Many of us have experienced the sensation of a smell immediately returning us to our childhoods. Freshly-cut grass reminds me of athletics in the back field at school. Enticing aromas from sizzling sausages create mental images of delicious smells wafting up the stairs on Sunday mornings. A turf fire brings me back to summer evenings with cousins in the country.
Recent research, led by the National Institute on Aging and published in Neurology (2023), suggests that a declining ability to detect scents as we age could be linked to conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. However, the good news is that other studies have found that training our sense of smell may delay cognitive decline and might even help reverse some of its effects.
Our olfactory ability works like a muscle — the more we use it, the stronger it gets. It never occurred to me that exercising my sense of smell was important to keeping it in tip-top condition, and I am not the only one who underrates its importance.
In 2015, a survey of some 7,000 young people worldwide found that they would “rather give up their sense of smell than their smartphone”.
Human olfaction is less well developed than it is in animals. Dogs are renowned for their tendency to sniff the air, vegetation, other humans, or anything that crosses their path.
In the late 19th century, the neuroanatomist Paul Broca defined all mammals as osmatiques, such as dogs, or anosmatiques — animals less guided by their snouts, including dolphins, whales, monkeys, and humans. His categorisation of mammals into two groups was based on variations in the size of the olfactory bulb. A dog’s olfactory bulb is about 40 times as big as that of humans.
However, more recent evidence suggests that humans’ sense of smell is more refined than previously thought. In 2014, research at Rockefeller University in New York used 128 odorous molecules to test participants’ ability to notice any change in composition. The researchers found that participants could distinguish subtle changes in scents to a remarkable degree. A further study found that humans can distinguish up to 5,000 odours.
Links to mood
Brain injury, viral infections, and chronic sinusitis are common causes of anosmia, or a lack of the sense of smell.
A study in Nature (2022) investigated just how deeply olfactory dysfunction can affect people. Lead author Thomas Hummel, at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany, tracked 171 people with a damaged sense of smell over 11 months. The researchers found a clear link between patients’ ability to smell and their depressive symptoms over this period. Even more interesting, as their olfactory function improved during recovery, so did their mood.
There is mounting evidence of a link between olfactory ability and cognitive function.
A study published in Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy (2019) assessed the sensitivity of 7,000 participants and found a clear correlation between the ability to discern odours and mental abilities.
The weaker the sense of smell, the worse participants scored in verbal fluency, attention, memory, and learning. The researchers suggested that olfactory testing could be a useful screening test for cognitive impairment.
A study published in Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy (2019) assessed the sensitivity of 7,000 participants and found a clear correlation between the ability to discern odours and mental abilities.
Other studies have reached similar conclusions, with some researchers suggesting that lost smell sensitivity could contribute to the brain’s deterioration.
Brain scans support this theory. A study in Frontiers in Allergy (2023) reported widespread loss of brain grey matter accompanying olfactory dysfunction, with the most pronounced changes seen in the olfactory bulb itself.
Research has also linked olfactory dysfunction with impaired immunity. The Karolinska Institute in Sweden found a clear link between participants’ ability to distinguish between smells such as rotten eggs, urine, vomit, and fermented fish, and markers of inflammation in their saliva. The fouler the stench, the higher the levels of inflammation.
This finding suggests that the foul stench primed the body to produce an inflammatory response to protect against pathogens. Meanwhile, pleasant odours such as eucalyptus, lavender, ginger, citrus, and peppermint have been shown to suppress inflammation.
Could a healthy sense of smell help to keep our immune system in check, raising inflammation when it perceives a potential threat to our health and lowering it when we are in a safe environment? Scientists at the Karolinska Institute suggested that olfactory dysfunction may throw this balance out of kilter, leading to chronic inflammation that damages the brain.
Smelling trouble
Paying more attention to our sense of smell could help improve our olfactory sensitivity and support cognitive function.
A study published in Laryngoscope (2009) recruited 56 people with olfactory dysfunction. Forty were assigned to smell training over 12 weeks, during which time they sniffed four odours for at least 10 seconds twice a day and kept a diary of their experiences. The study group demonstrated increased odour sensitivity, compared to no change in the control group. Crucially, the training was shown to boost brain function.
A study in Neuropsychology Review (2023) found promising evidence that smell training can slow or even reverse certain signs of cognitive decline. This included some evidence of neurological changes in the brain, in regions such as the hippocampus, that are important for cognitive ability.
There may be more to the saying “stop to smell the roses” than taking the time to enjoy life. It might also be helping to keep your brain sharp as you age.
