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Inside the Race Toward Superintelligence and the Warnings We May Be Ignoring
by August Harper · 6 min readInside the Race Toward Superintelligence and the Warnings We May Be Ignoring Introduction Artificial intelligence has become one of the defining technologies of the 21st century. Every week brings new breakthroughs like models that write
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What is a good education?
by August Harper · 7 min readWhat is education? I mean what is it? What about intelligence, what is that? These are questions that often come up when speaking with people. Comments like she is really intelligent or he is really clever - what does that even mean? The
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The Job, Rewritten
by August Harper · 8 min readEvery previous wave of automation took the hands and left the head. The loom, the assembly line, the spreadsheet, each absorbed some physical or clerical task and freed, or displaced, the people who used to do it, while leaving the
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The Mind in the Arm
by August Harper · 8 min readIf you want to feel the limits of your own intuition about minds, hold an octopus. Not literally, they are difficult to hold, being mostly muscle and intention, but in your imagination, hold the fact of one. Here is an animal that last
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On Hidden Worlds and the Work of Seeing Through Them
by August Harper · 10 min readOn Hidden Worlds and the Work of Seeing Through Them There is a thought that almost everyone has had at least once, usually late at night or in some flat grey moment of an ordinary day. The thought is this: what if none of it is quite what
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In Praise of the Second Read
by August Harper · 8 min readI used to think I had read Middlemarch. I had, in the sense that my eyes had passed over every word and I could have told you, at a dinner party, what happens in it. Then a few years ago I read it again, and discovered I had not read it at
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The Adult in the Room Was You
by August Harper · 8 min readThere is a specific exhaustion that comes from a certain kind of phone call with a parent. You hang up and you cannot say anything obviously terrible happened, no shouting, no insult you could repeat to a friend, and yet you feel scraped