Betting blind on AI and the scientific mind | The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives

In 2021, researchers at Harvard University applied this framework to AI-assisted decision-making, testing interface designs that reintroduce friction. One required users to commit to an answer before seeing AI’s suggestion. Another imposed a delay before revealing recommendations. These designs reduced overreliance on AI, not by helping users perceive which struggles were productive but by creating conditions that tend to help regardless of perception. The catch: People hated them. They rated the most effective designs least favorably and performed best in the conditions they liked least. Any tool that preserves productive struggle will probably lose in the marketplace to tools that eliminate it. 

Source: Betting blind on AI and the scientific mind | The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives

Ted Chiang: Fears of Technology Are Fears of Capitalism

And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that’s sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.

Source: Ted Chiang: Fears of Technology Are Fears of Capitalism

Phantom Obligation | Terry Godier

When you dress a new thing in old clothes, people don’t just learn the shape. They inherit the feelings, the assumptions, the emotional weight. You can’t borrow the layout of an inbox without also borrowing some of its psychology.

h/t D’Arcy Norman