Shane Parrish: “Great outcomes aren’t built on great days, but on consistent ones. You can’t just count the days when it’s easy. Each day moves you closer to the goal. No day is a hero; no day is a villain. Perfect days don’t compound. Consistent ones do.”
NYTimes: “When [AI agents] become more capable, they could start to substitute for human workers in some occupations. (OpenAI and Meta have already said they’re building A.I. engineer agents.) And some experts worry that more powerful, unrestrained A.I. agents could pose safety risks, if they learn to carry out commands like “drain a bank account” or “execute a cyberattack.” Setting a bunch of A.I. agents loose on the internet could also provoke a backlash from web publishers, e-commerce sites and other businesses that rely on human-generated traffic to pay their bills. (If you’re a business buying ads on Amazon, you want those ads to be seen by humans, not bots pretending to be humans.) In the future, I can imagine more websites taking steps to block A.I. agents or steer them toward certain pages or products. Right now, A.I. agents are too incompetent to be much of a threat. But it doesn’t take much imagination to envision a near future where most of the web will consist of robots talking to robots, buying things from robots and writing emails that only other robots will read. The self-driving internet is almost here.”
Dr. Anna Lembke: “Addiction is the continued compulsive use of a substance or a behavior despite harm to self and/or others. Importantly, there is no brain scan or blood test to diagnose addiction, and there won’t be for a very long time, if ever. We still base our diagnosis on what we call phenomenology, which is patterns of behavior that repeat themselves across individuals, temperaments, cultures, time periods, etc.”
WaPo: “Attention is the ultimate accordion of a subject, unfolding into a broad array of realms, touching on an infinity of concerns. This is because the giving and getting of attention is at the very center of who we are and how we live. Attention is not merely a cognitive muscle that helps determine how we do at school or how we function in an office. It is the entry point to every serious pursuit we undertake, the engine and the glue of every relationship we cherish, and a central reason for the memories we retain. What we pay attention to is ultimately what defines our days, our nights, our lives…Two new books, “The Sirens’ Call” by Hayes and “Superbloom” by Carr, argue that our capacity for attention and connection has been devastated by the digital age.”
Lydia Polgreen: “Millions of people from the poor world are trying to cross seas, forests, valleys and rivers, in search of safety, work and some kind of better future. About 281 million people now live outside the country in which they were born, a new peak of 3.6 percent of the global population according to the International Organization for Migration, and the number of people forced to leave their country because of conflict and disaster is at about 50 million — an all-time high. In the past decade alone, the number of refugees has tripled and the number of asylum seekers has more than quadrupled. Taken together, it is an extraordinary tide of human movement.”
