Elaina Plott Calobro write for The Atlantic on the state of play in Canada, ten years after legalizing medical aid in dying: The details of the assisted-death experience have become a preoccupation of Canadian life. Patients meticulously orchestrate their final moments, planning celebrations around them: weekend house parties before a Sunday-night euthanasia in the garden; … Read more“Canada is Killing Itself”
Michael Cholbi writes for Aeon: Freedom is a notoriously complex and contested philosophical notion, and I won’t pretend to settle any of the big controversies it raises. But I believe that a type of freedom we can call freedom over death – that is, a freedom in which we shape the timing and circumstances of … Read more“Freedom over death”
Ashley Belanger writes for Ars Technica: As artificial intelligence has advanced, AI tools have emerged to make it possible to easily create digital replicas of lost loved ones, which can be generated without the knowledge or consent of the person who died. Trained on the data of the dead, these tools, sometimes called grief bots … Read more“How to draft a will to avoid becoming an AI ghost—it’s not easy”
Adam Lee writes for OnlySky on the potential of New York becoming the eleventh US state to legalize Medical Assistance in Dying, and on the secular Humanist ethical underpinnings of MAID: If we have a freedom, we can choose how to exercise it. That choice necessarily includes the right not to exercise it. Freedom of … Read more“The Future of Dying”
Alexis Shotwell writes for Psyche on Ursula K. LeGuin’s practical philosophy:
Amy Kurzweil and Daniel Story write for Aeon on the questions raised by interactive LLM AI simulations of deceased people: These apps and algorithms are part of a growing class of technologies that marry artificial intelligence (AI) with the data that people leave behind. These technologies will become more sophisticated and accessible as the parameters … Read more“Chatbots of the dead”
Thomas Moynihan writes for Aeon: Just under 500 years ago, Nicolaus Copernicus initiated a string of discoveries eventually proving our planet is not the centre of a tidy, manageable cosmos. Instead, Earth pirouettes around a mediocre star within an ungraspably vast Universe. It took generations for people to start noticing – and giving names to … Read more“The bookends of time”
The reason you don’t know is because you’re going to die, and nobody is going to wrap their heads around death. You can’t do it. It’s impossible. You can’t conceive of your own death. You don’t know what it means. Any religious person who tells you, “Well, this has what happens when you die. When … Read moreErik Davis on the Fact of Death as a Liberator
Hillary Kelly interviews author Oliver Burkemann for The Atlantic: Burkeman cheerfully acknowledges that repetition is vital to his message—and to the way we self-reinforce it. A favorite tweet, he told me with a hearty laugh, goes something like this: “Four Thousand Weeks is basically just Oliver Burkeman shouting You are finite; you’re going to die … Read more“You Are Going to Die”: Oliver Burkeman’s “Four Thousand Weeks” and “Meditations for Mortals”