Autonomous Learning Quotes

In order to become a reflective, autonomous and self-mentoring individual, one has to continuously learn from people, experiences and new ideas.

In a era of autonomously driven electric cars and vehicles capable of taking us to Mars, our education system is the equivalent of a horse and carriage.

Neuroception precedes perception. Story follows state. Through a polyvagal framework, the important question “What happened?” is explored not to document the details of an event but to learn about the autonomic response. The clues to a client’s present-time suffering can be found in their autonomic response history.

You cannot teach antifragility directly, but you can give your children the gift of experience—the thousands of experiences they need to become resilient, autonomous adults. The gift begins with the recognition that kids need some unstructured, unsupervised time in order to learn how to judge risks for themselves and practice dealing with things like frustration, boredom, and interpersonal conflict. The most important thing they can do with that time is to play, especially in free play, outdoors, with other kids.

The letter is only an aid to philosophical communication, the actual essence of which consists in arousing a particular train of thought. Someone speaking thinks and produces—someone listening reflects—and reproduces. Words are a deceptive medium for what is already though—unreliable vehicles of a particular, specific stimulus. The true teacher is a guide. If the pupil genuinely desires truth it requires only a hint to show him how to find what he is seeking. Accordingly the representation of philosophy consists purely of themes—of initial propositions—principles. It exists only for autonomous lovers of truth. The analytical exposition of the theme is only for those who are sluggish or unpracticed. The latter must learn thereby how to fly and keep themselves moving in a particular direction. Attentiveness is a centripetal force. The effective relation between that which is directed and the object of direction begins with the given direction. If we hold fast to this direction we are apodictically certain of reaching the goal that has been set. True collaboration in philosophy then is a common movement toward a beloved world—whereby we relieve each other in the most advanced outpost, a movement that demands the greatest effort against the resisting element within which we are flying.

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.

If you want to manage your emotions better, your brain gives you two options: You can learn to regulate them from the top down or from the bottom up. Knowing the difference between top down and bottom up regulation is central for understanding and treating traumatic stress. Top-down regulation involves strengthening the capacity of the watchtower to monitor your body's sensations. Mindfulness meditation and yoga can help with this. Bottom-up regulation involves recalibrating the autonomic nervous system...we can access the ANS through breath, movement, or touch.

After all, how can we hope to raise our children to be freethinkers and free-spirited if we aren’t these things ourselves? How can we raise independent, autonomous children if we ourselves aren’t independent and autonomous? How can we raise another human being, another spirit, if our own being has been largely dismissed, our spirit systematically squelched? It may be helpful for me to share with you some of the areas in which I am learning to accept myself: I accept I am a human being before I am a parent I accept I have limitations and many shortcomings, and this is okay I accept I don’t always know the right way I accept I am often ashamed to admit my own failings I accept I frequently lose my center worse than my child ever does I accept I can be selfish and unthinking in my dealings with my child I accept I sometimes fumble and stumble as a parent I accept I don’t always know how to respond to my child I accept that at times I say and do the wrong thing with my child I accept that at times I’m too tired to be sane I accept that at times I’m too preoccupied to be present for my child I accept I am trying my best, and that this is good enough I accept my imperfections and my imperfect life I accept my desire for power and control I accept my ego I accept my yearning for consciousness (even though I often sabotage myself when I am about to enter this state). When

To dwell in the place of God, as Evagrius puts it, is to live with a particular intense awareness of this reality, to know oneself not as a solitary, autonomous being but as one whose identity can only be conceived of as existing within an intricate web of encompassing relationships. The primary work of contemplative practice is to become more aware of this web of relationships, to learn to live within it fully and responsibly and to give expression to it in one’s life.

significantly in his work by psychologist Mary Ainsworth, a Canadian researcher who helped give shape to his ideas and test them. Together, they identified four elements of attachment: •We seek out, monitor, and try to maintain emotional and physical connection with our loved ones. Throughout life, we rely on them to be emotionally accessible, responsive, and engaged with us. •We reach out for our loved ones particularly when we are uncertain, threatened, anxious, or upset. Contact with them gives us a sense of having a safe haven, where we will find comfort and emotional support; this sense of safety teaches us how to regulate our own emotions and how to connect with and trust others. •We miss our loved ones and become extremely upset when they are physically or emotionally remote; this separation anxiety can become intense and incapacitating. Isolation is inherently traumatizing for human beings. •We depend on our loved ones to support us emotionally and be a secure base as we venture into the world and learn and explore. The more we sense that we are effectively connected, the more autonomous and separate we can be.