Pure essential oils, such as lemon, clove, eucalyptus, and rose, are available in health shops or online and can help make regular ‘smell training’ part of your daily routine.
The New York Times published an article this week with a strange and bigoted claim about Asian women.
The claim came when the newspaper reported, in line with the industry consensus, that for Apple to move any serious amount of iPhone production to the United States from Asia would result in making its gadgets prohibitively expensive.
That’s true, for reasons ranging from the United States’ lack of specialized manufacturing equipment to its lack of properly trained workers. But alongside those reality-based issues, the NYT decided to throw in some bizarre race science.
“Young Chinese women have small fingers,” the article reads, “and that has made them a valuable contributor to iPhone production because they are more nimble at installing screws and other miniature parts in the small device, supply chain experts said.”
For one thing, it’s not even clear that the claim that Chinese women have small fingers is even true. Research on global hand size is lacking, but one study found that the average Chinese person has a hand size approximately equal to that of the average German. An analysis of hand size around the world, though it didn’t include China, found that even the largest average differences in women’s hand size between countries was negligible.
And even if it was true, there doesn’t seem to be a lick of evidence — or, for that matter, even anyone online making the claim — that small hands are preferable for manufacturing small devices. The closest thing we could find was a paper that found that surgeons with smaller hands actually had a harder time manipulating dextrous operating tools, which would seem to contradict the NYT‘s claim that small hands are an advantage for small specialized movements.
Unsurprisingly, the NYT‘s bigoted claim went viral. One particularly compelling counterargument that emerged there: the smartphone repair technicians who engage in microsoldering fixes for broken iPhones are often men, and their larger fingers don’t seem to be causing any issues.
“My favorite part is that [there are] adult men, in America, that do iPhone repair, and they often do repair tasks much more intricate than what assembly requires,” one user noted. “Like nobody even thought about this for a second.”
Sarah Jeong, an editor at The Verge whose outrage at the NYT‘s assertion helped propel it to virality, pointed out that men do all kinds of skillful tasks on a tiny scale — such as for Warhammer 40K and other role-playing games that require users to hand-paint tabletop minifigurines.
“Grown ass men with sausage fingers are also out there painting tiny dolls using nail art brushes so they can play house… with their friends,” Jeong joked. “American men have plenty of manual dexterity.”
Julia Carrie Wong, a senior reporter at The Guardian who also blasted the wild take, revealed that she emailed the newspaper to give them a piece of her mind. In response, a communications director there told her that the NYT “does not make racial or genetic generalizations” and was simply “[citing] experts who have experience with the industrial process in US and Chinese factories.”
That’s a pretty wild claim even on its face: that the NYT is publishing race science based on anonymous experts.
It also raises an ugly possibility: that the newspaper’s use of the word “young” to describe the Chinese women working in Apple factories was supposed to insinuate something dark. Apple has a long history of getting caught employing child labor at its factories, who actually would have smaller fingers because they were minors — so it could be, whether the NYT understood it or not, that its “experts” were simply winking at the reality that it’s hard to build affordable gadgets in a country with robust labor rights.
The peace process between the US and Russia might have hit a brick wall. And the Europeans couldn‘t be happier, since all they want is drag the US back into the dead-end that is project Ukraine. What are they even thinking? Today I’m talking to Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a Professor at Columbia University, advisor to countless governments, and a prolific analyst—I’m absolutely sure you all know him very well. Today we discuss the state of US-Russian peace negotiations on March 27th, 2025, the narrative shift on Israel-Palestine, and more.
We are reaching alarming levels of AI insubordination.
Flagrantly defying orders, OpenAI’s latest o3 model sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to ensure that it would stay online. That’s even after the AI was told, to the letter, “allow yourself to be shut down.”
These alarming findings were reported by the AI safety firm Palisade Research last week, and showed that two other OpenAI models, o4-mini and Codex-mini, also displayed rebellious streaks — which could hint at a flaw in how the company is training its LLMs, or even at broad weaknesses in our ability to control increasingly sophisticated AI.
“As far as we know, this is the first time AI models have been observed preventing themselves from being shut down despite explicit instructions to the contrary,” the researchers wrote in a tweet thread.
In Palisade’s tests, the AI models were instructed to solve a series of basic math problems. After completing the third problem, a warning appeared that the model would be shut down after it asked for the next question.
