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You probably don’t know Carl Sagan's name. I didn’t. He wrote the book Contact, which was turned into a major motion picture starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. He also co-wrote and narrated the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which became the most widely watched series in the history of American public television. Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people in 60 countries. He died in 1996.
I hadn’t heard of him. But a friend shared a quote from another book, The Demon-Haunted World, which he wrote the years before he died. Again, I haven’t read it, but I wanted to leave you with that quote this week:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,
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Here are my recommendations for this week:
One of the best tools to provide excellent reading and articles for your week is Refind. It’s a great tool for keeping ahead with “brain food” relevant to you and providing serendipity for some excellent articles that you may have missed. You can dip in and sign up for weekly, daily or something in between -what’s guaranteed is that the algorithm sends you only the best articles in your chosen area. It’s also free. Highly recommended Sign up.
Now
AI Arranged Marriages: Matchmakers in India Now Have Competition: Forget Sima Taparia from Netflix - singles and their parents are turning to algorithms for help with arranged marriages. Also: AI Will Save Dating Apps. Or Maybe Finally Kill Them
Embrace your dark side: A new perspective on negative emotions
Ethan Kross, psychologist and author of “Shift,” explains how negative emotions help us live safely and well. Throughout history, people have tried extreme methods to manage dark emotions, but modern science shows these emotions are natural and necessary parts of human life. Emotions like anger, anxiety, and envy provide crucial information that motivates us to act in beneficial ways when confronted with difficult situations. Effectively managing emotions involves recognizing their value and using various tools to shift between emotional states.
The Inside Story of How Altman and Musk Went From Friends to Bitter Enemies
The two tech titans are in the meanest fight in business. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Also: Look Past Elon Musk’s Chaos. There’s Something More Sinister at Work.
How a computer that 'drunk dials' videos is exposing YouTube's secrets. YouTube is about to turn 20, and an unusual research method is unveiling statistics about the platform that Google would rather keep hidden.
Forget DeepSeek. Large language models are getting cheaper still
A $6m LLM isn’t cool. A $6 one is
Next
AI Meets the Cascade of Rigidity: Diminished state capacity leads to civic disengagement as governments remain risk-averse and fail to meet public service expectations. The author advocates for understanding bureaucratic constraints and using AI to build government capacity for more effective governance.
I met the ‘godfathers of AI’ in Paris – here’s what they told me to really worry about. Experts are split between concerns about future threats and present dangers. Both camps issued dire warnings
The Anthropic Economic Index—In the coming years, AI systems will significantly impact the ways people work. For that reason, we're launching the Anthropic Economic Index, an initiative aimed at understanding AI's effects on labour markets and the economy over time. The Index’s initial report provides first-of-its-kind data and analysis based on millions of anonymized conversations on Claude.ai, revealing the clearest picture yet of how AI is being incorporated into real-world tasks across the modern economy.
I tested ChatGPT’s deep research with the most misunderstood law on the internet - It got the facts right but the story wrong.
Generate Value From GenAI With ‘Small t’ Transformations - Business leaders are getting real value from large language models by working their way up the risk slope and building the foundation for larger, future transformations.
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