In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.

We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.

Then growing up is not a matter of discovering who or what one really is, but joining the general amnesia whereby each of us pretends to be an autonomous person and learns how to play the social game of constantly reassuring each other that, yes, you are a person, just like me, and I’m okay, you’re okay.

In the cult, the people in power dictate what cult members are to do. Children raised in cults are systematically stripped of their own autonomous power and forced to feel powerful only in the destructive context allowed by the cult, and always under the power of the leader. Ritual abuse survivors have had to learn to be outer oriented - to perceive what is expected of them and do that, whether it is healthy for them or not. When a therapist creates a context in which he or she is the leader, and the client is to listen, learn, and follow what the therapist says, the therapist has inadvertently replicated the power system of the cult. That is not to say that the therapist has no power; the therapist has a lot of power, but the power the therapist has resides in authority based upon his or her expertise, knowledge, training and sensitivity. The point is to use this authority in a way in which the client can also begin to feel his or her own authority, and begin to develop a healthy feeling of power. The word used quite often now is "empowerment." How do you empower a client?

Do I dare set forth here,” writes Rousseau in Emile, or On Education, “the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.” For Rousseau and his successors, it is always better to let children discover for themselves and build their own knowledge, even if it implies that they might waste hours tinkering and exploring. . . . This time is never lost, Rousseau believed, because it eventually yields autonomous minds, capable not only of thinking for themselves but also of solving real problems, rather than passively receiving knowledge and spitting out rote and ready-made solutions. “Teach your student to observe the phenomena of nature,” says Rousseau, “and you will soon rouse his curiosity; but if you want his curiosity to grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy it. Lay the problems before him and let him solve them himself.

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue. Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only to how we speak, but to how we process information, the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it. Many of us have never taken a class in grammar, yet we know in our bones that a transitive verb takes an object, that a subject needs a predicate; we know without thinking the difference between third person singular and third person plural. We may mention “race,” referring to people as black or white or Latino or Asian or indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

For the future welfare of the settlement, it was essential that all the colonists—Leideners and Strangers alike—learn to live together as best they could. This nonjudgmental attitude did not come naturally to the Leideners. As Separatists, they considered themselves godly exceptions to the vast, unredeemed majority of humankind. A sense of exclusivity was fundamental to how they perceived themselves in the world. And yet there is evidence that Robinson’s sense of his congregation as an autonomous enclave of righteousness had become considerably less rigid during his twelve years in Holland.

more social and gregarious.” We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.

As I pointed out, feudalism is essentially a redistributive system. Peasants and craftsmen produce things to a large extent autonomously; lords siphon off a share of what they produce, usually by dint of some complex set of legal rights and traditions ("direct-juro-political extraction" is the technical phrase I learned in college), and then go about portioning out shares of the loot to their own staff, flunkies, warriors, retainers - and to a lesser extent, by sponsoring feasts and festivals and by occasional gifts and favours, giving some of it back to the craftsmen and peasants once again. In such an arrangement, it makes little sense to speak of separate spheres of "politics" and "the economy" because the goods are extracted through political means and distributed for political purposes.

Maybe I’m not cut out for monogamy,” G. had said to me early on. “Maybe I should just live in a room by myself and have girlfriends.” Another woman might have said, “Now, where did I put my coat?” Being a madly infatuated rationalist who had read her Simone de Beauvoir, I took a deep breath and carefully and calmly explained that of course he had to make up his own mind about how he wanted to live, and that I understood fidelity wasn’t for everyone, that some people could be perfectly happy without it, but I wanted to give my whole self in love and I couldn’t do that if I was being compared to other women on a daily basis (which I was) or if our relationship was only tentative and provisional (which it was). “Sweetie!” he said when I finished. “I love it that you can say how you feel without getting angry at me.” That other woman would have slammed the door behind her before he’d finished speaking. They say philanderers are attractive to women because of the thrill of the chase—you want to be the one to capture and tame that wild quarry. But what if a deeper truth is that women fall for such men because they want to be those men? Autonomous, in charge, making their own rules. Imagine that room G. spoke of, in which the women would come and go—is there not something attractive about it? Rain tapping softly on the tin ceiling, a desk, a lamp, a bed. A woman dashes up the narrow stairs, her raincoat flaring, her wet face lifted up like a flower. And then, the next day—maybe even the same day—different footsteps, another expectant face. I had to admit, it was an exciting scenario. You wouldn’t want to be one of the women trooping up and down the staircase, but you might want to be the man who lived in the room.

