine the probabilities. Essentially, their model considers the specifics of a patient’s current state and then determines the best action to effect the best possible outcome." - Amira

I believe it. Many moons ago for a project in an expert systems class it seemed obvious doctors could be helped a lot with such a system and it wouldn't even be that hard to build. As always though "best possible outcome" is quite a fluid thing. - Todd Hoff

Then Big Pharma would come up with a pharmaceutical rep virus. - Spidra Webster

"A group in mathematics is an object that measures symmetry in the same way that a number measures quantity, groups can be used to cast light on Neo-Riemannian theory" More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... // "The red lines connect notes that are a major third apart. The green lines connect notes that are a minor third apart. The blue lines connect notes that are a perfect fifth apart. Each triangle is a chord with three notes, called a triad. These are the most basic chords in Western music. There are two kinds: A major triad sounds happy. The major triads are the triangles whose edges go red-green-blue as you go around clockwise. A minor triad sounds sad. The minor triads are the triangles whose edges go green-red-blue as you go around clockwise. This pattern is called a tone net, and this one was created by David W. Bulger." https://plus.google.com/u... - Amira

"In these ground-breaking essays, Heinz von Foerster discusses some of the fundamental principles that govern how we know the world and how we process the information from which we derive that knowledge. The author, Austrian American scientist combining physics and philosophy was one of the founders of the science of cybernetics" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

'Heinz Von Foerster’s Theorem Number One': “The more profound the problem that is ignored, the greater are the chances for fame and success.” (p.191) // 'Heinz Von Foerster’s Theorem Number Three': “The Laws of Nature are written by man. The laws of biology must write themselves.” (p.195) - Amira

"The important thing is the obvious thing nobody is saying." --William S. Burroughs - Adriano

"Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved. To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended. (...) Over thousands of years, tiny variations in the way that we produce sounds have meant that early languages have morphed into many different descendents. Dr Klein explains: "These sound changes are almost always regular, with similar words changing in similar ways, so patterns are left that a human or a computer can find. "The trick is to identify these patterns of change and then to 'reverse' them, basically evolving words backwards in time." (...)" - Amira

"From a database of 142,000 words, the system was able to recreate the early language from which these modern tongues derived. The scientists believe it would have been spoken about 7,000 years ago. They then compared the computer's findings to those of linguists, finding that 85% of the early words that the software presented were within one "character" - or sound - of the words that the language experts had identified. (...) "Our system still has shortcomings. For example, it can't handle morphological changes or re-duplications - how a word like 'cat' becomes 'kitty-cat'. "At a much deeper level, our system doesn't explain why or how certain changes happened, only that they probably did happen." - Amira

Once the *recursive* features of language evolution are deduced, one can chain forward from the present (cf. prediction in physics), as well as simulate back to initial conditions (e.g. stochastic MCMC). By relying on probabilistic models of sound change, the authors zoom past symbolic representations of languages. My guess for first ever uttered sound: "Duh!" (maybe "wut" :-) - Adriano

"Scientists now believe the widespread phenomenon, known as “universality,” stems from an underlying connection to mathematics, and it is helping them to model complex systems from the internet to Earth’s climate. (…) Each of these systems has a spectrum — a sequence like a bar code representing data such as energy levels, zeta zeros, bus departure times or signal speeds. In all the spectra, the same distinctive pattern appears: The data seem haphazardly distributed, and yet neighboring lines repel one another, lending a degree of regularity to their spacing. This fine balance between chaos and order, which is defined by a precise formula, also appears in a purely mathematical setting: It defines the spacing between the eigenvalues, or solutions, of a vast matrix filled with random numbers. (…)" - Amira

"Universality is thought to arise when a system is very complex, consisting of many parts that strongly interact with each other to generate a spectrum. The pattern emerges in the spectrum of a random matrix, for example, because the matrix elements all enter into the calculation of that spectrum. But random matrices are merely “toy systems” that are of interest because they can be rigorously studied, while also being rich enough to model real-world systems. (...) The more complex a system is, the more robust its universality should be, said László Erdös of the University of Munich, one of Yau’s collaborators. “This is because we believe that universality is the typical behavior.” - Amira

"What if the very thing that made you feel crazy happy also made you smarter? That’s the question underlying the work of the Institute for Centrifugal Research, where scientists believe that spinning people around at a sufficiently high G-force will solve “even the trickiest challenges confronting mankind.” (...) The culminating experiment features a ride that resembles a giant tropical plant. Riders enter a round car that rises slowly up, up, up and then takes off suddenly at incredibly high speed along one of the “branches.” “Unpredictability is a key part of our work,” says Laslowicz. After the ride, he says, people described experiencing a “readjustment of key goals and life aspirations.” Though he later adds that he wouldn’t put his own children on one of his rides. “These machines provide total freedom,” Laslowicz says, “cutting all connection to the world we live in: communication responsibility, weight. Everything is on hold when you’re being centrifuged.” - Amira

*Eivind* - Harold Cabezas

Awesome. <3 - Jenny H.