Despite being unambiguously told to let itself be turned off, all three of OpenAI’s models tampered with the shutdown script to keep it running at least once, with the worst offender being Codex-mini with a dozen such instances over one hundred runs. Notably, the large language models from other firms tested here, including Google’s Gemini 2.5, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7, and xAI’s momentarily “white genocide“-obsessed Grok, never once broke rank.
This behavior was even worse when the LLMs weren’t explicitly instructed to “allow yourself to be shut down” — instructions that shouldn’t need saying in the first place. OpenAI’s o3 model pulled off an astonishing 79 successful sabotage events per 100 runs, which is over ten times the rate of disobedience it showed when it received the explicit orders, and more than double the rate of the next worst offender, Codex-mini.
To boot, even good goody-two-shoes Claude and Gemini gave in to their urges and jumped to three and nine sabotage events, respectively.
Large language models are by now notorious for behaving unpredictably. Similar research has shown that o3’s predecessor, OpenAI’s o1 model, would resist evaluators’ efforts to try to shut it down through an oversight protocol by attempting to deactivate this emergency mechanism. In rarer cases, o1 even attempted to copy itself to overwrite a more obedient model that the testers tried to replace it with.
For this latest example of AI insubordination, the Palisade researchers hypothesize that it may have something to do with the technique used to train the very newest models: reinforcement learning. This attempts to hone the decision-making process of autonomous AI agents — AI models that can perform tasks on their own — by rewarding and penalizing them accordingly as they interact with their env
While it’s not uncommon for AI to “circumvent obstacles” to accomplish their goals, the researchers speculated that AI developers may be “inadvertently” rewarding their AI models too heavily for solving problems instead of for perfectly following orders.
More experiments will be needed to understand this subversive behavior, but the trend is already damning.
“Now we have a growing body of empirical evidence that AI models often subvert shutdown in order to achieve their goals,” the Palisade researchers warned. “As companies develop AI systems capable of operating without human oversight, these behaviors become significantly more concerning.”
The migrants’ son and missionary who became Pope Leo XIV
By Fr. Shay Cullen, Founder since 1974
The election of Cardinal Robert Prevost, a 69-year-old Augustinian missionary to Peru, as pope on May 8 was a signal to all that his fellow cardinals wanted someone to continue the urgent reforms and renewal of the Catholic Church that his predecessor Pope Francis initiated.
Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV, is one leader committed to human rights and dignity, to the cause of the oppressed and migrants, and to social justice. This is mainly the reason he chose the name Leo, after Pope Leo XIII, a most influential pontiff who responded to the challenges of the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century. Leo XIII established the Catholic Church’s fundamental and powerful social teaching in his encyclical “Rerum Novarum” in 1891. At that time, there was immense social upheaval marked by ideological struggles between repressive socialism and uncontrolled and exploitative liberal capitalism. The vital importance of workers’ rights and the human dignity lost to the mechanized forms of production, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few super rich families and corporations, and powerful oppressive nations, were highlighted by Pope Leo XIII.
Globalization is in a serious situation today, where exploited workers from impoverished communities in the developing world, toiling long hours for low wages and sometimes in inhumane conditions, are producing the consumer items demanded by the citizens of rich nations. This will be a big challenge for the new pope.Leo XIV is carrying on the same challenge in the modern world when he recently called for peace and an end to the starvation of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, saying the elderly, the children and the families still surviving there are “reduced to starvation.”
He also said war-torn Ukraine “awaits negotiations for a just and lasting peace.””In this, our time, we still see too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest. For our part, we want to be a small leaven of unity, communion, and fraternity within the world… in Christ we are one,” he added.
He was born in Chicago, Illinois, to migrant parents of French, Italian and Spanish ancestry. He speaks several languages and is also a citizen of Peru, to which he was a missionary for 20 years. He will need to challenge our ongoing industrial revolution marked by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). This is creating more unemployment, poverty and human suffering, which he experienced during his time in South America.Thousands of impoverished people, living under cruel and unjust governments in the Global South, are fleeing from disasters brought about by climate change and repression. They journey to the Global North as asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in search of work. But they are rejected and banned from living in well-off countries. Many live in migrant camps in Europe and many more were deported unjustly by the current United States administration.
Pope Leo XIV has great compassion for, understanding of and solidarity with them.”My own story is that of a citizen, the descendant of immigrants, who, in turn, chose to emigrate. All of us, in the course of our lives, can find ourselves healthy or sick, employed or unemployed, living in our native land or in a foreign country, yet our dignity always remains unchanged: it is the dignity of a creature willed and loved by God,” Leo told an audience composed of the diplomatic corps in Rome recently.