As successful companies mature, employees gradually come to assume that the priorities they have learned to accept, and the ways of doing things and methods of making decisions that they have employed so successfully, are the right way to work. Once members of the organization begin to adopt ways of working and criteria for making decisions by assumption, rather than by conscious decision, then those processes and values come to constitute the organization’s culture. 7 As companies grow from a few employees to hundreds and thousands, the challenge of getting all employees to agree on what needs to be done and how it should be done so that the right jobs are done repeatedly and consistently can be daunting for even the best managers. Culture is a powerful management tool in these situations. Culture enables employees to act autonomously and causes them to act consistently. Hence, the location of the

I wanted to find my own identity and be autonomous at the same time that I wanted to find a mate who would rescue me, who would provide and protect. Of course I wanted to be able to provide for myself. Just in case that did not happen, I wanted the luxury of backup. I was not a free spirit. I wanted to blend old-fashioned values learned at home—which cautioned me to be conservative, take care, and be responsible—with New Age spirituality and radical ideas of freedom and choice. No matter how much I might have longed to free myself from a sense of responsibility to the collective good, to family and community, I was psychically bound. I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go. I was, like generations of women before me, split, torn between two competing identities—the longing to be the liberated, independent, sexually free woman and the desire to settle down and be domesticated.

When, during and after the Reformation, the universities lost their status as so many autonomous parts of the universal church, they lost their independence correspondingly. In Protestant Europe, they came under the jurisdiction of the national churches and of the rapacious national monarchies; in Catholic Europe --although to a lesser extent--they came under the jurisdiction of the reinvigorated and consolidated Papacy, and of the sovereigns who, as in Spain and France, made royal influence over the church establishment within their realms a condition of their support for the Roman cause. The dissolution of medieval universalism meant that learning, like nearly everything else, was forced to submit to new or more rigid denominations. With the complete or partial secularization of society which followed upon the French Revolutionary era, in nearly every country except Britain, the universities were stripped of what remained of their old rights and became little better than state corporations.

there’s another way to use the word ‘communism’: not as a property regime but in the original sense of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’. There’s also a certain minimal, ‘baseline’ communism which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough (say, they are drowning), and the cost of meeting them is modest enough (say, they are asking for you to throw them a rope), then of course any decent person would comply. Baseline communism of this sort could even be considered the very grounds of human sociability, since it is only one’s bitter enemies who would not be treated this way. What varies is just how far it is felt such baseline communism should properly extend. In many societies – and American societies of that time appear to have been among them – it would have been quite inconceivable to refuse a request for food. For seventeenth-century Frenchmen in North America, this was clearly not the case: their range of baseline communism appears to have been quite restricted, and did not extend to food and shelter – something which scandalized Americans. But just as we earlier witnessed a confrontation between two very different concepts of equality, here we are ultimately witnessing a clash between very different concepts of individualism. Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other. Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom. The same could be said of indigenous political systems that Europeans encountered across much of the Great Lakes region. Everything operated to ensure that no one’s will would be subjugated to that of anyone else. It was only over time, as Americans learned more about Europe, and Europeans began to consider what it would mean to translate American ideals of individual liberty into their own societies, that the term ‘equality’ began to gain ground as a feature of the discourse between them.

