Category Archives: 1947 – Quote, Unquote

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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:

“Anecdotally, it appears that the rapid adoption of AI may already be affecting student well-being and creating new long-term challenges. Some students are becoming dependent on AI for schoolwork or emotional support; losing their sense of agency, purpose, and confidence; and worrying about their career prospects in an AI-saturated world. Instructors and other academic staff should be prepared to recognize AI-related academic, social, and emotional challenges and to direct students to appropriate support.”

Published on August 13, 2026.

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The institutions that are fostering supposedly egalitarian politics limit upward mobility as much as they facilitate it. This has encouraged a type of blinkered and oftentimes unambitious style of activism among young people, which asks for many changes but does not challenge the system that provides them with their own lofty status.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker

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In some ways, Anthropic’s terms resemble these traditional examples of privately imposed contractual limits on the military’s use of technology. The company’s position on autonomous lethal weapons, for example, is not one of outright opposition to the use of such weapons but instead a judgment that today’s frontier AI systems are not capable enough to autonomously make decisions about human life or death.
~ Dean Ball via Hyperdimensional

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Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
~ Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic

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Roy Cohn was a master of situational immorality. He had rules about how to exercise power. You would always try to goad your enemies into being the worst they possibly could be and then turn that against them, so that Cohn would actually look like the good guy, which he virtually never was.
~ Sam Roberts, city politics reporter for the Daily News via The New Yorker

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For years, China’s rising power has rested on a fragile balance of economic freedom and political control, in what early Party reformers called the “birdcage economy”—airy enough to allow enterprises to thrive, but not capacious enough to sacrifice power. That arrangement has rarely looked more tenuous.
~ Evan Osnos via The New Yorker

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The golden era for the depiction of food in art came with the popularization of the still life in seventeenth-century Holland. The first society to experience the problem of having too much money and too much stuff, the Dutch had multiple genres of food-related still lifes, each dealing in a different level of luxury. They began with the humble ontbijtjes, or breakfast paintings, to the slightly more elaborate banketjestukken or “little banquets,” and on to the kings of them all, the pronkstilleven, from the Dutch word for “ostentatious.”
~ Jacob Mikanowski

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