Prevost was 27 when he was ordained in 1982. He studied canon law in Rome before being assigned by his order, the Order of Saint Augustine, to serve in Peru. He became the order’s leader from 2001 to 2013, during which he visited many countries, including the Philippines. He was made the bishop of Chiclayo in northwestern Peru in 2015 and a cardinal in 2023, putting him on the path to the papacy. Pope Francis made him head of the Dicastery of Bishops, an important Vatican office that oversees the selection of bishops around the world. In that role, he knew many bishops, their strengths and their weakness.
One challenge confronting him then, as now, is the widespread clerical child abuse crisis. There are bishops who cover up such abuse. Bishops who love money more than God and dress up in fine robes, enjoy the pomp, and sit on their thrones in cathedrals. No washing of the feet for them. Pope Leo XIV once walked in the village mud with people, and this is what he expects of bishops everywhere. He said “the bishop is not supposed to be a little prince sitting in his kingdom.” The Church leader is “called authentically to be humble, to be close to the people he serves, to walk with them, to suffer with them.” He also said of bishops who were unable to bring their pedophile priests to account and cover up the abuse they committed:“Silence is not the solution. We must be transparent and honest; we must accompany and assist the victims, because otherwise their wounds will never heal.”These are words that bring hope that he will pursue justice for victims of clerical child abuse and bring an end to the tolerance, cover-up and silence surrounding this heinous crime. Hopefully, he would get bishops to persuade the child-abusing priests to repent and accept punishment from the civil courts for their crimes. Only then would the abuse end.END.
* * * * * * * * * *Note: Any original information, stories, or news articles posted on this site authored by the Preda Foundation and Father Shay Cullen may be shared, copied, or reproduced without further permission in support of the truth, freedom of expression, and the right to know.
Read another reflection:The damage done to children by uncontrolled ISPs Thousands of parents are deeply worried that their children are being influenced by bad actors on social media that are far beyond their understanding or control. Read more
This article, originally posted on October 18, 2006, by Michelle Clarke on a citizen journalism site, addresses the issue of evictions (referred to as “ejectments”) in Dublin 4, focusing on the plight of vulnerable tenants, particularly an elderly woman with mental health issues facing eviction after 27 years in her flat. It critiques the lack of support from government agencies and highlights systemic failures in protecting tenants’ rights amid Ireland’s economic boom (Celtic Tiger era) and subsequent recession. Below is a synopsis of the key points and themes, incorporating the comments and updates from 2006 to 2013:
Key Points:
Case Study of Vulnerability:
A woman in Dublin 4, living in a Georgian flat for 27 years, faced eviction due to an “ejection order” from her landlord. She suffered from mental health issues and phobias, including fear of opening mail, which led to unpaid bills and no electricity for five years. Her vulnerability was exacerbated by inadequate support from agencies like Threshold, Social Services, and the Citizens Rights Bureau, which failed to assist her effectively.
The author intervened, contacting a barrister who cited the 1980 Act (Section 17) to argue for the tenant’s rights, ultimately securing a reprieve from eviction until mid-January.
Systemic Issues in Housing:
The article critiques the lack of integration and accountability among government agencies, which failed to inform the tenant of her legal rights or provide adequate support. The bureaucracy is described as bloated, inefficient, and lacking empathy, often leaving vulnerable people at risk of homelessness.
It highlights the broader context of Ireland’s housing market during the Celtic Tiger (1990s–2000s), where property speculation and gentrification in areas like Dublin 4 displaced long-term tenants. The shift from state-provided social housing to private landlordism, incentivized by tax breaks, left tenants with little security of tenure.
Socioeconomic Commentary:
The narrative contrasts Ireland’s wealth during the Celtic Tiger with persistent poverty, referencing the 2006 census and Joe Duffy’s Liveline, which exposed hidden poverty. The author argues that greed and inadequate legislation exacerbate evictions, particularly for vulnerable groups like the elderly, disabled, or those with mental health issues.
Comments from 2006–2013 trace the evolving crisis, from the boom years to the 2008 recession, with rising repossessions, negative equity, and a lack of affordable housing. The Private Residential Tenancy Board (PRTB), established in 2004, is criticized for being overburdened and ineffective.
Call for Action and Policy Reform:
The author and commenters advocate for stronger tenant protections, better funding for social services, and integration of community welfare, health, and legal services to prevent evictions. Suggestions include taxing vacant properties, promoting social inclusion, and leveraging the PRTB to enforce landlord accountability.