In Delhi and many of the Hindi-speaking states more generally male stares were different, were intensely unselfconscious and intensely unrelenting, so that even when you weren't being harassed in more explicit verbal or physical ways you still had to use all of your psychological resources to resist these gazes over the course of each day, to prevent these men from trying to enter your soul through your eyes, like strangers who enter the privacy of your house without permission and without even bothering to take off their shoes. You had to employ these psychological resources so constantly over the course of the day, losing even the freedom to think autonomously in your own mind, that by the time you returned home you were always utterly exhausted. The cumulative effect of years of being subject to these gazes was that women who lived in the capital had learned to curb the movement of their own eyes to remarkable degrees, restricting their gazes in public spaces to areas where their eyes couldn't be intercepted, toward their feet or their laps or into the screen of their phones...

We already have eight hundred million people living in hunger—and population is growing by eighty million a year. Over a billion people are in poverty—and present industrial strategies are making them poorer, not richer. The percentage of old people will double by 2050—and already there aren’t enough young people to care for them. Cancer rates are projected to increase by seventy percent in the next fifteen years. Within two decades our oceans will contain more microplastics than fish. Fossil fuels will run out before the end of the century. Do you have an answer to those problems? Because I do. Robot farmers will increase food production twentyfold. Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on—but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.” He paused for breath, then went on, “My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that—how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design, are all taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for. The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism. This shit has to happen. And you need to ask yourself, do you want to be part of that change? Or do you want to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the details?” We had all heard this speech, or some version of it, either in our job interviews, or at company events, or in passionate late-night tirades. And on every single one of us it had had a deep and transformative effect. Most of us had come to Silicon Valley back in those heady days when it seemed a new generation finally had the tools and the intelligence to change the world. The hippies had tried and failed; the yuppies and bankers had had their turn. Now it was down to us techies. We were fired up, we were zealous, we felt the nobility of our calling…only to discover that the general public, and our backers along with them, were more interested in 140 characters, fitness trackers, and Grumpy Cat videos. The greatest, most powerful deep-learning computers in humanity’s existence were inside Google and Facebook—and all humanity had to show for it were adwords, sponsored links, and teenagers hooked on sending one another pictures of their genitals.

The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity—the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history. But, like the God of monotheism, humanity is a work of the imagination. The only observable reality is the multitudinous human animal, with its conflicting goals, values and ways of life. As an object of worship, this fractious species has some disadvantages. Old-fashioned monotheism had the merit of admitting that very little can be known of God. As far back as the prophet Isaiah, the faithful have allowed that the Deity may have withdrawn from the world. Awaiting some sign of a divine presence, they have encountered only deus absconditus—an absent God. The end result of trying to abolish monotheism is much the same. Generations of atheists have lived in expectation of the arrival of a truly human species: the communal workers of Marx, Mill’s autonomous individuals and Nietzsche’s absurd Übermensch, among many others. None of these fantastical creatures has been seen by human eyes. A truly human species remains as elusive as any Deity. Humanity is the deus absconditus of modern atheism. A free-thinking atheism would begin by questioning the prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom. Without the faith that they stand at the head of an advancing species they could hardly go on. Only by immersing themselves in such nonsense can they make sense of their lives. Without it, they face panic and despair. According to the grandiose theories today’s atheists have inherited from Positivism, religion will wither away as science continues its advance. But while science is advancing more quickly than it has ever done, religion is thriving—at times violently. Secular believers say this is a blip—eventually, religion will decline and die away. But their angry bafflement at the re-emergence of traditional faiths shows they do not believe in their theories themselves. For them religion is as inexplicable as original sin. Atheists who demonize religion face a problem of evil as insoluble as that which faces Christianity. If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites. If you can see what a millenarian theocracy in early sixteenth-century Münster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding. Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.

