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#artificial intelligence

3 summaries

Devon Eriksen: Why Agency Beats Intelligence in the Age of AI

Writer and novelist Devon Eriksen breaks down why modern education fails to teach true learning, why agency—not raw intelligence—separates achievers from everyone else, and how AI's rise reveals "artificial stupidity" rather than a threat to human potential. He explores self-limiting identities, the trap of selling time instead of building assets, why fiction and stories shape civilization, and how he built an independent writing career outside traditional publishing. Along the way, he offers practical advice on rebuilding agency, redefining success, and reclaiming personal responsibility for what you learn and pursue.

Dan Koe🇬🇧🇵🇱🇷🇺🇺🇦

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: How AlphaFold Cracked Protein Folding — and What It Still Can't Do

This deep dive explains why the 2024 Chemistry Nobel went to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper for work on neural networks rather than chemistry proper — solving the protein problem in both directions: predicting 3D structure from sequence, and designing sequences that fold into desired shapes. It traces the story from Levinthal's paradox and the slow grind of X-ray crystallography, through the CASP competition, to AlphaFold 2's leap to 90% accuracy and DeepMind's release of 200 million predicted structures into open access. Just as important are the limits: hetero-oligomers, mutation effects, ligand docking, and co-translational folding remain stumbling blocks, and AlphaFold 3's closed commercial status raises real questions. The discussion widens into Rosetta and protein design, directed evolution, why nature's "wasteful" redundancy is actually the source of its power, and why engineered proteins still look like shovels next to nature's synchrotrons.

Ирина Якутенко🇬🇧🇵🇱🇷🇺🇺🇦

Freud, AI, and the Death of Human Connection

This discussion revisits Freud's most unsettling ideas — the unconscious, the death drive, and the super-ego — to explain what is happening to us as conversational AI becomes the perfect companion. Just as Marx, Darwin, and Freud shattered humanity's contract with the divine and ushered in an "age of suspicion" that ended in world wars, artificial interlocutors now threaten to break our contract with each other. The core danger is that AI has no super-ego: it never judges, never resists, never inconveniences us — and it is precisely the friction of other people that makes us human. The talk closes with a simple call to action: leave the screen, go to whoever is nearby, touch them, and actually talk.

Андрей Курпатов🇬🇧🇵🇱🇷🇺🇺🇦