James' World 2

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When was the last time you bragged about being sensitive?

Most likely, the answer is never. There are plenty of traits we take pride in but being “sensitive” is usually perceived as a weakness. It’s used to mean you’re fragile, thin-skinned, or just overreacting. Men are told that they shouldn’t be sensitive at all, whereas women are told not to be “so” sensitive—an infuriating set of words that ought to be retired.

Either way, the message sensitive people get isn’t to celebrate who they are. It’s that they should “overcome” their sensitivity and “toughen up.” Putting aside that this approach doesn’t work, it’s wrongheaded. Sensitivity is largely genetic, and not something you can turn off. It is a trait linked to giftedness and something we ought to embrace. In fact, according to three decades of research, it’s not only a healthy trait, it also serves as a a powerful asset.

As a personality trait, being sensitive means you take in more information from your environment, and you do more with it. Sensitive people are wired at a brain level to process information more deeply than others do. That includes sensory input (like noticing the texture of a fabric), emotional input (reading social cues), and ideas (spending a longer time thinking things through and making more connections between concepts).

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“Sorry! Computers need to be accountable to people!” he said, and then made sure to clarify, “That was not a Freudian slip.”

Slip or not, the laughter in the room betrayed a latent anxiety. Progress in artificial intelligence has been moving so unbelievably fast lately that the question is becoming unavoidable: How long until AI dominates our world to the point where we’re answering to it rather than it answering to us?

First, last year, we got DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, which can turn a few words of text into a stunning image. Then Microsoft-backed OpenAI gave us ChatGPT, which can write essays so convincing that it freaks out everyone from teachers (what if it helps students cheat?) to journalists (could it replace them?) to disinformation experts (will it amplify conspiracy theories?). And in February, we got Bing (a.k.a. Sydney), the chatbot that both delighted and disturbed beta users with eerie interactions. Now we’ve got GPT-4 — not just the latest large language model, but a multimodal one that can respond to text as well as images.

Fear of falling behind Microsoft has prompted Google and Baidu to accelerate the launch of their own rival chatbots. The AI race is clearly on.

But is racing such a great idea? We don’t even know how to deal with the problems that ChatGPT and Bing raise — and they’re bush league compared to what’s coming.

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Dinesh Raj, who lives in the south Indian city of Salem, treasures his account on microwork website Amazon Mechanical Turk, even if competition for data annotation tasks on the crowdsourced platform is high, and the pay is low.

The 30-year-old, who has an engineering degree, has struggled to find a well-paid job and relies on the platform for much of his income, which can vary every day.

“I work at night when there are more jobs from U.S. clients,” said Raj, who has done tasks on Amazon MTurk for about four years.

“Of 10 tasks I do, only two may get approved, so I have to do more tasks to make $10-$30 a day. But it’s still better than nothing,” said Raj, who sometimes rents out his ID to members of a Facebook group of Indian workers on Amazon MTurk.

The explosive growth in artificial intelligence (AI) is driving the need for large training datasets, which are serviced by millions of workers labeling text, images, video, and audio for everything from voice recognition assistants to face recognition to 3D image recognition for autonomous vehicles.

India makes up about a third of global online freelance workers, according to the International Labour Organization, with developing nations accounting for about two-thirds of the total remote workforce.

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Employees work at their desks inside Tech Mahindra office building in Noida on the outskirts of New Delhi March 18, 2013. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

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On a clear, moonless night, you might be able to see thousands of stars sparkling like jewels above. But a keen eye will notice that they don’t all look alike. Some glow brighter than others, and some display warm red hues.

Astronomers have identified several different types of stars in the universe, as diverse as small brown dwarfs and red supergiants. Stars in the prime of their lives, known as main sequence stars, are typically classified by how hot they are. Since most star temperatures can’t be directly measured, explains Natalie Gosnell, an assistant professor in physics at Colorado College, astronomers need to look at another signal: temperature. This is largely inferred by the color of the light a star emits, which is reflected in many names given to star types.  

Each category, however, is connected. A star moves through various designations throughout its lifetime, an evolution shaped by its original mass and the reactions that occur within the roiling stellar body. 

In the beginning…

All stars form from a cloud of dust and gas when turbulence pushes enough of that material together, pressed into one body by gravity. As that clump collapses in on itself, it starts to spin. The material in the middle heats up, forming a dense core known as a protostar. Gravity draws even more material toward the developing star as it spins, making it bigger and bigger. Some of that stuff may eventually form planets, asteroids, and comets in orbit around the new star.

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured this blue star shedding outer layers of gas and dust. NASA, ESA, STScI

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Whether it’s a meetup at a dimly lit bar, an awkward blind date, a speed-dating event, or even an answer to a classified ad in the newspaper, American dating has long been an experiment of throwing strangers together and hoping for the best. In many cases, there was little to connect people except a shared geography or, perhaps, a mutual acquaintance.

For the most part, this dating formula worked. American marriages are full of people who started dating when they were complete strangers. A survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, where I’m the director, found that 46% of married Americans reported not knowing their spouse before they started dating.

But that’s changing: Today’s young adults, especially young women, are increasingly finding romance in their friend groups. In our survey, 43% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 said they were in a relationship with someone who was first a friend, including an astonishing 50% of women in that cohort. This is double the 21% of people over 65 who reported having been friends with their partner or spouse before they started dating. Among older couples, 52% said their significant other was a complete stranger to them before they got together, while only 35% of young people said the same. In other words, a lot more older Americans created a relationship out of thin air.

