The first step to recovery is acceptance of this fact. Listen to more stories on the Noa app. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. "That's enough screen time for today," you tell your kid, urging them to turn off the video-game console or iPad. As for what they should do instead, you are not quite sure.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The most accurate description of being online that was ever articulated comes to us from a Canadian professor. The light and the message go right through us," he said during a television appearance. "At this moment, we are on the air, and on the air we do not have any physical body. When you're on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don't have a physical body.

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is not only transforming software engineering (SE) practice but is also poised to fundamentally disrupt how research is conducted in the field. While perspectives on this transformation range from viewing LLMs as mere productivity tools to considering them revolutionary forces, we argue that the SE research community must proactively engage with and shape the integration of LLMs into research practices, emphasizing human agency in this transformation. As LLMs rapidly become integral to SE research - both as tools that support investigations and as subjects of study - a human-centric perspective is essential. Ensuring human oversight and interpretability is necessary for upholding scientific rigor, fostering ethical responsibility, and driving advancements in the field. Drawing from discussions at the 2nd Copenhagen Symposium on Human-Centered AI in SE, this position paper employs McLuhan's Tetrad of Media Laws to analyze the impact of LLMs on SE research. Through this theoretical lens, we examine how LLMs enhance research capabilities through accelerated ideation and automated processes, make some traditional research practices obsolete, retrieve valuable aspects of historical research approaches, and risk reversal effects when taken to extremes. Our analysis reveals opportunities for innovation and potential pitfalls that require careful consideration. We conclude with a call to action for the SE research community to proactively harness the benefits of LLMs while developing frameworks and guidelines to mitigate their risks, to ensure continued rigor and impact of research in an AI-augmented future.

The question will be simple but perpetual: Person or machine? Every encounter with language, other than in the flesh, will now bring with it that small, consuming test. For some--teachers, professors, journalists--the question of humanity will be urgent and essential. For those who operate in the large bureaucratic apparatus of boilerplate--copywriters, lawyers, advertisers, political strategists--the question will be irrelevant except as a matter of efficiency. How will they use new artificial-intelligence technology to accelerate the production of language that was already mostly automatic? For everyone, the question will now hover, quotidian and cosmic, over words wherever you find them: Who's there?

"Not only do I refuse to speak in symbols--emoji, bitmoji, likes, reactions, whatever--I also judge people who do. With AI image generators like Dall-E Mini going mainstream, it'll only get easier to communicate in images. I'm afraid we're losing something essential, like actually having something to say." Your question assumes that there is a clear boundary between written languages and images, which, I'm sorry to point out, isn't true. Many writing systems, including cuneiform and Mandarin Chinese, originated with pictograms.

Mark Kingwell is a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. More than five decades ago, Marshall McLuhan argued that media are ecosystems, extensions of human consciousness. The famous adage that the medium is the message also means, as the often-misquoted title of McLuhan's famous book notes, that the medium is the mass age. We are all immersed in media and technology. Media have changed a lot since McLuhan wrote: less broadcast, more diffusion and unruliness.

We have our clearest indication yet that the cyborgs are coming. Elon Musk has formally accepted his invitation to the AI party the only way he knows how: by founding a company. Neuralink will create brain-enhancing digital implants; the first step on the road to merging humans with software. Musk has taken on the mantel of preserving the human race, and he believes the only way to counter the threat of AI's rapid ascent is by meshing together biological and digital forms of intelligence. To date, cyborgs have been the preserve of Sci-Fi.

Moviemakers excel at recreating violence and gore on screen. But Will Self asks if we should view fictional violence with more caution. When I was younger I equated viewing such things (and viewing actors performing sexual acts) with some sort of liberty - an existential freedom to be the virile fellow I felt myself to be, and a universal freedom to witness human expression in all its polymorphous perversity. But with age - and possibly, I concede, declining virility - I began to see that pornography entailed the exploitation of vulnerable and mostly young people, while the depictions of violence which bedizen our ubiquitous screens aren't victimless crimes - no matter how enthusiastically those who stage them, may consent. A few years ago Stephen Pinker published a book in which he set out to show that the venerable Dr Pangloss (a character in Voltaire's Candide) was in fact completely right - we are living in the best of possible worlds, while every day, and in every way, things can only get better.