From the BBC this morning, an hour’s meditation on the nature, practice and moral questions regarding war photography: Regarding the Pain of Others In her 2003 essay Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag grappled with this question. War photograp…
Ecologies, empathy, parenting, robots, and unanticipated consequences
Two scifi stories about tech inventions that don’t work out as their designers planned. Ken Liu’s “Quality Time” (from last year) looks into “unsolved problems in home automation” and a friendship at a startup. “Nobel Prize Speech Draft of Paul Winterh…
Arachnophobia can eclipse our ability to feel compassion
Why so many of us are casual spider-murderers – “The moment we sense the pitter-patter of their tiny feet across the living room floor, or catch a glimpse of movement in the corner of an eye as they abseil down from the ceiling, they’re likely to end u…
What is life?
Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life on Earth – “The union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time. Using this definition vastly increases what can be …