You Are Not Okay and Tomorrow Will Come

So that’s what I tell them.

You can feel sad and you can do five math problems.

You can be nervous and write the last paragraph of your essay.

You can be anxious and pick up trash in the hallway.

You can feel mad and eat a piece of fruit.

And nothing will really be fixed, but then, it wasn’t really going to get fixed anyway. But maybe they’ll be a little bit better at algebra or feel a little bit healthier.

It’s not magic advice, but sometimes the nudge is enough to put things in motion again.
Emily Kingsley

about education

If children only sharpen their brains at school, there’s no guarantee they won’t go on to make trouble. To balance their keen brains, they need a warm heart. The more compassionate they learn to be, the more useful members of society they’re likely to become.
Dalai Lama

about regulation

And they will tell us: You can’t possibly regulate effectively anyway, because the tech is moving too fast.

But (channeling Ryan Calo here): The point of regulation isn’t to micromanage specific technologies but rather to establish and protect rights. And those are enduring.
Emily M. Bender

on being part of social “culture”

If you have a keyboard, you have the chance to speak to some people – the people who want to hear from you. It is possible, when the stars align, for that group to be a billion, or it might only be 10, but there is a number of people that you can engage with and if you change the culture then you change everything. My argument for more than 20 years has been that we are each responsible for the culture where we are living, because we each have the ability to do something about it.
Seth Godin

Fear about A.I., fear about technology, fear about capitalism

“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.”
Ted Chiang

Golden handcuffs

I realized what the real cost to golden handcuffs was. The cost is your youth, your time, and your life. People don’t accurately judge these costs, because a salary is a hard number, whereas the value of your youth is more intangible. But just because something is hard to measure doesn’t make it any less valuable than something countable like money. It’s hard to measure the value of a brand, mental health, or love, but we know it matters.
Michael Lin