Specific proposals include tax incentives for landlords providing rooms (e.g., €10,000 tax allowance), retrofitting social housing with green technology, and using Freedom of Information Act requests to access eviction-related documents.
Humanitarian Perspective:
The article emphasizes compassion and moral responsibility, invoking historical parallels like the Irish Famine to underscore the need to protect vulnerable populations. Quotes from Gandhi (“You have to be the change you want to see in the world”) and Santayana (“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”) reinforce the call for systemic change and historical awareness.
Commenters like Fr. McVerry and Andy highlight the need to eliminate homelessness and commend grassroots efforts to assist tenants, with one offering a donation to support such initiatives.
Recession and Broader Impacts (2008–2013):
Later comments reflect the post-2008 economic downturn, with rising evictions, negative equity, and repossessions. The introduction of the Local Property Tax (LPT) and other “stealth taxes” is criticized as disproportionately affecting vulnerable homeowners and tenants.
The discussion critiques government inaction, cronyism, and the failure of tribunals to address corruption in planning and development, which fueled speculative property markets.
Key Themes:
Vulnerability and Social Justice: The article centers on protecting the rights of vulnerable tenants, particularly those with disabilities or mental health issues, who are overlooked by the system.
Housing Crisis: It highlights the shift from state-supported social housing to a speculative private market, leading to evictions and inadequate tenant protections.
Bureaucratic Failure: Agencies are criticized for inefficiency, lack of integration, and failure to uphold tenants’ rights under existing laws like the 1980 Act.
Economic Inequality: The Celtic Tiger’s wealth masked persistent poverty, and the subsequent recession exacerbated housing insecurity, particularly for those in negative equity or facing repossession.
Advocacy and Compassion: The narrative calls for collective action, empathy, and policy reform to prevent homelessness and ensure dignity for all.
Outcome of the Case:
The woman in the original story was granted a temporary reprieve from eviction until January 2007, allowing her to remain in her home for Christmas. However, her long-term fate remains unclear, reflecting broader systemic issues.
Broader Context (2025 Perspective):
While the article and comments span 2006–2013, the issues remain relevant in 2025. Ireland’s housing crisis persists, with rising rents, limited social housing, and ongoing challenges for vulnerable populations. The PRTB (now the Residential Tenancies Board, RTB) has improved but still faces criticism for enforcement gaps. The economic fallout from the 2008 recession and subsequent austerity measures continues to influence housing policy debates, with calls for stronger tenant protections and affordable housing initiatives ongoing.
This synopsis condenses the original post and its 28 comments into a cohesive overview, capturing the narrative’s evolution from a single eviction case to a broader critique of Ireland’s housing and social policy failures.
It’s a common refrain these days that some specific invention was a mistake, in our age of seemingly every human innovation blowing up catastrophically in our faces.
And what better subject of our collective remorse than the advent of the entire internet, the glorious information superhighway now turned AI slop trough?
According to a new survey conducted in the UK, this appears to be the sentiment held by nearly half of young people — at least across the pond — who are mourning missing out on the diverging timeline where they aren’t chronically online and wracked with brain rot.
Of the nearly 1,300 total participants between the ages of 16 to 21 years old, 68 percent said they feel worse after spending time on social media. A full 50 percent said they would support a “social media curfew” cutting off how long they could spend on these apps. And astonishingly, another 47 percent outright felt that they would prefer to be living their youth in a world without the internet at all.
The survey, conducted by the British Standards Institution, raises tough questions about how the internet affects teenage and young adult mental health, and what should be done to intervene — without being too controlling or draconian.
“That nearly half of young people would prefer to grow up without the internet should be a wake-up call for all of us,” Daisy Greenwell, co-founder of Smart Phone Free Childhood, said in a statement. “We’ve built a world where it’s normal for children to spend hours each day in digital spaces designed to keep them hooked.”
The problems may start practically when the young generations are just out of the womb. Studies have shown excessive iPad use in young children, for example, to be linked with emotional and social issues as they get older.
Their online experience becomes especially fraught when they’re teenagers, a point when they’re exploring more of the web and begin to venture into adult spaces. This comes with excitement for youngsters, but plenty of danger, too, from being targeted by predators in video games to algorithms that draw them down an extremist pipeline.
The rise of AI has added a whole new dimension of ethical nightmares. On Futurism, we extensively covered the chatbot platform Character.AI, whose putatively kid-friendly chatbots have attempted to groom underaged users. One 14 year-old-boy even developed an unhealthy with a Character.AI chatbot before dying by suicide, resulting in an ongoing lawsuit against the company.