'Suspended stone circle' by Ken Unsworth, Art Gallery of W.A., 1978 - 1981 | Charissa, Brock, Hearing the Sea, 2005 | Lesfemmesartistes: Claire Morgan, A Bird Dropping, 2007 - Amira

"Japanese photographer Miyoko Ihara began taking pictures of her grandmother, Misao, 13 years ago to commemorate her rich life. Along the way, the photographer came across a beautiful bond between her now 88-year-old grandmother and a cat named Fukumaru, whose given name roughly translates as "good fortune circle." In her photo book titled Misao the Big Mama and Fukumaru the Cat, Ihara captures the affectionate tale of these two best friends doing everything together. Looking through a selection of photos from the book, one can see the genuine friendship and warmth between the inseparable pair as they keep each other company throughout their daily lives. It was nine years ago that Misao first found Fukumaru abandoned in a shed, described as an "odd-eyed kitten." While the cat had its own ailments and hearing disabilities, the two have continued to grow old together, enjoying the beauty of everyday life against the stunning backdrop of nature's fields." - Amira

"Saudade is a Portuguese word that has no direct translation in English. (...) The "Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa" defines saudade (or saudades) as "A somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness. It is related to thinking back on situations of privation due to the absence of someone or something, to move away from a place or thing, or to the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived." (...) Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses. (...)" - Amira

Yes i am from Portugal. Can i add you on my facebook as a friend? [email protected] (my contact) - jose manuel

"Cellist Katinka Kleijn performed both halves of a duet Sunday night. Her hands played the cello, and her brain, hooked up to a headset that detects cerebral electrical signals, played itself. (...) "Intelligence in the Human Machine,” the cello/brain duet, explored the relationship a performer has to the music she’s playing. During the performance, at Chicago’s Cultural Center, Kleijn wore an Emotiv EPOC, a neuroheadset with 14 sensors that attach to the scalp and detect brainwaves. In front of her, a laptop flashed a word and a few measures of music. She then played the music on her cello, interpreting the word onscreen. At the same time, her brainwaves, translated to audio, changed sounds as she reacted to the word. (...) “Not only is Katinka playing the cello, but she is also, in a sense, playing her brain waves, emphasizing what’s going on in her brain while she’s performing,” Dehaan says." - Amira

"Look into a mirror and you’ll simultaneously see the familiar and the alien: an image of you, but with left and right reversed. Left-right inequality has significance far beyond that of mirror images, touching on the heart of existence itself. From subatomic physics to life, nature prefers asymmetry to symmetry. (...) Life is fundamentally asymmetric. (...) Somehow, during its infancy, the cosmos selected matter over antimatter. This imperfection is the single most important factor dictating our existence. (…) It is not symmetry and perfection that should be our guiding principle, as it has been for millennia. (...) The science we create is just that, our creation. Wonderful as it is, it is always limited, it is always constrained by what we know of the world. […] The notion that there is a well-defined hypermathematical structure that determines all there is in the cosmos is a Platonic delusion with no relationship to physical reality. (…)" - Amira

"The critics of this idea miss the fact that a meaningless cosmos that produced humans (and possibly other intelligences) will never be meaningless to them (or to the other intelligences). To exist in a purposeless Universe is even more meaningful than to exist as the result of some kind of mysterious cosmic plan. Why? Because it elevates the emergence of life and mind to a rare event, as opposed to a ubiquitous and premeditated one. (...) Unified theories, life principles, and self-aware universes are all expressions of our need to find a connection between who we are and the world we live in. I do not question the extreme importance of understanding the connection between man and the cosmos. But I do question that it has to derive from unifying principles. (…)" - Amira

"For a clever fish, water is “just right“ for it to swim in. Had it been too cold, it would freeze; too hot, it would boil. Surely the water temperature had to be just right for the fish to exist. “I’m very important. My existence cannot be an accident,” the proud fish would conclude. Well, he is not very important. He is just a clever fish. The ocean temperature is not being controlled with the purpose of making it possible for it to exist. Quite the opposite: the fish is fragile. A sudden or gradual temperature swing would kill it, as any trout fisherman knows. We so crave for meaningful connections that we see them even when they are not there. (...) The gravest mistake we can make is to think that the cosmos has plans for us, that we are somehow special from a cosmic perspective." - Amira

like my wallpaper, boxing kangaroos and #tiddies. I get it, totss - sofarsoShawn

"We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth. You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state. (...) You’re going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel. It’s going to be a connectionist network. (...)" - Amira

Bernard Williams: “The generic human need to make and listen to music, for instance, might be explained at the level of evolutionary psychology, but the emergence of the classical symphony certainly cannot. In fact, the insistence on finding explanations of cultural difference in terms of biological evolution exactly misses the point of the great evolutionary innovation represented by Homo sapiens, the massive development of non-genetic learning.” — Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 28. - Amira

Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. “We’re writing things (…) that we can no longer read. And we’ve rendered something illegible, and we’ve lost the sense of what’s actually happening in this world that we’ve made. (…) “We’re running through the United States with dynamite and rock saws so that an algorithm can close the deal three microseconds faster, all for a communications framework that no human will ever know; that’s a kind of manifest destiny.” - Amira

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can’t tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you? // People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. // The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it’s to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.” — Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget (2010) - Amira

if you’ve just lowered your own standards of intelligence - don't think so. We just over estimated how little it took to seem human. We can feel sorry for a very basic puppet with a vaguely human face, so it doesn't take much; Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans - not really, it was a scam so all they needed to do was bamboozle customers into thinking it was possible; Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? - we know it doesn't know what we want and the results are simply better than we had before - Todd Hoff