In our last newsletter, we discussed how the difficult process of building skills can reveal meaningful distinctions in the world. The frictionless environment of social media, we argued, blinds us to these distinctions by discouraging deep engagement. As PTI advisor Nicholas Carr writes of his experience online…

As we kick off 2020, many of us are drawing up lists of resolutions: good habits to build, bad habits to break, new skills to learn. We may even have goals around technology — less compulsive or more efficient use, for example. But there is something paradoxical about this reflective New Year mood…

If you turned on a news broadcast in the 1960s or 70s, you'd be greeted by the warm, reassuring voice of Walter Cronkite dutifully summarizing world affairs. The world on which Cronkite reported was hardly uneventful; it included, among other things, a war, a moon landing, and the assassination of a president. But one feature…

It is now commonplace to bemoan the growing political polarization in the United States, and to lay the blame at the feet of social media. There are good reasons for this attribution: social media plays host to many contentious and unproductive disagreements, and the design features of these services seem…

We closed our last newsletter, an interview with Nicholas Carr, by asking about the nature and possibility of progress. We argued that disputes about the very idea of progress animate many debates about technology today. At the extremes, one finds both blind optimism about progress as an inexorable historical force…

One of the rare upsides of the fractiousness of social media is a growing awareness of the impact of design. Human nature hasn't changed over the past two decades, but the choice architectures we inhabit have transformed radically -- with behavioral consequences on full display. The power of design to shape our choices is not a new phenomenon…

The field of computer science did not begin in earnest until the 1950s, but we humans have been outsourcing our cognition to external objects for centuries. From the alphabet to the abacus to the astrolabe, the tools we've invented have extended our cognitive capacities far beyond the limits of our brains and bodies…

One of the great ironies of the information age is that abundant and available knowledge has produced widespread uncertainty. Rather than merely expanding access to authoritative accounts of reality, the web has cast doubt on even the most entrenched forms of institutional authority…

The most uncanny fact about modern AI may not be how smart it is, but how inscrutable. After centuries of scientific progress driven by a hand-in-hand relationship between explanation, prediction, and understanding, we’re now facing a world in which some of the most intelligent systems on earth…

This week, we are featuring an interview with Dr. Michal Kosinski, an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Dr. Kosinski is an expert on privacy, big data, and psychological targeting -- all topics of increasing importance to the public conversation about technology…

When will AI exceed human performance across all tasks? What is the likelihood of a technology-induced catastrophe in the next century? How rapidly will automation spread? Which abilities will be automated first? Such questions are of vital importance, not only for the future of humanity…

Consider a nurse charged with administering medication to an unwilling patient. Suppose that the nurse is experienced, trustworthy, and responsible. Suppose further that he or she is under the charge of a chief physician, who has explicitly directed that the patient be given the medication. The nurse refuses out of concern…

Has social media compromised the mental health of a generation? As we wrote in a prior newsletter, the question is far from settled, despite a proliferation of headlines and popular books. Some have argued we’re in the midst a public health crisis; others, a moral panic. The research itself remains mixed…

[Humans] have always been prey to distractions, which are the original sin of the mind; but never before today has an attempt been made to organize and exploit distractions, to make of them, because of their economic importance, the core and vital center of human life, to idealize them as the highest manifestations of mental activity…

In our last newsletter, we spoke about the increasingly fraught question of AI ethics and the way in which machines force clarity on age-old moral dilemmas. Nowhere is this clearer than in the arena of algorithmic bias, which, unlike fears about AGI and existential risk, has immediate, near-term implications. Concerns have already…

In his influential 2014 book Superintelligence, the philosopher Nick Bostrom argued that the prospect of advanced AI would require us to do "philosophy with a deadline." While Bostrom's concern was redirecting academic resources toward the mitigation of existential risk, his line applies equally to the increasingly fraught near-term…

In the coming weeks, Russia may temporarily cut itself off from the global internet. The test comes as part of a “sovereign internet” law, which the Kremlin hopes will help guard against cyber attacks from abroad. And while there are many reasons to view this test as a restriction of liberty…