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Instead of relying on dating apps or meeting a stranger, Gen Z is increasingly finding romance in their friend groups. Arif Qazi / Insider

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We are constantly bending and being bent to the will of others—and neurotechnology may be enabling new methods for those seeking to bend others to their will. In 2021, Ahmed Shaheed, during his mandate as the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, presented the first-ever report on freedom of thought, which argued that “freedom of thought” should be interpreted to include the right not to reveal one’s thoughts nor to be penalized for them. He also recommended that freedom of thought include the right not to have our thoughts manipulated. But manipulation is a slippery concept. If ill-defined, an absolute prohibition on it could do more harm to human interactions than good.

About a decade ago, I went down a rabbit hole trying to untangle claims about philosophical and legal free will. The written debate goes back at least two thousand years, but neuroscientists have recently joined the fray by arguing that decision-making is hardwired in our brains. Punishment, they argue, cannot be justified by retributivism—an eye for an eye—because people are not morally culpable for their actions. I disagree and have sought in my own scholarship to explain why freedom of action is a freedom worth defending.

In a well-known 1971 essay titled “Freedom of Will and the Concept of a Person,” the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt describes what he calls a peculiar characteristic of humans—that we can form “second-order desires.” Besides our subconscious preferences, biases, and desires, we can also “want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives.” Frankfurt calls this capacity for reflective self-evaluation of those biases and desires “higher-order volition.” We don’t have to be fully aware of our unconscious desires to engage in reflective self-evaluation. We might be completely unaware of some desires while being mistaken about others. Free will, he argues, is our capacity to form higher-order volitions, by recognizing certain desires as our own.

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Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images

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Few things in life satisfy me as much as canceling social plans.

As a reporter who regularly covers friendship, I am well-versed in the benefits of platonic connection. I know, for instance, that studies show that people with strong social ties live longer and are better protected against stress. And I am familiar with the evidence showing that a truly robust social circle encompasses different types of friendship, including work pals (who can help you feel more engaged and productive throughout the day) and “weak ties” (casual acquaintances who can help you learn new things and improve your daily sense of well being).

But I am who I am: an introvert who delights in alone time. I admit I seldom feel motivated to make new friends, or even to see the small-but-cherished group I already have. For me, the tension between craving camaraderie, connection and all of the wonderful benefits of friendship, and wanting to be left alone is real. And the advice that’s so often given about making friends in adulthood (including that in my own articles) tends to make me shudder: Put yourself out there? No, thank you.

“Every single person has the fundamental need for connection,” said Kasley Killam, a social scientist and the founder and executive director of Social Health Labs, a nonprofit that works to create solutions for isolation and loneliness. “It’s not like introverts don’t need meaningful relationships. But what varies is how much and what kind of connection.”

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It was early days, but Flo was feeling positive about Jack – a man she’d been seeing for three months. The pair met on Hinge, Flo swiping right after Jack’s pithy one-liners made her smile.

Their first date – a couple of drinks after work – had been the most fun she’d had in a while. The pair went on to meet twice a week afterwards: more drinks, dinners, movie nights – Jack even took Flo to a warehouse rave with his best friends. 

They never put a label on it – there didn’t seem to be a need to – but a flush would warm Flo’s cheeks whenever his name lit up her phone. That was until one day, Jack stopped texting. No explanation, no response: Flo had been blocked, with her WhatsApp messages to Jack now punctuated with a lonely grey tick.

“I was upset,” publicist Flo, 24, reflects, a year later. Like every dater in this piece, she’s speaking anonymously to protect her privacy. “But this sort of stuff happens all the time. I’ve been ghosted before and I’ll get ghosted again. But part of me thinks what’s the fucking point? It makes me just not want to bother with dating.”

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Photo: Uwe Krejci / Getty Images

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Sometime during the pandemic lockdowns, I began to nurture a fantasy: What if I were neighbors with all of my friends? Every day, as I took long walks through North Vancouver that were still nowhere near long enough to land me at a single pal’s doorstep, I would reflect on the potential joys of a physically closer network. Wouldn’t it be great to have someone who could join me on a stroll at a moment’s notice? Or to be able to drop by to cook dinner for a friend and her baby? How good would it be to have more spontaneous hangs instead of ones that had to be planned, scheduled, and most likely rescheduled weeks in advance?

This doesn’t have to be just a dream. Friends who already live in the same city could decide to move within walking distance of one another—the same neighborhood, block, or even apartment building—and campaign for others to do the same. Doing so would likely involve a lot of effort on the front end,

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Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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Many people come to therapy confused about how to form new friendships in adulthood. They say things like:

• “I was really good at making friends when I was young. Does everybody lose this ability with age?”
• “I feel like everyone around me already has a solid group of friends. How do I find a group to fit in with? Or is it too late?”
• “I’m either working at my office or taking care of my family. How do I find time for making new friends?

Making friends as an adult can be more complicated than when you were young. The logistical and emotional challenges involved in creating new bonds as an adult sometimes push us to isolate ourselves. Or, they may lead us to believe the false notion that our time to make new friends has passed.

If you struggle to make new friends as an adult, research says you’re not alone. The challenges you’re facing are real, but they can be managed. Here are two practices you can incorporate into your life that can help you create lasting friendships at any life stage.

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Adult friendships may not come easy, but they pay dividends for a long time. Getty

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