February 06, 2018

From The New York Times:

Obviously not everyone who provides care for others is a saint. But engaging in that daily devotion, or even living with its expectation, has enormous potential to change a person. It forces one to constantly imagine the world from someone else’s point of view: Is he hungry? Maybe she’s tired. Is his back hurting him? What is she trying to say?

From The New York Times:

The most obvious cure for today’s gender inequities is to put more women in power. But if we really hope to create an equal society, we will also need more men to care for the powerless — more women in the boardroom, but also more men at the nurses’ station and the changing table, immersed in daily physical empathy. If that sounds like an evolutionary impossibility, well, it doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we can achieve it. It is surely worth at least as much investment as defeating death.

From The Economist:

Imagine a future, some warn, in which you are transported everywhere in a Waymo autonomous car (owner: Alphabet, parent of Google), pay for everything with an Android phone (developer: Google), watch YouTube (owner: Google) to relax, and search the web using—you can guess.

From The Economist:

The competition today is not between humans and machines but among the world’s technology giants, which are investing feverishly to get a lead over each other in AI.

From The New Yorker:

The style of middle-class child rearing that the Germans and the French and the rest might help us escape from is really more handcuff than helicopter, with the parent and the child both, like the man and woman agents in a sixties spy movie, shackled to the same valise—in this case, the one that carries not the secret plans for a bomb but the college-admission papers. Until we get to that final destination, we’ll never be apart.