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@_Borriss_ I don’t mean to be hyperbolic but it’s difficult to not imagine a post human future with the speed this tech is advancing. Hyper optimism about these developments sadly masks the real dangers- hubris will be mankind’s downfall. We’re heading towards a trans humanist world…

Wow... The OpenAI Sora team dropped 5 new videos that are bananas! (Almost no exaggeration.😬) Check them here:

@c_valenzuelab Any one poll the public on the sentiments of AI? I think this all a receipt for disaster if $ is key driver for deploying and disseminating this to the masses. Safety is not priority. Those who dismiss criticism as people being luddites should be met with skepticism

With the advent of high-quality AI-generated media and the soon-to-be reality of generation on a real-time basis, I'm seeing a version of the same type of questions going around: how will we be able to distinguish real from generated? I think that's the wrong question to ask. It's worth remembering that generated videos have been around for 60+ years. And we are all okay. We actually already have a term for it: computer-generated imagery (CGI). Most movies and shows you watch are partially or entirely generated. Remember those dinosaurs in Jurassic Park? Guess what? They are not real. (yeah, sorry to break that) But sometimes, CGI is harder to find. Look for David Fincher's VFX breakdown of The Social Network, for example. The best CGI is the one you don't notice. And society has been perfectly fine about it. Under that premise, then, the real concerns do not seem to be how to distinguish what is real from what is not, but what happens when everyone has the tools that a David Fincher movie budget has. What happens when everyone can create anything they can imagine. My long-term position is that what is needed moving forward is a focus on i) digital literacy and ii) social awareness. i) Digital literacy: you need to adjust your mental models for every new technology. We keep discussing how fast technology changes, but we rarely discuss how fast culture adapts. We tend to underestimate speed of cultural changes and human adaptability. The best way of updating a prior is to have experience and exposure. One of the earliest films ever made was “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” by the Lumière brothers in 1895. Legend has it that when the film was first screened, the audience panicked and fled the theater, convinced that the train in the film was going to burst through the screen and run them over. You can cure your fear of trains in films by understanding how movies are made. ii) Collective awareness: Social verification is key for any malicious type of content. We are already collectively good at sussing out malicious things that are trying to be passed as truth but are not. We get better at collective awareness by exercising more of i). The solution to potential challenges posed by ubiquitous access to high-quality content creation tools is not merely technological but also cultural and educational.

@RealEmirHan “Keys to the City” The New Yorker Documentary

@packyM penguinrandomhouse.com/books/567075/g…

Religion is wasted on the young. Warning: these are very loose thoughts, not formed enough to write about in the newsletter. There's a well-known decline in religion in America. According to Pew, Christians declined from 90% of the population in 1972 to 64% in 2020. "Nones" grew from 5% to 30% over the same period. At the same time, as technology addresses bigger things -- intelligence, space/universe, geo-engineering -- it feels like there's a shift back towards ~religion in Silicon Valley. I've kind of noticed it in myself recently. I'm reading Teilhard de Chardin's The Phenomenon of Man and nodding my head a bunch. (The Catholic Church exiled de Chardin to China for his unorthodox views.) I agree that it's important that people have a sense of being part of something bigger than themselves, of working towards something instead of nihilistically going through the motions. I'm appreciating more than I have before that old religious ideas are useful in thinking about what comes next. But it's taken me years to admit all of that to myself, let alone write it out. I think it's because I went to Catholic school. I'm not old enough to have gone to a Catholic school where the nuns hit kids with rulers, but one memory stands out vividly: my 5th grade teacher telling one of the girls in our class that her parents were going to Hell because they got divorced. That didn't seem particularly productive. It just made a little girl who already felt like an odd-one-out for being the kid of just one of two divorced sets of parents in the class feel worse. More generally, religion, at least in my Catholic experience, felt like a set of rules instead of a conversation or an exploration of deeper truths. Like dogma. Making kids sit through an hour+ of church every weekend, and then some Sunday school on top, with more of the same might have been good for discipline or something, but it didn't engender a love of religion, like running around outside unstructured engendered a love of games. So when the scandals hit the Church, it was like, "See, I told you those people were fucked up. Can we not go to church anymore now?" Then when you go to high school and college and start learning about the scientific method and testability, it's another excuse to drop that strict, dogmatic, boring thing you were forced to endure growing up. I think as humanity has gotten really good at science and rationality, it would be more useful than ever to have some sort of religion to balance it out. Unchecked rationality gives you Yud; religion gives you de Chardin, and a belief that we're working towards an understanding of something bigger. You don't need Dante's vision of hell when peoples' sentiments towards you and what you've done live on in the noosphere. Kill someone, and that's the first thing any google search or AI will say about you for all eternity. If I were made Pope for the day, the first thing I'd do would be to shut down the schools. Maybe even ban kids from going to church until they were 18. Let them come up with a bunch of really hard-to-answer questions -- ok, but what happened right before the Big Bang? where did it come from? -- that they really want answers to, and then let them in and show them that people had been wrestling with those questions for a long time. Lead by example -- the people who have gone religious seem good and happy -- instead of rulers. Let kids seek religion instead of making them endure it until they get a chance to escape. There's all sorts of other things I'd probably change at that point -- I'd hand over my Popeship to a modern de Chardin, for one -- if I knew enough to know what to change. I'd try to make it more wondrous than dogmatic. But I think letting kids grow into their own need for religion and keeping the doors wide open for them when they do would be a good place to start.

@mdudas My short documentary “Keys to the City”- now streaming on the New Yorker or here on YouTube youtu.be/eg6o7NDIsmM

Congrats @MadebyMoubayed for the feature in the @NewYorker newyorker.com/culture/the-ne…. Great doc, story and characters.

@JOSH_BENNY If you’re in the mood for an untold nyc story this weekend please check out my short doc, “Keys to the City” in The New Yorker newyorker.com/culture/the-ne…

@davidcinema Not the best- best in recent memory is For sure Il Vitelloni- that ending is pure magic.

What is the best Italian movie you've ever seen?

@jerrysaltz Love Michael Haneke’s long takes and pacing. The White Ribbon, Cache, Code Unknown are all brilliant

@jerrysaltz Scorsese turned 80 last month and still can’t wait for what he does with Killers of the Flower Moon so pretty sure Kubrick had a few left in him lol

@MadebyMoubayed Kubrick died at 71.

What 5 people would you most wanted to have lived longer to produce more work? (at least 1 from our time.) 1. Mozart 2. Gericault 3. John Lennon/Jimi Hendrix 4. Proust (died at 51 but his epic was still unfinished.) 5. Félix González-Torres (Jackson Pollock died at 44!) You?

Loved meeting my fellow short list nominees. Exited to see all of your films!

1991 PSA dir. David Lynch. If only he made PSAs against riding the wrong direction in bike lanes

There's a "Museum of Failure" in Sweden which highlights 150+ failed products. It's meant to show that innovation requires risk-taking and failure. Here are 10 gems you may not remember:

Happy Amazon Prime Day or as we say in Brooklyn those packages are as good as as gone day. #PrimeDay

Late to share. But so proud of our team. Keys to the City won best short documentary at the Brooklyn Film Festival! @brooklynfest

Mood #PTA

You ain’t a New Yorker until you get into your first alternate side parking fight (I won the spot🏆) #nyc

@ProfessorJun_ Richard Mosse 🤌🏼

Picasso use to carry around a revolver loaded with blanks and would fire the gun at “morons and philistines” who asked about the meaning of his paintings.