ANITA GATES
THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
PUBLISHED JANUARY 7, 2019

I am a technology anthropologist who examines automation, algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the context of preserving human agency.

So interesting. There's a lot to unpack here. To start:

"One way to understand the logic of the 3 contexts is through the famous parable of the 3 stone-cutters, popularized by Peter Drucker in the business world.

A traveler encounters 3 men cutting stones. He asks them what they’re doing. The first says, “I’m making a living,” The second says, “I’m doing the best job of stone-cutting in the country.” The third says, “I’m building a cathedral.""

Pope Francis’s new encyclical calls for a holistic ethic, an “integral ecology” that insists on the dignity of both human and nonhuman nature and on the shared roots of ecological and social problems. This ethic holds that “everything is connected. Concern for the environment thus needs to be joined to a sincere love for our fellow human beings and an unwavering commitment to resolving the problems of society.” Many responses to Laudato Si’ have focused on Francis’s treatment of particular issues, such as air conditioning or carbon credits. Yet the call for an integral ecology is what makes the encyclical truly distinctive. (..) Patrick Deneen claimed that Laudato Si’ develops “a Thomistic and Aristotelian theme: ‘how human beings live in and with and through nature, in ways that do not fall into what Pope Francis calls, again and again, the twin temptations of, on the one hand, viewing human beings as separate from nature in our capacity to dominate nature, [and] on the other side, a kind of anti-humanism which regards human beings as equally foreign to nature, but now as a kind of virus that has to—in some ways—be eliminated.” Francis’s integral ecology thus challenges some tendencies on both the right and the left. It does so by staying resolutely focused on the poor.

by Stephen P. White on June 24, 2015 Given the media coverage since its release, and the political implications of the pope throwing his moral weight behind one…

This essay offers a philosophical overview of the central themes of Nietzsche's philosophy, addressing (1) the primary intellectual influences on his work (esp. the PreSocratics, Schopenhauer, and Lange); (2) the style in which he writes and his philosophical reasons for it; (3) his philosophical naturalism and its role in his conception of the mind and agency; (4) his critique of morality and its connection with the idea that there can be an "aethestic" justification for existence, notwithstanding the terrible truths about human existence (such as suffering and death); and (5) competing interpretations of his views on truth and knowledge. Certain well-known Nietzschean ideas -- like "will to power," "eternal recurrence," and perspectivism -- are also located and explained within this philosophical framework. -- downloaded pdf to Note

"Once people pick a brand, their reasons for sticking with it are largely automatic. Read Montague is the director of the ­human-neuroimaging laboratory and ­computational-psychiatry unit at Virginia Tech’s Carilion Research Institute, where he studies how people choose and value products using an fMRI machine. When shoppers are exposed to a brand they identify with, their ventral medial prefrontal cortex lights up—the same part of the brain associated with reward recognition in drug users. That neural pathway may have helped our ancestors remember, say, which plants were safe to eat or when a tribal marking meant a clan was worth avoiding. In the modern age, we use the same circuitry as a shortcut for more mundane decisions. “As long as it keeps paying you back the same way,” Montague says, you buy the same brands. The feedback loop flashes: “It’s worth the money.”"