It might help us all to acknowledge it

Some make us look foolish, and some make us look wise. We are imperfect mirrors for each other’s lives. — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — Read every story from Jim Mason (and thousands of other writers on Medium): https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership

About how human institutions and supra-organisms operate The continuing crisis in the United States over the process of Presidential elections is a large-scale example of how we humans behave as a species of social animal. The crisis illustrates how collections of people (human supra-organisms), human cultural institutions, and human language…

What you see is not exactly what you get If you are like many people, you will be able to see a face on the coffee mug pictured above. Our brains have built-in networks for face detection and memory, including detection of simple eyes-mouth-nose patterns and capable of distinguishing thousands…

Will our human relationships survive? We have created them as servants, now building some of them as images of ourselves, and they are becoming our trusted assistants and even confidants. It’s trending like this: “Hey Google, what is the market forecast for today?” “Siri, make me a reservation for a…

It comes down to how brains are built and grow — Many people are worried about recent developments in artificial intelligence, and rightly so. From sophisticated facial recognition software to software that can generate cogent text and surprising works of art, computational devices that people have created seem about to out-perform our human abilities, possibly rendering us obsolete. In assessing that…

We have helped them become symbiotic and even parasitic to our minds and bodies Time was when telephones were unintelligent devices attached by cords to our walls. I joke that phones should be kept tied up like they used to be, because of the dangerous animals that they are. But…

And I’m already becoming a bit fond of it.

Would you want an experienced self-driving car or the latest general version? The recent development of many artificial cognitive agents, such as robotic devices and large-language models for text generation, raises an interesting general question about the value of individualization. We humans, taking ourselves as a pinnacle of an “intelligent”…