The delete button makes it so that anything you’re unsure of you can get rid of, so nothing new has a chance. Writing by hand is a revelation for people. Maybe that’s why they asked me to NASA – I still know how to use my hands… there is a different way of thinking that goes along with them.

Boring meeting, you have a pen, the usual clowns are yakking. Most people will draw something, even people who can’t draw. I say “If you’re bored, what do you draw?” And everybody has something they draw. Like “Oh yeah, my little guy, I draw him.” Or “I draw eyeballs, or palm trees.” … So I asked them “Why do you think you do that? Why do you think you doodle during those meetings?” I believe that it’s because it makes having to endure that particular situation more bearable, by changing our experience of time. It’s so slight. I always say it’s the difference between, if you’re not doodling, the minutes feel like a cheese grater on your face. But if you are doodling, it’s more like Brillo. It’s not much better, but there is a difference. You could handle Brillo a little longer than the cheese grater.

"The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleasant experience for me… It was on those quiet weekend nights when even my parents were out having fun that I began making serious attempts to make stories in comics form." - Adrian Tomine, introduction to 32 Stories

I don’t know what the strip’s going to be about when I start. I never know. I oftentimes have—I call it the word-bag. Just a bag of words. I’ll just reach in there, and I’ll pull out a word, and it’ll say “ping-pong.” I’ll just have that in my head, and I’ll start drawing the pictures as if I can… I hear a sentence, I just hear it. As soon as I hear even the beginning of the first sentence, then I just… I write really slow. So I’ll be writing that, and I’ll know what’s going to go at the top of the panel. Then, when it gets to the end, usually I’ll know what the next one is. By three sentences or four in that first panel, I stop, and then I say “Now it’s time for the drawing.” Then I’ll draw. But then I’ll hear the next one over on another page! Or when I’m drawing Marlys and Arna, I might hear her say something, but then I’ll hear Marlys say something back. So once that first sentence is there, I have all kinds of choices as to where I put my brush. But if nothing is happening, then I just go over to what I call my decoy page. It’s like decoy ducks. I go over there and just start messing around.

Craig: Early 2008, 2009, 2010, I was very negative on Facebook. Very early because I remember explicitly that Facebook was eating up all the designers, uh, from Brooklyn who were doing genuinely interesting work. I remember being really depressed about that. But if Facebook offers you a million dollar salary — especially in 2008, 2009, 2010, it’s hard to turn down. But it felt like there was this incredible compromise that had started to happen.

David: This is a really important point of the 21st century, which is I graduated in 2001, and I don’t think anyone around me, even the money hungry people were like, I’m going to be a billionaire. No, it was just on zero people’s minds. And the best was like, dude, did you know you could go work for an investment bank and within five years you could be making $1 million?

Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.

Noting the use of chatbots as therapists, Malfacini suggested that “companion A.I. users may have more fragile mental states than the average population”. Furthermore, she noted one of the main dangers of relying on chatbots for personal satisfaction; namely: “if people rely on companion A.I. to fulfill needs that human relationships are not, this may create complacency in relationships that warrant investment, change, or dissolution. If we defer or ignore needed investments in human relationships as a result of companion A.I., it could become an unhealthy crutch.

Čapek’s robots are a tool for the explications of the contradictions between the limitations of humans and humanism. Humanity is led to destruction by human intention, and technology multiplies the consequences of these actions. […] Yet, if one includes Čapek’s view on philosophy and religion in the premise of the play, then the human-posthuman interactions are not only about loss, but also about hope. Hope is in the technological mirror. Or life will start anew since altruism could be reflected throughout robots and all other mirroring relations.

We are not the images of angels or lesser gods but of the Creator Himself. And we are crowned “with glory and honour.” I propose that our conception of humankind is too anthropomorphic, too narrowly defined — as physical, mental, or moral — as mortal, either damned or saved, but not as the overwhelming power we are as a creature, a species. Every day we are confronted with the actual and potential effects of this power, but we are never properly in awe of it.

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. […] And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. The danger most immediately to be feared in ‘technological progress’ is the degradation and obsolescence of the body. Implicit in the technological revolution from the beginning has been a new version of an old dualism, one always destructive, and now more destructive than ever. […] More recently, since the beginning of the technological revolution, more and more people have looked upon the body, along with the rest of the natural creation, as intolerably imperfect by mechanical standards. They see the body as an encumbrance of the mind – the mind, that is, as reduced to a set of mechanical ideas that can be implemented in machines – so that they hate it and long to be free of it. The body has limits that the machine does not have; therefore, remove the body from the machine so that the machine can continue as an unlimited idea.