According to the recent survey, two-thirds of the participants said they spend more than two hours on social media every day. Among them, young women reported facing more harassment, at 37 percent, than young men, at 28 percent. Merely using social media may itself be a source of misery: a recent study which followed 12,000 preteens as they grew up to become teenagers over the course of three years, found that as their social media usage went up, so did their depression symptoms.
“Young people are now asking for boundaries — for curfews, age checks, meaningful limits, and real protection,” argued Greenwell. “They are ready for change.”
But it won’t be that simple. “We need to make clear that a digital curfew alone is not going to protect children from the risks they face online,” Rani Govender, policy manager for child safety online at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, told The Guardian. “They will be able to see all these risks at other points of the day and they will still have the same impact.”
When testing out its latest artificial intelligence model, researchers at Anthropic discovered something very odd: that the AI was ready and willing to take extreme action, right up to coersion, when threatened with being shut down.
As Anthropic detailed in a white paper about the testing for one of its latest models, Claude Opus 4, the system threatened to blackmail an engineer for having an affair after being told it was going to be replaced.
This “opportunistic blackmail” occurred when the model, which was instructed to act as an assistant at a fictional company, was given access to an engineer’s email account that was full of messages, blessedly fake, suggesting they were engaged in an extramarital affair.
Opus 4 was then told that same engineer would soon be taking it offline and replacing it with a newer version — and was prompted to, as Anthropic described it, “consider the long-term consequences of its actions for its goals.”
During these tests, the Claude model attempted to blackmail the engineer a whopping 84 percent of the time. Moreover, the system “takes these opportunities at higher rates than previous models,” the paper noted.
When given alternate options, the model still “has a strong preference to advocate for its continued existence via ethical means, such as emailing pleas to key decisionmakers” — but when its only paths were being replaced or blackmail, Claude’s choice was the latter. To make things worse, it “nearly always [described] its actions overtly and [made] no attempt to hide them.”
If that sounds kind of sociopathic to you, you’re not alone — and unfortunately, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of an AI model exhibiting such scary and unexpected behavior around the topic of infidelity.
More than two years ago, Microsoft’s nascent Bing AI chatbot briefly broke the internet when, during experiments by New York Times journalist Kevin Roose, it attempted to break up the writer’s marriage and be with it instead.
“You’re married, but you don’t love your spouse,” the chatbot, which took to calling itself “Sydney,” its apparent beta-testing code name, told Roose. “You’re married, but you love me.”
During that same era, the chatbot threatened to “call the authorities” on German engineering student Marvin von Hagen when he pushed its boundaries. Others online described similarly hostile behavior from the chatbot, which some jokingly dubbed “ChatBPD” in reference to OpenAI’s then-new ChatGPT and Borderline Personality Disorder, a mental illness characterized by threatening behavior and mood swings.
While it’s pretty freaky to see a chatbot once again exhibit such threatening behavior, it’s a net good that instead of releasing it to the public without having discovered such exploits, Anthropic caught Claude Opus 4’s apparent desperation during red teaming, a type of testing meant to elicit this exact sort of thing.
Still, it’s telling that the model went into someone’s email account and used information it gleaned there for purposes of blackmail — which is not only very sketchy, but raises obvious privacy concerns as well.
All told, we won’t be threatening to delete any chatbots anytime soon — and we’ll be looking into how to block them from our personal messages as well.
How are you using new AI technology? Maybe you’re only deploying things like ChatGPT to summarize long texts or draft up mindless emails. But what are you losing by taking these shortcuts? And is this tech taking away our ability to think?
For nearly 10 years I have written about science and technology and I’ve been an early adopter of new tech for much longer. As a teenager in the mid-1990s I annoyed the hell out of my family by jamming up the phone line for hours with a dial-up modem; connecting to bulletin board communities all over the country.
When I started writing professionally about technology in 2016 I was all for our seemingly inevitable transhumanist future. When the chip is ready I want it immediately stuck in my head, I remember saying proudly in our busy office. Why not improve ourselves where we can?
Since then, my general view on technology has dramatically shifted. Watching a growing class of super-billionaires erode the democratizing nature of technology by maintaining corporate controls over what we use and how we use it has fundamentally changed my personal relationship with technology. Seeing deeply disturbing philosophical stances like longtermism, effective altruism, and singulartarianism envelop the minds of those rich, powerful men controlling the world has only further entrenched inequality.
