MIT Technology Review:
How Small Businesses Can Leverage #AI
Tutor Sam Finnegan-Dehn shares how he’s outsourcing basic administrative tasks to a large language model.
By Peter Hall
https://t.co/mpkTfN8lR5
#ArtificialIntelligence#LLMs#AGI#technology#startups
A Lo-Fi Rebellion Against #AI – As slick, machine-generated visuals become ubiquitous, artists and designers are embracing a style of handmade imperfection.
By Kyle Chayka
https://t.co/BTTPVjUY0d
#ArtificialIntelligence#technology#artists#designers
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.
Her name is Audrey van der Meer.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.
Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.
The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.
Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.
Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.
Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.
Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.
Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.
The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.
The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.
That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.
Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.
Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.
You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.
The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.
Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
‘The Mistress Of Nonsense’ Images: #Midjourney Animation: #VEO3 Lyrics by me. Song: #Suno Additional mixing and engineering by Marshall Altman. Let yourself be strange ❤️ #ai#aiart#music
U.S. Supreme Court Eviscerated the #VotingRightsAct —What’s Next?
“...responsibility now shifts to Congress and state legislatures to ramp up their efforts to protect the freedom to vote"
By Madeleine Greenberg
https://t.co/HeRdEPqUHK
#justice#equality#humanity#votingrights
MIT Technology Review: You Have No Choice In Reading this Article—Maybe
Does free will exist? Neuroscientist Uri Maoz devises experiments to illuminate how—or if—the brain makes decisions
https://t.co/LWZS2BMiOm
#research#philosophy#neuroscience#AI#intelligence#humanity
A Show of Defiance Across the Nation:
In the U.S., more than 3,000 "No Kings" demonstrations were planned to protest President Trump and his policies.
By Ernesto Londoño and Sonia A. Rao
https://t.co/LhUgCqOreh
#justice#economy#humanrights#civilrights#equality#democracy
Pokémon Go Is Giving Delivery #Robots an Inch-Perfect View of the World
Niantic's #AI spinout is training a new world model using 30 billion crowdsourced images of urban landmarks
“I’m very focused on trying to re-create the real world.”
https://t.co/GYkiPGm5ZA
#labor#privacy
This extraordinary illustration, titled Wild World, is a hand-drawn global map created by artist and cartographer Anton thomas. Instead of political borders and city names, the map highlights wildlife, placing animals in their native habitats across every continent and ocean.
Over the course of three years, Thomas meticulously illustrated 1, 642 species using coloured pencil and pen. Each animal is positioned according to its natural range, transforming the familiar shape of the world into a celebration of biodiversity.
By removing human boundaries and focusing on ecosystems, the map offers a powerful reminder that
the planet is shared space. It invites us to see geography not just as nations and borders, but as living habitats that connect species across land and sea.
Reverend Jesse Jackson was a relentless advocate for justice who demanded that America’s opportunities belong to every American. From the streets of Chicago to the national stage, he expanded the coalition for civil rights and economic fairness across faith, race, party and more.
#AI Is Giving You a Personalized Internet, but You Have No Say in It
The relentless addition of #ArtificialIntelligence in popular apps raises questions about what’s at stake. The answer: the future of the internet and its lifeblood, digital #advertising
https://t.co/D8TDVNyHkU
MIT Technology Review: ALS stole this musician’s voice. #AI let him sing again.
Patrick Darling used a music tool from ElevenLabs to perform a song with his former bandmates.
By Jessica Hamzelou
https://t.co/vElKgVISB3
#ArtificialIntelligence#biotech#health
What We’ve Been Getting Wrong About #AI’s Truth Crisis
Even when content is revealed to be manipulated, it still shapes our beliefs. The defenders of truth are hopelessly behind.
By James O'Donnell
https://t.co/jA0RweJy9Q
#deepfakes#misinformation#regulations#health
#AlexPretti was a calm presence amid hospital chaos. A mentor who taught kindness and patience to younger friends and colleagues.
Friends and Family Denounce ‘Lies’ About His Life:
Read full article at:
https://t.co/ZceYdT4h5M
#ReneeGood#justice#journalism#humanrights#love