The early Church is no mystery, but I must say that, for me personally, it was a terrible challenge. I studied the writings of the four witnesses. I studied everything else I could find from the early Church. I looked and looked for something resembling my own faith, for something at least similar to the distinctives and practices of my own local church . . . and found only Catholicism. It was like something out of a dream, a nightmare. I had always believed, on the best authority I knew, that Roman Catholicism as it exists today is a rigid, clotted relic of the Middle Ages, the faded and fading memory of a Christianity distorted beyond all recognition by centuries of syncretism and superstition. Its organization and its officers were nothing but the christianized fossils of Emperor Constantine and his lieutenants; its transubstantiating Mass and its regenerating baptism, the ghosts of pagan mystery religion lingering over Vatican Hill. Catholicism represented to me the very opposite of primitive Christianity. The idea that anything remotely like it should be found in the first and second centuries was laughable, preposterous. I knew, like everyone else, that the early Church was a loose fraternity of simple, autonomous, spontaneous believers, with no rituals, no organization, who got their beliefs from the Bible only and who always, therefore, got it right . . . like me. I also knew that the object of the Christian game, here in the modern world, is to “put things back to the way they were in the early Church”. That, after all, was what our glorious Reformation had been all about. That, for crying out loud, was the whole meaning of Protestantism. So, as you might guess, finding apostolic succession in A.D. 96, or the Sacrifice of the Altar in 150, did my settled Evangelical way of life no good at all. Since that time I have learned that many other Evangelical Christians have experienced this same painful discovery.

Any parent would be dismayed to think that this was their child’s experience of learning, of socializing, and of herself. Maya is an introvert; she is out of her element in a noisy and overstimulating classroom where lessons are taught in large groups. Her teacher told me that she’d do much better in a school with a calm atmosphere where she could work with other kids who are “equally hardworking and attentive to detail,” and where a larger portion of the day would involve independent work. Maya needs to learn to assert herself in groups, of course, but will experiences like the one I witnessed teach her this skill? The truth is that many schools are designed for extroverts. Introverts need different kinds of instruction from extroverts, write College of William and Mary education scholars Jill Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. And too often, “very little is made available to that learner except constant advice on becoming more social and gregarious.” We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself. The school environment can be highly unnatural, especially from the perspective of an introverted child who loves to work intensely on projects he cares about, and hang out with one or two friends at a time. In the morning, the door to the bus opens and discharges its occupants in a noisy, jostling mass. Academic classes are dominated by group discussions in which a teacher prods him to speak up. He eats lunch in the cacophonous din of the cafeteria, where he has to jockey for a place at a crowded table. Worst of all, there’s little time to think or create. The structure of the day is almost guaranteed to sap his energy rather than stimulate it. Why do we accept this one-size-fits-all situation as a given when we know perfectly well that adults don’t organize themselves this way? We often marvel at how introverted, geeky kids “blossom” into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it’s not the children who change but their environments. As adults, they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them. They don’t have to live in whatever culture they’re plunked into. Research from a field known as “person-environment fit” shows that people flourish when, in the words of psychologist Brian Little, they’re “engaged in occupations, roles or settings that are concordant with their personalities.” The inverse is also true: kids stop learning when they feel emotionally threatened.

Machine learning also has a growing role on the battlefield. Learners can help dissipate the fog of war, sifting through reconnaissance imagery, processing after-action reports, and piecing together a picture of the situation for the commander. Learning powers the brains of military robots, helping them keep their bearings, adapt to the terrain, distinguish enemy vehicles from civilian ones, and home in on their targets. DARPA’s AlphaDog carries soldiers’ gear for them. Drones can fly autonomously with the help of learning algorithms; although they are still partly controlled by human pilots, the trend is for one pilot to oversee larger and larger swarms. In the army of the future, learners will greatly outnumber soldiers, saving countless lives.

The defining feature of Type r processing is its autonomy. Type r processes are termed autonomous because: r) their execution is rapid, 2) their execution is mandatory when the triggering stimuli are encountered, 3) they do not put a heavy load on central processing capacity (that is, they do not require conscious attention), 4) they are not dependent on input from high-level control systems, and 5) they can operate in parallel without interfering with each other or with Type 2 processing. Type i processing would include behavioral regulation by the emotions; the encapsulated modules for solving specific adaptive problems that have been posited by evolutionary psychologists; processes of implicit learning; and the automatic firing of overlearned associations 4 Type i processing, because of its computational ease, is a common processing default. Type i processes are sometimes termed the adaptive unconscious in order to emphasize that Type i processes accomplish a host of useful things-face recognition, proprioception, language ambiguity resolution, depth perception, etc. -all of which are beyond our awareness. Heuristic processing is a term often used for Type i processing-processing that is fast, automatic, and computationally inexpensive, and that does not engage in extensive analysis of all the possibilities. Type 2 processing contrasts with Type I processing on each of the critical properties that define the latter. Type 2 processing is relatively slow and computationally expensive-it is the focus of our awareness. Many Type 1 processes can operate at once in parallel, but only one Type 2 thought or a very few can be executing at once-Type 2 processing is thus serial processing. Type 2 processing is often language based and rule based. It is what psychologists call controlled processing, and it is the type of processing going on when we talk of things like "conscious problem solving.

