GOALOOP® - Connecting the World through Goals®

“The Dream of the Raised Arm” by Zadie Smith In early Thirties Germany, as the Nazi threat grew, the state’s propaganda machine began to penetrate the dream life of its citizenry. What of our dreams today, under the influence of the algorithms? And what will come with the return of Donald Trump? “Born in 1907 in Forst, Germany, a town near the Polish border, Charlotte Beradt was a young journalist who reported on women’s issues and other aspects of German social and political life for the weekly journal Die Weltbühne. In 1933 Beradt, a committed communist and a Jew, found herself suddenly unemployed. As the Nazi movement grew, she began having nightmares every night. She wondered whether other people were having similar dreams. She started to ask people about their dreams, discreetly: “I asked the dressmaker, the neighbor, an aunt, a milkman, a friend, almost always without revealing my purpose.” [...] There’s a bracing moment in The Third Reich of Dreams when Beradt reminds us that “the destruction of plurality” as well as the feeling of “loneliness in public spaces” was how Hannah Arendt characterized “the basic quality of totalitarian subjects.” These are also fair descriptions of the effects of our present algorithmic existence. That of course does not mean that simply by disengaging from the algorithms we will make all our real-world problems disappear. Doing so will not solve climate change, end profound economic inequality, destroy racism and misogyny or bolster reproductive rights, end wars cultural and real, or magically transform the plight of migrants. But it might hasten the end of the misguided belief that self-selecting, yet algorithmically determined, online communities are any decent political substitute for geographic, localized, politically diverse, real-world communities. It might help to reinstate a less manipulated, more public, more shared place of debate, in which the possibility of actually knowing and at least partially comprehending your neighbor and their political leanings (rather than caricaturing and demonizing them) could re-emerge as a real political possibility. Which might in turn result in newly invigorated powers of concession, compromise, and consensus, all of which—whether you like it or not—happen to be vital for any healthy polis. That’s a whole lot of “mights.” But in my dream, it’s worth a try, if only because it would so seriously hobble the most powerful and dangerous political lobbyists on the present scene: the tech bros. In my nightmares, Trump is only the Trojan horse. Musk is the real power. An unelected billionaire whose megaphone reaches every corner of the globe? O give us freedom of thought.” https://lnkd.in/gkM36Zzx #algorithms #dreams #authoritarianism #tyranny #nightmares #art #artists #writers #literature #health #democracy #freedom #humanity

At the Intersection of #AI and #Spirituality Modern religious leaders are experimenting with A.I. just as earlier generations examined radio, television and the internet. “To members of his synagogue, the voice that played over the speakers of Congregation Emanu El in Houston sounded just like Rabbi Josh Fixler’s. In the same steady rhythm his congregation had grown used to, the voice delivered a sermon about what it meant to be a neighbor in the age of artificial intelligence. Then, Rabbi Fixler took to the bimah himself. “The audio you heard a moment ago may have sounded like my words,” he said. “But they weren’t.” The recording was created by what Rabbi Fixler called “Rabbi Bot,” an A.I. chatbot trained on his old sermons. The chatbot, created with the help of a data scientist, wrote the sermon, even delivering it in an A.I. version of his voice. During the rest of the service, Rabbi Fixler intermittently asked Rabbi Bot questions aloud, which it would promptly answer. Rabbi Fixler is among a growing number of religious leaders experimenting with A.I. in their work, spurring an industry of faith-based tech companies that offer A.I. tools, from assistants that can do theological research to chatbots that can help write sermons. […] On a recent afternoon at his synagogue, Rabbi Hayon recalled taking a picture of his bookshelf and asking his A.I. assistant which of the books he had not quoted in his recent sermons. Before A.I., he would have pulled down the titles themselves, taking the time to read through their indexes, carefully checking them against his own work. “I was a little sad to miss that part of the process that is so fruitful and so joyful and rich and enlightening, that gives fuel to the life of the Spirit,” Rabbi Hayon said. “Using A.I. does get you to an answer quicker, but you’ve certainly lost something along the way.”” By Eli Tan https://lnkd.in/gZ5ifSPE #religion #technology #robotics #ai #artificialintelligence #chatbots #history #intellectualproperty #science #regulations #health #humanity

MIT Technology Review: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025 We can’t see the future, but we expect these technologies to affect our world in a big way, for decades to come. Number 3: “Small language models: Large language models can do amazing things because they’re crammed with hundreds of billions—even trillions—of parameters (the values that determine their behavior) and were trained on most of the internet’s data. But cheaper and less power-hungry small language models can now stand with the heavyweights across a range of specific tasks. Move over dinosaurs. The future belongs to smaller, nimbler beasts.” By Will Douglas Heaven https://lnkd.in/eUvsvXxV #research #technology #robotics #biotech #startups #bigtech #ai #artificialintelligence #llms #intellectualproperty #science #genai #2025 #power #energy #regulations #health #democracy #humanity

