February 05, 2018

From The Economist:

Older generations have been complaining about the state of young people’s writing since a teacher of Sumerian complained about his charges 4,000 years ago. (“A junior scribe...does not pay attention to the scribal art.”)

From The Economist:

[Two] letters can add up to a lot of money. No area of technology is hotter than AI, or artificial intelligence. Venture-capital investment in AI in the first nine months of 2017 totalled $7.6bn, according to PitchBook, a data provider; that compares with full-year figures of $5.4bn in 2016. In the year to date there have been $21.3bn in AI-related M&A deals, around 26 times more than in 2015. In earnings calls public companies now mention AI far more often than “big data”.

From The New York Times:

As the longevity entrepreneur Arram Sabeti told The New Yorker: “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it.” Of all the slightly creepy aspects to this trend, the strangest is the least noticed: The people publicly championing life extension are mainly men.

From The New York Times:

Only for a nanosecond of human history have men even slightly shared what was once exclusively a woman’s burden: the relentless daily labor of caring for another person’s body, the life-preserving work of cleaning feces and vomit, the constant cycle of cooking and feeding and blanketing and bathing, whether for the young, the ill or the old. For nearly as long as there have been humans, being a female human has meant a daily nonoptional immersion in the fragility of human life and the endless effort required to sustain it.

From The New Yorker:

German parents don’t merely not hover; they refuse to hover, on considered principle, and send the kids off to school and back, after having digested the odds of a child’s being snatched along the way and, sensibly enough, decided that it’s a safe bet they won’t be.