Category: Behavior

  • Move Fast and Kill Kids

    Trigger Warning: If the title wasn’t enough of a hint, this piece gets into dark territory. In the December 5 episode of the podcast On with Kara Swisher, Swisher interviewed Megan Garcia and Meetali Jain. Garcia is the mother of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old boy who killed himself in part because of an unhealthy, one-sided quasi-relationship with a chatbot…

  • Can You Only GenAI Your Way to the Middle?

    Should we take seriously a recent study that shows people like AI-generated poetry? And what are the broader implications? A few days ago, La Profesora sent me an intriguing link to a Poetry Turing Test set up by a couple of philosophers at the University of Pittsburgh. The test is a simple Google Form that presents the…

  • Emotional Truths that Aren’t True

    Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller “The Anxious Generation” is a terrible book on which nobody should waste their money or attention. Last week I had the privilege and pleasure of joining Joey Dumont on an episode of his True Thirty podcast in which we debated the merits of Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling nonfiction book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring…

  • My Ozempic Journey: Packing Up

    Sometimes, when you know a change is coming, the anticipation itself can create other sorts of change. Regular Dispatch readers might remember a few issues back—in Will Ozempic Kill Movie Theaters?—when I explored how the possibility of 10% of the U.S. population going onto GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic might be the final nail in the collective coffin…

  • The Digital Cyrano

    How realistic is the idea that an AI-driven “digital intimacy assistant” could help a shy man woo somebody he finds attractive? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called Flyrt about Chris, a shy man, Roxy, the woman he finds attractive, and Cyr, a snarky, AI-powered “digital intimacy assistant”…

  • New Cracks in Reality

    Deep fakes, voice cloning, and other technologies are making fraud more convincing and widespread than ever, but there’s another threat to our ability to answer “what is real?”  An ongoing topic here is how answers to the question “what is real?” keep changing as new technologies (Generative AI in particular) make it easier to create…

  • Will Ozempic Kill Movie Theaters?

    The social disruptions that new, injectable, weight-loss drugs like Ozempic will create go far beyond health and health care. We humans organize our mental worlds with categories and consideration sets, so it can be hard to see when trends from different categories collide. Back in the day when I worked at EarthLink, a dial-up ISP,…

  • Mr. Hyde’s Letter, a Microfiction

    What happens when a man takes medication to change his personality, but the new personality has his own opinions? Timothy’s constipated mind pushed to slow, thick wakefulness. Only a wail from his bladder stopped him from plummeting back to sleep. He felt his way to the toilet and sat, too groggy to aim. A long…

  • Serendipity Engines

    In commerce, there’s an incalculable difference between search and discovery. Discovery requires serendipity, and there’s no better source of serendipity than independent bookstores. Wednesday, I was in Eugene, a small Oregon city a couple hours south of Portland. I dropped into the legendary Smith Family Bookstore, where I found a $4.00 copy of Violent Spring by Gary Phillips,…

  • Chatting with Chat

    Access to ChatGPT’s new voice interface turned into a long conversation while I walked in the summer sun. The results were mixed. To paraphrase and tweak a famous quote usually attributed to H.L. Mencken, nobody has ever lost money by overestimating the laziness of the human mind. To put it more generously, we humans have a lot…