The 2024 Good #Tech Awards A few tech projects stood out for their clear benefits to #humanity. “Tech companies continued to make breakneck progress in artificial intelligence, with #AI products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude all getting big updates during the year, and billions being spent on the creation of even more powerful models. (And the researchers behind Google’s AlphaFold, an AI project on proteins that I gave a Good Tech Award three years ago, got a slightly more prestigious award this year — the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.) But AI was not the only thing happening in Silicon Valley…” By Kevin Roose https://lnkd.in/dSaMY-2X #technology #startups #bigtech #artificialintelligence #2024 #regulations #socialmedia #privacy #health #democracy

“Why Can’t You Just Deal with It?” By Joshua Rothman Often, it’s our most obviously necessary #tasks that feel the most impossible. “You have something important to do—something vital. It’s not an item on a list but a burdensome project, urgent and complicated. Your home office must be transformed into a nursery for a baby due next month. Your late father’s house must be sold to pay for your daughter’s college education. You’ve owed your boss a report for a year, and with each passing week it grows more difficult to complete. You have to file this year’s taxes, and last year’s, and the documents you need are lost in your spare room, in nondescript envelopes you’ve never opened. Why can’t you just deal with it? It’s a question you can ask yourself in bed at night, or in the mirror the next morning. Procrastination is one thing: we’ve all put off writing thank-you notes or responding to e-mails and survived with our dignity intact. Not dealing with it is different. It’s what we experience when a lot is being asked of us and we’re not rising to the occasion. […] when a problem needs to be dealt with, it’s almost as though it’s an individual, too. Ultimately, dealing with difficult things requires getting to know them. It can be hard to really wrap yourself around a quirky and recalcitrant problem; it’s a little like hugging in winter, when people wear big coats and seem to have a lot in their pockets. You often have to contort yourself into an awkward embrace. And embracing something briefly won’t help you really deal with it; you have to stay there, settling in. You need nuance, persistence, flexibility, firmness, attention to detail—almost a love of the problem. You’ll have to become old friends before you can say goodbye.” By Joshua Rothman https://lnkd.in/evt-uxZf #happynewyear #2025 #newyear #productivity #problems #goal #goals #connectgoals #resolutions

MIT Technology Review: The Biggest #AI Flops of 2024 From #chatbots dishing out illegal advice to dodgy AI-generated search results, take a look back over the year’s biggest AI failures. “The past 12 months have been undeniably busy for those working in AI. There have been more successful product launches than we can count, and even Nobel Prizes. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. AI is an unpredictable technology, and the increasing availability of generative models has led people to test their limits in new, weird, and sometimes harmful ways. These were some of 2024’s biggest AI misfires.” By Rhiannon Williams https://lnkd.in/eTFTqUBd #ArtificialIntelligence #LLMs #regulations #intellectualproperty #science #research #technology #datascience #health #democracy #humanity

MIT Technology Review: These stunning images trace ships’ routes as they move Publicly available data helps monitor ship traffic to avoid disruption of undersea internet cables, identify whale strikes, and study the footprint of underwater noise. “Global Fishing Watch is an international nonprofit that uses AIS to monitor the fishing industry, seeking to protect marine life from overfishing. But it says that only 2% of fishing vessels use AIS transmitters.” By Jon Keegan https://lnkd.in/gZaHzFtS #technology #humanity

This International #Surveillance Project Aims to Protect Wheat from Deadly Diseases Backed by the Gates Foundation, the Wheat Disease Early Warning Advisory System is on the front lines, looking for early signals of crop-killing rust infections. “Gilligan says the technology may be potentially transferable to other wheat diseases, and other crops—like rice—that are also affected by weather-­dispersed pathogens. Dagmar Hanold, a plant pathologist at the University of Adelaide who is not involved in the project, describes it as “vital work for global agriculture.” “Cereals, including wheat, are vital staples for people and animals worldwide,” Hanold says. Although programs have been set up to breed more pathogen-­resistant crops, new pathogen strains emerge frequently. And if these combine and swap genes, she warns, they could become “even more ­aggressive.”” By Shaoni Bhattacharya https://lnkd.in/gCMJ-4u3 #agriculture #climatechange #food #water #energy #technology #humanity

How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking? English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result. “If ways of speaking can alter ways of thinking, ways of thinking can alter ways of speaking as well. The dynamic interaction between the two is part of the ongoing story of how we try to make the world intelligible to us—and to make ourselves intelligible to one another. Talk about the human conversation.” By Manvir Singh https://lnkd.in/ekqunGTu #language #communication #philosophy #linguistics #technology #chatbots #ai #socialmedia #humanity

Does Morality Do Us Any Good? Our basic sense of right and wrong appears to be the product of blind evolution. The hard question is how unsettling that should be. By Nikhil Krishnan https://lnkd.in/e36ikugy