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Recently, I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. I had a decision to make and, either way, I knew my life would follow a different track. On one path, I accept a job offer: it’s an incredible opportunity, but means relocating hundreds of miles away, with no social network. On the other, I stay in Oxford where I’d lived for a decade: less adventure, but close to my friends and family. Both options had upsides and downsides, so I wished that I could take the job and turn it down, somehow living each life in parallel.
Well… there was potentially a way to make this happen. I could have my cake and eat it too.
This will seem odd at first, but bear with me. There are smartphone apps that can help you decide between two options by harnessing the unpredictable quirks of quantum mechanics. But this is no ordinary coin toss, where randomness decides your fate. Instead, it guarantees that both choices become realities.
You open the app and request a measurement of a photon, which forces it to occupy a binary state, such as ‘spin up’ or ‘spin down’. In my case, ‘spin up’ meant accept the job and ‘spin down’ meant decline. You will see only one result but, in theory, another you will see the opposite, in a different universe. From that moment, two versions of you co-exist, living in parallel.
It’s inspired by the ‘Many-Worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed by the physicist Hugh Everett III in his doctoral dissertation in the 1950s. He argued that our Universe branches into multiple worlds every time a quantum event takes place – and thousands happen every second. While this idea seems fantastical, a growing number of scientists and philosophers think this is how our world really works. In fact, if the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, then the splitting of worlds is not only possible, it is ubiquitous.
Read the rest of this article at: Aeon
Late this past summer, I was at the convenience store with my son, buying ice cream, when a Tesla Cybertruck pulled into the lot. Peter is six, and fascinated by Cybertrucks; hushed with awe, he walked closer, peering out from beneath his bike helmet. Angular and metallic, the Cybertruck loomed in its parking space like a meteor fallen to earth, or a Transformer waiting to transform. Peter said, “Whoa,” and the truck’s middle-aged driver, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, rolled down his window and offered a thumbs-up in return. They grinned, like-minded across the decades.
Later that day, we biked to the marina near our house, to test our new remote-controlled boat. We’d burned out the motor on our old one, and I’d sprung for an upgraded model, which turned out to be two feet long, with a top speed of thirty miles an hour. As we installed the battery, configured the controller, and then descended the boat ramp, a small group of gray-haired men milled around on the dock. They stayed to watch as our boat zoomed to and fro. When Peter successfully raced it between two tightly spaced pilings, they applauded. “Sweet boat,” one of them said, as he walked to the berth where his big version was moored.
When packs of burly bearded dudes cruise by on their belchy motorcycles, it’s easy to see them as giant children enthralled by their toys. Grownups like kid stuff, and vice versa—having been both a kid and a grownup myself, I’ve always known this to be true. Still, it wasn’t until I had little kids of my own that I realized the true extent of the overlap. Clearly, there are preoccupations, challenges, and fascinations exclusive to adults. (I can’t imagine too many kids enjoying the movie “Marriage Story,” for example.) But, at least to my parental eye, the similarities can seem to outnumber the differences. Kids are on an endless quest for yummy treats, and adults line up for trendy pastries; kids like playing dress-up, and grownups spend hours in the dressing room trying on everything in the store. Kids can be nostalgic, recalling fondly in third grade the games they played in first. They can wish to be useful and suffer from feeling useless; like their elders, they can thirst simultaneously for belonging and solitude, dependence and independence. Children have dignity, which can be injured by the careless exercise of parental power, and they worry about death, sometimes in a more direct way than adults do.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Over the past six months, as I’ve gone about my day as a journalist, teacher and parent, I’ve conducted a highly unscientific study. In conversations from the newsroom to the school gates, I’ve asked the same question repeatedly: “Do you use generative AI?”
The responses vary wildly.
At one end of the spectrum, a mother of three from New Jersey, who doesn’t work outside the home, told me that generative AI scares her “to death.” At the other, a father of one from Texas, who works in consulting, said that he uses it “all the time and for everything.” In between? Varying shades of enthusiasm. A young graduate student from California told me she’s never tried it but intends to. Her classmate from Chicago said he uses it “occasionally, mostly for writing emails.”
In my crude survey of about 30 or 40 people I regularly interact with, men were often quick to admit to using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini frequently and shamelessly. The women I spoke to — with the notable exception of those who work in tech and media — were more reluctant. Many seemed disinterested.
Having reported and written for years on the causes and consequences of gender gaps, this dichotomy concerned me. Was I seeing evidence of the latest iteration of inequality between the sexes? And might it signal something consequential about how men and women work and are paid? Or was this merely a quirk of my particular social circle and small sample size? I started digging.
A Generative AI Gender Gap
Because of the relative novelty of generative AI models and technology, comprehensive studies on who uses them, how frequently and for what have so far been hard to come by. Nonetheless, one research paper from July corroborates my flimsy poll. Based on responses to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York consumer survey, economists at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) indeed established the existence of “an economically and statistically significant ‘gen AI gender gap’.”
Read the rest of this article at: Bloomberg
It had been nearly ten years since I’d last been on the dating market, and I felt like I had slept through some kind of revolution.Illustration by Sophi Miyoko Gullbrants
Heartbreak cures are as old as time, or at least as old as the Common Era. Around the year 1 C.E., the Roman poet Ovid followed up “The Art of Love,” his dating manual in verse, with an antidote titled “Cures for Love.” Among the recommendations are to pick up a hobby (“cow bulls into submission”), distract yourself with a new partner (“as they split off into many a stream, mighty rivers lose muscle”), and, if possible, take a trip at once: “Don’t fake an excuse, either, for sticking around. Don’t check the calendar. Don’t keep looking over your shoulder back at Rome.”
This past summer, I did the bidding of the ancients and booked a seat on the Berkshire Flyer—Amtrak’s seasonal train from Penn Station to Pittsfield, Massachusetts—to get some distance from my own romantic disappointment. A few weeks earlier, I had been dumped by a man I was seeing—and by text, no less. Even the rake Rodolphe had the decency to add a drop of water to his breakup letter to Emma Bovary, hidden in a basket of apricots, to make it look as though he was inconsolable. Yet does that spare Emma’s feelings? When the basket arrives and her husband invites her to smell the fruit’s sweet aroma, she shouts, “I can’t breathe!” With respect to breakups, the message is the message.
My friends, more schooled in these matters, reminded me that a breakup text was better than being “ghosted,” a practice that, when I learned of it, seemed worth bringing the guillotine back for. One friend asked if I had a “breakup plan.” A what? I found a worksheet on Etsy, seemingly modelled on a birth plan, only instead of “I may want a walking epidural,” the options to numb the pain included “start a side hustle.” Before I knew it, I was lost in a corner of the Internet populated by breakup coaches, heartbreak dietitians looking to replace the classic pint of ice cream with anti-inflammatory popcorn, and get-over-him getaways. The Chablé hotel, at its Yucatán and Maroma locations, offers a program called Healing Heartbreak, in which newly single guests can undergo a full-body exfoliation treatment to symbolize the “scrubbing away of the past.” When Al Green sang “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” the question was rhetorical. Now there’s the Mend app, which leads users through a seventeen-module online course that will “turn your breakup into a breakthrough.” At StrIVeMD, which has locations in Ohio, Illinois, and Texas, Dr. Syed Ali advertises ketamine injections as breakup therapy, claiming that they can provide relief from heartbreak-induced depression and anxiety within hours.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