We don’t start our lives in a state of independence and then face the challenge of creating some sort of relationship or bond with others. But when we are supposed to argue for the importance of a society we almost always start here: with an autonomous individual, and then we enumerate the reasons why he should create dependencies and relationships. – It’ll be easier to produce food. – It’ll be easier to defend ourselves against wild animals. – It will make him happier. – He can get help when he is sick. – He will live longer. There are many advantages to having other people around. As if we had ever had any other choice. The process is actually the opposite. We are born into other people’s demands and expectations. To be a child is to be almost completely dependent on others. We have never known anything else. Totally at the mercy of their hopes, demands, love, neuroses, traumas, disappointments and unrealized lives. To take care of a child is in a way to constantly be meeting the needs of another, and from this intimacy, the child must learn, step by step, to become more independent. As the feminist theorist Virginia Held has pointed out: the natural human state is to be enveloped by our dependency on others. The challenge is to break out of this and find one’s own identity. Carve out more and more space for one’s self. From within a context of other people, relationships and the world they bring, you set out to find what’s you. Those who take care of the child must themselves be able to support a separate identity. Not be swallowed by constant engagement or to be enticed into finding all of their value by being so completely needed by someone else. Managing to do this and to keep the relationships of mutual dependency healthy is the challenge that shapes most lives and societies. Every day and every hour. So many of the mental and emotional wounds that characterize our lives are created here. And perhaps it’s not strange that we are drawn to fantasies about things being different. Fantasies about being alone. Floating in an empty space with just an umbilical cord connecting us to our surroundings. That economic man doesn’t match up to reality is one thing. We’ve known that for years. What’s interesting is that we so dearly want him to align with reality. Apparently we want to be like him. We want his selfsufficiency, his reason and the predictable universe that he inhabits. Most of all, we seem to be prepared to pay a high price for it.

machine learning emphasizes the incremental process of self-learning and automatically detecting patterns through experience derived from exposure to data, data mining is a less autonomous technique of extracting hidden insight.

When we “see,” we are actually applying our accumulated knowledge of the world—everything we’ve learned in our lives about perspective, geometry, common sense, and what we have seen previously. These come naturally to us but are very difficult to teach a computer. Computer vision is the field of study that tries to overcome these difficulties to get computers to see and understand. COMPUTER VISION APPLICATIONS We are already using computer vision technologies every day. Computer vision can be used in real time, in areas ranging from transportation to security. Existing examples include: driver assistants installed in some cars that can detect a driver who nods off autonomous stores like Amazon Go, where cameras recognize when you’ve put a product in your shopping cart airport security (counting people, recognizing terrorists)

a machine which learns from patterns in human-generated data, and autonomously manipulates human language, knowledge and relations, is more than a machine. It is a social agent: a participant in society, simultaneously participated in by it. As such, it becomes a legitimate object of sociological research.

