Happy Monday (and happy birthday to Kin!) and welcome to "The Extra Mile," an extra newsletter for Second Breakfast's paid subscribers. This is where I work out a bunch of ideas about health and technology that are still largely fragmentary, speculative, and – in a busy breakfast fashion before one launches on to the next thing – sort of half-baked.
Robot owls: "The question that remains in my mind," writes Imogen West-Knights in the latest issue of The Dial, "and in the minds of many of even its most dedicated users, is: what is Duolingo actually teaching you?" (Emphasis mine.) What indeed? Duolingo won't
I'd originally planned to take today off from the newsletter – a little post-Thanksgiving respite from my writing (and your having to read it). But the steady drumbeat of AI hype hasn't stopped, so how can I? (You're free, as always, to not-click.) I really
It's been absolutely fascinating to watch the narrative about AI shift over the last few weeks – from very boisterous claims that "AGI (artificial general intelligence) is just around the corner" to a rather big "maybe not." According to some researchers, the current approach isn&