“All will come in time, my dear,” said his mother; “a good son makes a good husband.” “And a very loving papa,” said Mr. Malcolm. “Oh, spare me, sir,” said poor Charles; “how have I deserved this?”

It is a life of poverty and communion that, like the first Christian community, prefigures a new world: one in which the unity and equality hidden beneath the divisions of the present (race, nationality, gender) is realized.

Attacks on recently acquired rights will mean pain and suffering, especially for trans people and people of color. Once again, living the same kinds of lives as straight people may become less possible. Strange as it may sound, Newman’s very Catholic novel can help us glimpse what might be gained from these losses.

It seemed as if the kiss of his friend had conveyed into his own soul the enthusiasm which his words betokened. He felt himself possessed, he knew not how, by a high superhuman power, which seemed able to push through mountains, and to walk the sea.

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.