Category: Social-Technical
-
Peter Pan ?
There is controversy around the mechanisms that guided the change in brain shape during the evolution of modern humans. It has long been held that different cortical areas evolved independently from each other to develop their unique functional specializations. Some recent studies suggest that high integration between different cortical areas could facilitate the emergence of…
-
Native language & connectome of the brain
Investigation towards the question if the neuroanatomy of the language structural connectome is modulated by the life-long experience of speaking a specific language are presented. The current study compared the brain white matter connections of the language and speech production network in a large cohort of native speakers of two very different languages: an Indo-European…
-
With AI, we can’t
“Humans lie and manipulate each other’s emotions all the time, but at least we can reasonably guess at someone’s motivations, agenda and methods. With AI, we can’t.” Ethicist Carissa Véliz argues that chatbots that use emojis are emotionally manipulative: without appropriate safeguards, the technology could undermine people’s autonomy. A 2021 study found that people consistently…
-
A map is not the territory it represents, but…
I quote one of the key ideas of my activities, as stated bij Korzybski: A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness Korzybski, “Science and sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics.“ This post is created to…
-
4 kinds of creativity
HBR just published a nice article on 4 kinds of creativity.In the decades to come, creativity will be key to doing most jobs well. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman and Martin E.P. Seligman offer a new typology that breaks creative thinking into four types: – integration, or showing that two things that appear different are the same; – splitting, or seeing how…
-
Millionaire spending incompatible with 1.5 ◦C ambitions
This article in Cleaner Production Letters studies the implications of a continued growth in the number of millionaires for emissions, and its impact on the depletion of the remaining carbon budget to limit global warming to 1.5 °C (about 400 Gt CO2). Much evidence suggests that the wealthiest individuals contribute disproportionally to climate change. Findings suggest that…
-
Neuroplasticity enables bio‑cultural feedback
The scientific reports article “Neuroplasticity enables bio‑cultural feedback in Paleolithic stone‑tool making” elaborates on the idea described in articles like The comparative neuroscience and neuroarchaeological evidence indicate that functional systems supporting stone tool making have undergone substantial change over human evolution, and that these changes may be relevant to a much wider range of distinctively…
-
“You Are Not Expected to Understand This”
When starting my professional career in IT, I got close to the holy grale of the UNIX source code, well known for the most striking comment in IT history. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”. Few of us give much thought to computer code or how it comes to be. The very word “code”…
walterstiers
-
Humans are keen to exploit benevolent AI
Algorithm exploitation: Humans are keen to exploit benevolent AI: We cooperate with other people despite the risk of being exploited or hurt. If future artificial intelligence (AI) systems are benevolent and cooperative toward us, what will we do in return? Our cooperative dispositions are weaker when we interact with AI. Contrary to the hypothesis that…
-
Develop or disrupt & team size
“Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology“Increases in team size have been attributed to the specialization of scientific activities, improvements in communication technology, or the complexity of modern problems that require interdisciplinary solutions. This shift in team size raises the question of whether and how the character of the science and technology…