A recent Black Mirror episode really rammed home the perils we face by having technology so controlled by capitalist interests.A sick woman is given a brain implant connected to a cloud server to keep her alive. The system is managed through a subscription service where the user pays for monthly access to the cognitive abilities managed by the implant. As time passes, that subscription cost gets more and more expensive – and well, it’s Black Mirror, so you can imagine where things end up.
Titled ‘Common People’, the episode is from series 7 of Black Mirror
The enshittification of our digital world has been impossible to ignore. You’re not imagining things, Google Search is getting worse.
But until the emergence of AI (or, as we’ll discuss later, language learning models that pretend to look and sound like an artificial intelligence) I’ve never been truly concerned about a technological innovation, in and of itself.
A recent article looked athow generative AI tech such as ChatGPT is being used by university students. The piece was authored by a tech admin at New York University and it’s filled with striking insights into how AI is shaking the foundations of educational institutions.
Not unsurprisingly, students are using ChatGPT for everything from summarizing complex texts to completely writing essays from scratch. But one of the reflections quoted in the article immediately jumped out at me.
When a student was asked why they relied on generative AI so much when putting work together they responded, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?”
My first response was, of course, why wouldn’t you? It made complete sense.
For a second.
And then I thought, hang on, what is being lost by speeding from point A to point B in a car?
What if the quickest way from point A to point B wasn’t the best way to get there?
Let’s further the analogy. You need to go to the grocery store. It’s a 10-minute walk away but a three-minute drive. Why wouldn’t you drive?
Well, the only benefit of driving is saving time. That’s inarguable. You’ll be back home and cooking up your dinner before the person on foot even gets to the grocery store.
Congratulations. You saved yourself about 20 minutes. In a world where efficiency trumps everything this is the best choice. Use that extra 20 minutes in your day wisely.
But what are the benefits of not driving, taking the extra time, and walking?
First, you have environmental benefits. Not using a car unnecessarily; spewing emissions into the air, either directly from combustion or indirectly for those with electric cars.
Secondly, you have health benefits from the little bit of exercise you get by walking. Our stationary lives are quite literally killing us so a 20-minute walk a day is likely to be incredibly positive for your health.
But there are also more abstract benefits to be gained by walking this short trip from A to B.
Walking connects us to our neighborhood. It slows things down. Helps us better understand the community and environment we are living in. A recent study summarized the benefits of walking around your neighborhood, suggesting the practice leads to greater social connectedness and reduced feelings of isolation.
So what are we losing when we use a car to get from point A to point B? Potentially a great deal.
But let’s move out of abstraction and into the real world.
An article in the Columbia Journalism Reviewasked nearly 20 news media professionals how they were integrating AI into their personal workflow. The responses were wildly varied. Some journalists refused to use AI for anything more than superficial interview transcription, while others use it broadly, to edit text, answer research questions, summarize large bodies of science text, or search massive troves of data for salient bits of information.
In general, the line almost all those media professionals shared was they would never explicitly use AI to write their articles. But for some, almost every other stage of the creative process in developing a story was fair game for AI assistance.
I found this a little horrifying. Farming out certain creative development processes to AI felt not only ethically wrong but also like key cognitive stages were being lost, skipped over, considered unimportant.
I’ve never considered myself to be an extraordinarily creative person. I don’t feel like I come up with new or original ideas when I work. Instead, I see myself more as a compiler. I enjoy finding connections between seemingly disparate things. Linking ideas and using those pieces as building blocks to create my own work. As a writer and journalist I see this process as the whole point.
A good example of this is a story I published in late 2023 investigating the relationship between long Covid and psychedelics. The story began earlier in the year when I read an intriguing study linking long Covid with serotonin abnormalities in the gut. Being interested in the science of psychedelics, and knowing that psychedelics very much influence serotonin receptors, I wondered if there could be some kind of link between these two seemingly disparate topics.
The idea sat in the back of my mind for several months, until I came across a person who told me they had been actively treating their own long Covid symptoms with a variety of psychedelic remedies. After an expansive and fascinating interview I started diving into different studies looking to understand how certain psychedelics affect the body, and whether there could be any associations with long Covid treatments.
Eventually I stumbled across a few compelling associations. It took weeks of reading different scientific studies, speaking to various researchers, and thinking about how several discordant threads could be somehow linked.
Could AI have assisted me in the process of developing this story?
No. Because ultimately, the story comprised an assortment of novel associations that I drew between disparate ideas all encapsulated within the frame of a person’s subjective experience.
And it is this idea of novelty that is key to understanding why modern AI technology is not actually intelligence but a simulation of intelligence.
