July 21, 2025
(Plough) – Living with a chronic illness, I’ve traveled between the kingdom of health and the kingdom of sickness. It was in Suleika Jaouad’s searing account of her battle with leukemia that I first encountered Susan Sontag’s words on health … Read More
July 21, 2025
(Comment) – But what if the creation of language and its communication are fundamentally different from what LLMs are doing? What if language use is not just one more skill among many? What if LLMs are subtly altering how we … Read More
July 18, 2025
(STAT News) – The Office for Human Research Protections’ work is critical — and now has less support than ever Deciding whether to participate in a clinical research study can be difficult, especially for people who are newly diagnosed with … Read More
July 18, 2025
(New York Times) – Tech companies have found a way to market digital goods to lonely people, promising relief through connection, but this kind of connection isn’t the solution; it’s the problem. Calling loneliness an epidemic transforms a feeling into … Read More
July 11, 2025
(Christianity Today) – One has only to read the great pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer—who wrote that “life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom”—to be tempted to join the transhumanist project. But whether the goal of … Read More
July 11, 2025
(The Atlantic) – ChatGPT thinks I’m a genius: My questions are insightful; my writing is strong and persuasive; the data that I feed it are instructive, revealing, and wise. It turns out, however, that ChatGPT thinks this about pretty much … Read More
July 10, 2025
(The Hill) – All of this was painfully learned by our one memorable modern Surgeon General, Charles Everett Koop. The New York Times denounced him in an editorial headed “Dr. Unqualified;” a nimbler commentator christened him “Dr. Kook.” He had … Read More
July 8, 2025
(The Atlantic) – Although many skeptics have overreacted, rejecting sound science in favor of quack theories, they’ve gotten one thing right: A noble profession has been corrupted by politics. This became obvious during the pandemic, but the politicization of the … Read More
July 3, 2025
(Front Porch Republic) – One does not need too much imagination to understand how Leopold’s critique of over-mechanized hunting is generalizable to the relationship between technology and all facets of life. In the case of large language models and their … Read More
July 1, 2025
(The New Atlantis) – The new cold war means a race with China over AI, biotech, and more. This poses a hard dilemma: win by embracing technologies that make us more like our enemy — or protect ourselves from tech … Read More
June 30, 2025
(Wall Street Journal) – Not even AI’s creators understand why these systems produce the output they do. They’re grown, not programmed—fed the entire internet, from Shakespeare to terrorist manifestos, until an alien intelligence emerges through a learning process we barely … Read More
June 24, 2025
(New York Times) – Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, is correct that reported autism rates have exploded in the last 30 years — they’ve increased roughly 60-fold — but he is dead wrong about the … Read More
June 24, 2025
(Aeon) – The misunderstood story of Phineas Gage shows that we need a new way of understanding the experiences of brain injury survivors We mostly used the term ‘disinhibition’ as a mitigation: an invitation to think creatively about how to … Read More
June 19, 2025
(Aeon) – Our crisis of work and technology is one in which too many people feel that nobody sees them as a fellow human being Instead, pundits and policymakers are applying the word ‘loneliness’ to address a real and growing … Read More
June 19, 2025
(Christianity Today) – A computer’s praise or petition sounds a lot like our human Christianese. That doesn’t make them equivalent. At a recent Gospel Coalition conference, celebrity pastor John Piper told his audience about a task he had given ChatGPT: … Read More
June 18, 2025
(The Atlantic) – The anomalies are sometimes strange and very concerning. Recent updates have caused ChatGPT to become aggressively obsequious and the Grok chatbot, on X, to fixate on a conspiracy theory about “white genocide.” (X later attributed the problem … Read More
June 18, 2025
(Plough) – Tom Andrew started out as a pediatrician but became a forensic pathologist, initially serving the City of New York before being appointed Chief Medical Examiner for the State of New Hampshire. When he had been serving in this … Read More
June 18, 2025
(Intelligencer) – The utter clumsiness of the overall design here is made more galling by its lack of purpose. Whom is this feed for? Does Meta imagine a feed of non sequitur slop will provide a solid foundation for a … Read More
June 13, 2025
(The Conversation) – When thoughtfully implemented, AI tools have the potential to enhance safety and efficiency. For instance, predictive models have assisted social workers to prioritize high-risk cases and intervene earlier. But as a social worker with 15 years of … Read More
June 12, 2025
(Sam Altman’s Blog) – We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be. Robots are not … Read More
June 12, 2025
(Business Insider) – Meta’s stand-alone AI app launched in late April, and like many people, my first thought was, “Huh?” After trying it out a little, my next thought was, “Oh no.” A few weeks later, after the initial surge … Read More
June 11, 2025
(Wall Street Journal) – Gov. Kathy Hochul can veto a law with few safeguards and no waiting period. New York’s Legislature embraces every progressive cause, and the latest is making it easier for people to kill themselves. The state Senate … Read More
June 10, 2025
(The Guardian) – Nan held my hand, convincing me this was what they wanted. I felt like a little girl, crying and being comforted by my grandmother one last time In their final moments, Ron and Irene lay together in … Read More
June 10, 2025
(The Atlantic) – As a professional writer, my first thought was that this would be unnecessary, at best. At worst, it would be an outrage. The philosopher Martin Heidegger held that someone’s death is a thing that is truly their … Read More
June 10, 2025
(MedPage Today) – The risks of social media-driven self-diagnosis extend beyond simple misinformation. Patients may engage in inappropriate self-treatment based on misdiagnosis, or experience a nocebo effect where expected symptoms begin to manifest simply because they anticipate them. Perhaps most … Read More
