Artificial intelligence
we know that one of three things happens when people use a machine to automate a task they would otherwise have done themselves:Their skill in the activity grows.Their skill in the activity atrophies.Their skill in the activity never develops. Nicholas Carr, on The Myth of Automated Learning
Social Media
Boredom is when you do the things that make you feel like you have life under control. Not being bored is why you always feel busy, why you keep “not having time” to take a package to the post office or work on your novel. You do have time—you
Psychology
critical ignoring—choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens, published in Sage Journals, via Jason Kottke. The authors describe three types of cognitive strategies for critical ignoring, which should be taught in school: 1. Self-nudging,
User experience
Multi-tasking is cognitively exhausting — when we do it by choice, being asked to stop can come as a welcome change. Clay Shirky, in a very thoughtful piece, explaining why he asked his students to put their laptops away…
Cognition
I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. Stephen Hawking, interviewed in The Guardian, There is no heaven; it’s a fairy story
At any given moment, our most complicated machine will be taken as a model of human intelligence Adam Gopnik explains, in The New Yorker, How the Internet Gets Inside Us
Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention. More clutter isn’t free. In fact, more clutter is a permanent shift, a desensitization to all the information, not just the last bit. Seth Godin, in a instantly popular post The inevitable decline due to clutter
Psychology
As our jobs (and lives) get more cerebral and less physical, our misunderstandings about the mind (and the self-defeating miscalculations each of us make every day) become ever more important. Seth Godin, Multiple minds