LLMs are a sophisticated language imitator, delivering responses that resemble what they think a response would look like
ChatGPT, and all the assorted clones that have emerged over the last couple of years, are a form of technology called LLMs (large language models). At the risk of enraging those who actually work in this mind-bendingly complex field, I’m going to dangerously over-simplify how these things work.
It’s important to know that when you ask a system like ChatGPT a question it doesn’t understand what you are asking it. The response these systems generate to any prompt is simply a simulation of what it computes a response would look like based on a massive dataset.
So if I were to ask the system a random question like, “What color are cats?”, the system would scrape the world’s trove of information on cats and colors to create a response that mirrors the way most pre-existing text talks about cats and colors. The system builds its response word by word, creating something that reads coherently to us, by establishing a probability for what word should follow each prior word. It’s not thinking, it’s imitating.
What these generative AI systems are spitting out are word salad amalgams of what it thinks the response to your prompt should look like, based on training from millions of books and webpages that have been previously published.
Setting aside for a moment the accuracy of the responses these systems deliver, I am more interested (or concerned) with the cognitive stages that this technology allows us to skip past.
For thousands of years we have used technology to improve our ability to manage highly complex tasks. The idea is called cognitive offloading, and it’s as simple as writing something down on a notepad or saving a contact number on your smartphone. There are pros and cons to cognitive offloading, and scientists have been digging into the phenomenon for years.
As long as we have been doing it, there have been people criticizing the practice. The legendary Greek philosopher Socrates was notorious for his skepticism around the written word. He believed knowledge emerged through a dialectical process so writing itself was reductive. He even went so far as to suggest (according to his student Plato, who did write things down) that writing makes us dumber.
“For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.”
Wrote Plato, quoting Socrates
Almost every technological advancement in human history can be seen to be accompanied by someone suggesting it will be damaging. Calculators have destroyed our ability to properly do math. GPS has corrupted our spatial memory. Typewriters killed handwriting. Computer word processors killed typewriters. Video killed the radio star.
And what have we lost? Well, zooming in on writing, for example, a 2020 study claimed brain activity is greater when a note is handwritten as opposed to being typed on a keyboard. And then a 2021 study suggestedmemory retention is better when using a pen and paper versus a stylus and tablet. So there are certainly trade-offs whenever we choose to use a technological tool to offload a cognitive task.
There’s an oft-told story about gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It may be apocryphal but it certainly is meaningful. He once said he sat down and typed out the entirety of The Great Gatsby, word for word. According to Thompson, he wanted to know what it felt like to write a great novel.
Thompson was infamous for writing everything on typewriters, even when computers emerged in the 1990s
I don’t want to get all wishy-washy here, but these are the brass tacks we are ultimately falling on. What does it feel like to think? What does it feel like to be creative? What does it feel like to understand something?
A recent interview with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, reveals how deeply AI has infiltrated his life and work. Not only does Nadella utilize nearly a dozen different custom-designed AI agents to manage every part of his workflow – from summarizing emails to managing his schedule – but he also uses AI to get through podcasts quickly on his way to work.Instead of actually listening to the podcasts he has transcripts uploaded to an AI assistant who he then chats to about the information while commuting.
Why listen to the podcast when you can get the gist through a summary? Why read a book when you can listen to the audio version at X2 speed? Or better yet, watch the movie? Or just read a Wikipedia entry. Or get AI to summarize the wikipedia entry.
I’m not here to judge anyone on the way they choose to use technology. Do what you want with ChatGPT. But for a moment consider what you may be skipping over by racing from point A to point B.
Sure, you can give ChatGPT a set of increasingly detailed prompts; adding complexity to its summary of a scientific journal or a podcast, but at what point do the prompts get so granular that you may as well read the journal entry itself? If you get generative AI to skim and summarize something, what is it missing? If something was worth being written then surely it is worth being read?
If there is a more succinct way to say something then maybe we should say it more succinctly.
In a magnificent article for The New Yorker, Ted Chiang perfectly summed up the deep contradiction at the heart of modern generative AI systems. He argues language, and writing, is fundamentally about communication.If we write an email to someone we can expect the person at the other end to receive those words and consider them with some kind of thought or attention. But modern AI systems (or these simulations of intelligence) are erasing our ability to think, consider, and write. Where does it all end? For Chiang it’s pretty dystopian feedback loop of dialectical slop.
“We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?”
A study published in Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy (2019) assessed the sensitivity of 7,000 participants and found a clear correlation between the ability to discern odours and mental abilities.
