Editor’s pick Culture, Society, Sports & Arts
In this interview, I spoke to Sherry Turkle, the MIT psychologist who has spent forty years studying our relationships with machines, about her new book Artificial Intimacy: why a chatbot cannot be a therapist, what these…
In this interview, I spoke to Dave Plummer, the Microsoft engineer who wrote Windows Task Manager, about growing up undiagnosed autistic, why Microsoft's whiteboard interviews suited him, rebuilding Task Manager with AI…
In this interview, I spoke to Professor Susan Schneider, the philosopher who held NASA's astrobiology chair, about why asking whether ChatGPT is conscious is a category mistake, how consciousness might sit beneath…
In this interview, I spoke to Michael and Liam Bates of the Principality of Sealand, a wartime fort in the North Sea that Britain tried to cut off, mercenaries seized and a…
In this interview, I spoke to David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and co-owner of 37signals, about why he stopped writing code by hand, why AI is ending programmers' monopoly…
In this interview, I spoke to Carlos Gutierrez, former US Secretary of Commerce and the youngest chief executive in Kellogg's history, about fleeing Cuba as a child, selling cereal from a van…
In this interview, I spoke to Jesper Kouthoofd, founder of Teenage Engineering, about why he still refuses the title of designer, why he thinks every product is an illusion and the honest…
In this interview, I spoke to Jonathan Caplan KC, one of Britain's most senior barristers, who has spent 50 years applying the evidentiary standards of the criminal Bar to unidentified anomalous phenomena.…
In this interview, I spoke to Michelle Gielan, positive psychology researcher, former CBS Morning News anchor and author of Resilient Optimism, about why optimism is a set of behaviours rather than a…
Voices in the archive
From the archive
“Tetris also has an incredibly long learning curve, which is unique. Most games, even very successful ones, have a steep learning curve that you can master relatively quickly. But in Tetris, the learning curve is gradual and seemingly endless. You continually feel like you're improving—getting faster, more skilled, and more savvy. It's just the magic of the game.”
“The 'Doomers' often anthropomorphize computers by attributing human characteristics to them. Humans have evolved their competitive nature and occasional violent impulses from survival in a world marked by resource scarcity and competition. Computers, on the other hand, have emerged from a vastly different evolutionary path. Thus, to say a computer 'wants to eat your lunch' leans heavily into projecting human traits onto machines.”
“My mother passed away 10 years ago; and she was always someone who pushed me to get educated, and to work on my academic side. She always made me remember that football could be temporary; what if I broke a leg? What if I lose my ability to play? She never wanted me to give-up my dreams, but to be smart and hedge my bets.”
Browse the archive
