LINKS - September 11th, 2024
Welcome to LINKS — my attempt to provide Rhapsody readers with five interesting stories that tell us something about what it means to be human . LINKS is published every Wednesday. Have a link you want to share? Drop it in the comments.
Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art
“Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.”
Ancient DNA unveils a previously unknown line of Neandertals
“Whether classified as a separate species or a variant of Homo sapiens, Neandertals have typically been viewed as a genetically consistent population. But an adult male’s partial skeleton discovered in France contains genetic clues to a Neandertal line that evolved apart from other European Neandertals for around 50,000 years, nearly up to the time these close relatives of H. sapiens died out, researchers say.”
Famed Pacific island’s population 'crash' debunked by ancient DNA
By Ewen Callaway, Nature
“The theory that the early Indigenous inhabitants of Rapa Nui — also known as Easter Island — ravaged its ecosystem and caused the population to crash before the arrival of Europeans in the early eighteenth century was popularized in the 2006 book Collapse, by geographer Jared Diamond, but some other scholars have since criticized that theory.
“The latest analysis, published on 11 September in Nature, ‘serves as the final nail in the coffin of this collapse narrative’, says Kathrin Nägele, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. ‘It’s correcting the image of Indigenous people.’”
Health Effects of 9/11 Still Plague Responders and Survivors
By Tara Haelle, Scientific American
“Nearly 3,000 people died during the deadliest terrorist attack in world history. But in the two decades since then, the number of deaths among survivors and responders—who spent months inhaling the noxious dust, chemicals, fumes and fibers from the debris—has continued creeping up. Researchers have identified more than 60 typesof cancer and about two dozen other conditions that are linked to Ground Zero exposures. As of today, at least 4,627 responders and survivors enrolled in the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Program have died.”
We’re Bad at Understanding Our Political Opponents
“The study found that, on average, participants predicted the views of their in-group just over half of the time, whereas that accuracy dropped to 39 percent for their out-group. Participants were only slightly less confident about their abilities to predict responses for people with whom they disagreed, giving themselves odds of 74 percent to guess the response of their in-group correctly, compared to 72 percent for their out-group. ‘People really aren’t aware that they’re bad at this,’ Payne says.”