Quantifying our lives is easier than it's ever been. But a philosopher of games warns that external metrics and data can never capture what's truly important. There are plenty of useful things a metric can reveal. There are even more it can obscure or corrupt. It took me well over a decade of tracking my own life in ever greater detail to fully appreciate this duality, which probably reveals something about both me and the nature of measurement. Like a lot of people bitten by the self-quantifying bug, I initially started gathering personal data to pursue a nebulous collection of goals and desires.

The great German philosopher, who died in March, understood how much depended on a principled public sphere. Habermas emerged from the uncompromising Frankfurt School, but his work was considerably less fatalistic. You wake up and brace yourself for the barrage of toxic gibberish that constitutes the modern public sphere. Your e-mail is overrun with spam, scams, and smut. There are voice mails from no one about nothing. A glance at the news reveals that the President is continuing to spew lies and obscenities; that a trillionaire is peddling white-supremacist propaganda on a social-media platform he owns; that a chart-topping musical artist is praising Hitler, or apologizing for praising Hitler, or praising Hitler once again. Publications from the on down employ clickbait headlines that treat you like a starving rat in a Pavlovian experiment. A.I. systems simulate the experience of talking to an arrogant ten-year-old boy who knows far less than he thinks he does. When pressed, the chatbots admit that they cannot "naturally understand human morality, dignity, culture, or meaning." It all adds up to a continuous discursive tinnitus--a buzz of random, fake, stupid, sinister chatter that nobody wants and nobody can stop. The person who should have been best able to explain how we got here was the great German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who illuminated how a feisty, principled public sphere is integral to democracy. But Habermas died in March, at the age of ninety-six, and, although he remained active until his final months, commenting on Ukraine, Gaza, and Eurobonds, he struggled to understand the turn history had taken. As a teen-ager in 1945, he had witnessed American soldiers enter his home town of Gummersbach, near Cologne, carrying messages of freedom and openness. Eight decades later, he watched American voters choose a leader who had advertised his fascistic bent in blood-and-soil rhetoric, fantasies of punitive violence, and a taste for bombastic architectural kitsch.

Silicon Valley is turning to ethicists to shape the future of AI. Philosophy has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as pedantic and abstruse. In one of the most prominent debates of the 20th century, philosophers spent a great deal of energy arguing over what means. Paul Graham, the legendary tech investor, studied philosophy as a college student, which seemed "an impressively impractical thing to do," as he later wrote. But over time, Graham became disillusioned: "I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring," he explained .

Nick Land believes that digital superintelligence is going to kill us all. In San Francisco, his followers ask: What if, instead of trying to stop an A.I. takeover, you work to bring it on as fast as possible? In the spring of 1994, at a philosophy conference on a run-down modernist campus in the English Midlands, a group of academics, media theorists, artists, hackers, and d.j.s gathered to hear a young professor give a talk at a conference called "Virtual Futures." It was ten o'clock in the morning, and most of the attendees were wiped out from a rave that had taken place in the student union the night before. But the talk--titled "Meltdown"--was highly anticipated. The professor, Nick Land, was tenured in the philosophy department at the University of Warwick, at the time one of the top philosophy programs in the U.K. Land had gained a cult following for his radical anti-humanism, his wild predictions about the future of technology, and his erratic teaching style. Soon, his academic presentations would become increasingly "experimental"; at a conference in 1996, he lay on the floor, reciting cut-up poetry in what an attendee described as a "demon voice" while jungle music played in the background.

Why Experts Can't Agree on Whether AI Has a Mind Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. Pillay is an editorial fellow at TIME. I'm not used to getting nasty emails from a holy man, says Professor Michael Levin, a developmental biologist at Tufts University. Levin was presenting his research to a group of engineers interested in spiritual matters in India, arguing that properties like "mind" and intelligence can be observed even in cellular systems, and that they exist on a spectrum. But when he pushed further--arguing that the same properties emerge everywhere, including in computers--the reception shifted.

In the age of A.I., we endlessly debate what consciousness looks like. Can a camera see things more clearly? Earlier that day, she'd been onstage at the conference I was attending and had been teased for a gesture that looked as though she were flipping off the audience. Now she was in the hotel lobby, in a black gown, holding court. She stepped in front of a bright-orange wall. I had brought an 85-mm. "What are your hopes for the future of humanity?" She wasn't keen to answer, but she responded to the camera.

Fifty years after her death in New York, Hannah Arendt has become the most popular philosopher of our time. For good reason: Her views are just as timely as ever. It must be so nice to play Hannah Arendt. No fewer than five actresses are on stage this evening at the Deutsches Theater Berlin to portray the philosopher. The piece is an adaptation of the graphic novel by American illustrator Ken Krimstein about the philosopher's life, called The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt," combined with scenes from the famous interview that journalist Günter Gaus conducted with Arendt in 1964 for German public broadcaster ZDF. The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 49/2025 (November 28th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL. They play Arendt and a few of her contemporaries, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the writer Walter Benjamin, her husband Heinrich Blücher. There is a great deal of speech in the play, especially from Arendt herself. The places of her life are ticked off, her ...

AI may blunt our thinking skills - here's what you can do about it There is growing evidence that our reliance on generative AI tools is reducing our ability to think clearly and critically, but it doesn't have to be that way Socrates wasn't the greatest fan of the written word. Famous for leaving no texts to posterity, the great philosopher is said to have believed that a reliance on writing destroys the memory and weakens the mind . Some 2400 years later, Socrates's fears seem misplaced - particularly in light of evidence that writing things down improves memory formation . A growing number of psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers worry that ChatGPT and similar generative AI tools will chip away at our powers of information recall and blunt our capacity for clear reasoning. What's more, while Socrates relied on clever rhetoric to make his argument, these researchers are grounding theirs in empirical data.

Kant's life was famously dull, but he was less of a hermit than is often supposed.

Some of the world's most interesting thinkers about thinking think they might've cracked machine sentience. And I think they might be onto something. As a journalist who covers AI, I hear from countless people who seem utterly convinced that ChatGPT, Claude, or some other chatbot has achieved "sentience." The Turing test was aced a while back, yes, but unlike rote intelligence, these things are not so easily pinned down. Large language models will claim to think for themselves, even describe inner torments or profess undying loves, but such statements don't imply interiority.