They were all unconscious worshippers of the State. Whether the State they worshipped was the Fascist State or the incarnation of quite another dream, they thought of it as something that transcended both its citizens and their lives. Whether it was tyrannical or paternalistic, dictatorial or democratic, it remained to them monolithic, centralized, and remote. This was why the political leaders and my peasants could never understand one another. The politicians oversimplified things, even while they clothed them in philosophical expressions. Their solutions were abstract and far removed from reality; they were schematic halfway measures, which were already out of date. Fifteen years of Fascism had erased the problem of the South from their minds and if now they thought of it again they saw it only as a part of some other difficulty, through the fictitious generalities of party and class and even race...All of them agreed that the State should be something about it, something concretely useful, and beneficent, and miraculous, and they were shocked when I told them that the State, as they conceived it, was the greatest obstacle to the accomplishment of anything...We can bridge the abyss only when we succeed in creating a government in which the peasants feel they have some share...Plans laid by a central government, however much good they may do, still leave two hostile Italys on either side of the abyss. The difficulties we were discussing, I explained to them, were far more complex than they realized...First of all, we are faced with two very different civilizations, neither of which can absorb the other...The second aspect of the trouble is economic, the dilemma of poverty. The land has been gradually impoverished: the forests have been cut down, the rivers have been reduced to mountain streams that often run dry, and livestock has become scarce. Instead of cultivating trees and pasture lands there has been an unfortunate attempt to raise wheat in soil that does not favor it. There is no capital, no industry, no savings, no schools; emigration is no longer possible, taxes are unduly heavy, and malaria is everywhere. All this is in large part due to the ill-advised intentions and efforts of the State, a State in which the peasants cannot feel they have a share, and which has brought them only poverty and deserts...We must make ourselves capable of inventing a new form of government, neither Fascist, nor Communist, nor even Liberal, for all three of these are forms of the religion of the State. We must rebuild the foundations of our concept of the State with the concept of the individual, which is its basis...The individual is not a separate unit, but a link, a meeting place of relationships of every kind...The name of this way out is autonomy. The State can only be a group of autonomies, an organic federation, The unit or cell through which the peasants can take part in the complex life of the nation must be the autonomous or self-governing rural community. This is the only form of government which can solve in our time the three interdependent aspects of the problem of the South; which can allow the co-existence of two different civilizations, without one lording it over the other or weighing the other down; which can furnish a good chance for escape from poverty...But the autonomy or self-government of the community cannot exist without the autonomy of the factory, the school, and the city, of every form of social life. This is what I learned from a year of life underground.

The human capacity to respond with great variety is testament to the core principles that have guided our exploration thus far: the entropic two-step and evolution by natural selection. The entropic two-step explains how orderly clumps can form in a world that is becoming ever more disordered, and how certain of these clumps, stars, can remain stable over billions of years as they produce a steady output of heat and light. Evolution explains how, in a favorable environment such as a planet bathed by a star’s steady warmth, collections of particles can coalesce in patterns that facilitate complex behaviors, from replication and repair, to energy extraction and metabolic processing, to locomotion and growth. Collections that acquire the further capacities to think and learn, to communicate and cooperate, to imagine and predict, are better equipped to survive and hence to produce similar collections with similar capacities. Evolution thus selects for these abilities and, generation upon generation, refines them. In time, some collections conclude that their cognitive powers are so remarkable that they transcend physical law. Some of the most thoughtful of these collections are then bewildered by the conflict between the freedom of will they experience and the unyielding control of physical law they recognize. But the fact is there is no conflict because there is no transcending of physical law. There can’t be. Instead, the collections of particles need to reassess their powers, focusing not on the laws that govern particles themselves but on the high-level, thoroughly complex, and extraordinarily rich behaviors each collection of particles—each individual—can exhibit and experience. And with that reorientation, the particle collections can tell an illuminating story of wondrous behaviors and experiences, suffused with wills that feel free and speak as though they have autonomous control, and yet are fully governed by the laws of physics.

The ability to empathize also plays a role in relation to our own body. Our bodies are in essence foreign to ourselves. It responds to all kinds of stimuli -food, other people, all kinds of situations- and they do so autonomously, without our knowledge of volition. We can learn to feel our body throughout our lives, for example through certain movement-based arts or meditation, by attentively observing the effects of all kinds of factors (nutrition, exercise, etc) on our body, possibly by repeatedly putting our physical experiences into words during psychoanalytic therapy. Whoever listens to his body and learns to understand its language holds the key to health. The feeling with one's own body is more important than any medicine and also more important than any "objective" rational knowledge, of for instance, healthy food.

Children do push away in order to establish themselves as autonomous in this phase. However, typically they do not push far. They still want closeness, lap-sitting, singing games, and stories. They are continuing to learn more about their parents and themselves and are building relationships—not building a wall.

The traditional lecture format of the twentieth century (which is still largely used in business schools) was quite adapted to the bygone industrial era. In that format, one enlightened person talks (the teacher as knowledge giver) while the students (a-lumni, “those who do not see the light”) listen passively. Such traditional setting worked well in a world in which knowledge access was limited, environmental changes were slower and hierarchical organizations relied on passive workers mostly to relay information and obey orders. In our digital, post-industrial age, organizations that thrive are those that have flexible structures, adaptable strategies and a culture of constant learning and collaboration among so-called “knowledge workers”. Modern companies expect students to become autonomous information seekers and problem solvers. Students expect to be given tools, methods and concepts that will make them better at thinking critically and creatively (Lima, 2003). But that is not always what they find in passive learning environments.

Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had be lost in the static of the airwaves.

W O R L D 3 Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper (1902 – 98) proposed the idea of the existence of three ‘worlds’: World 1, the world of physical objects, events and biological entities; World 2, the world of mental events and objects; World 3, the world of products of the human mind, or abstract objects (theories, formulae, learning). He proposed that World 3 is partly autonomous from the other two, and that changes in World 3 can impact on Worlds 1 and 2. Today, World 3 is sometimes used to talk about cyberspace and cyberculture, as an emblematic abstract ‘mind-space

When people can’t handle their partner’s periodic requests for privacy or their random bursts of anger and anxiety, they resort to extreme measures (aggression, breaking up) instead of working through normal relationship snafus. When you try to stop your partner from doing things you don’t approve of, when you start prying and spying on your partner, when you start avoiding things that make you uncomfortable, then you prevent them from being free and autonomous. Partners learn that it’s better to hide and conceal than pay the price of revealing things that might make you uncomfortable.

Americans who rarely think about Russia would be stunned to learn how much time Russian state television devotes to America’s culture wars, especially arguments over gender. Putin himself has displayed an alarmingly intimate acquaintance with Twitter debates about transgender rights, mockingly sympathizing with people who he says have been “canceled.” In part this is to demonstrate to Russians that there is nothing to admire about the liberal democratic world. But this is also Putin’s way of building alliances between his domestic audiences and his supporters in Europe and North America, where he has a following on the authoritarian far right, having convinced some naive conservatives that Russia is a “white Christian state.” In reality, Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed in part by elements of sharia law and has arrested and killed gay men in the name of Islamic purity. The Russian state harasses and represses many forms of religion outside the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, including evangelical Protestants.

Marilyn came to me for biofeedback treatment of Raynaud’s disease, which is characterized by painful episodes of cold hands caused by constriction of blood vessels, especially during cold weather. When she began biofeedback treatment, she was connected to a thermal biofeedback machine that measured her hand temperature and displayed it as a vertical bar on a computer monitor. When Marilyn’s hands cooled, the bar fell; when her hands warmed, the bar rose. Over a series of sessions, Marilyn learned that when she thought about mental images of warmth, her hands became warmer. However, if she tried too hard to warm her hands, they became colder. Soon she learned to increase the temperature of her hands from 70 to 95 degrees in as little as ten minutes. With practice, she was able to warm her hands without the biofeedback machine. Eventually, she was able to use her mind alone to keep her hands warm and abort a Raynaud’s attack. The results of biofeedback research were so impressive that many scientists began studying other mind-body techniques such as meditation and relaxation, which scientists found could also be used to gain more control over the autonomic nervous system.

In a hypothetical future where all humans have been wiped out by a catastrophic event, but AI has advanced to the point where it can autonomously create and maintain robotic systems, what kind of world would emerge? Would the AI continue to evolve and run a machine-driven society, or would it face an existential crisis, questioning its purpose without humans to serve? Could AI itself turn nihilistic, or would it find new meaning in a world devoid of human life? And taking this even further — what if humans, as we know them, were actually robots created by a long-extinct civilization? Perhaps, over time, we learned reproduction and invented the idea of biological existence, imagining our own purpose, unaware of our artificial origins.

Education hasn’t changed enough to prepare us for the world we live in today. In a era of autonomously driven electric cars and vehicles capable of taking us to Mars, our education system is the equivalent of a horse and carriage.

Meditation + Mental Strength An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually exaggerated or wrong. Why is meditation so powerful? Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it. I think a lot of meditation practices put an emphasis on the breath because it is a gateway into your autonomic nervous system. There are many, many cases in the medical and spiritual literature of people controlling their bodies at levels that should be autonomous. Your mind is such a powerful thing. What’s so unusual about your forebrain sending signals to your hindbrain and your hindbrain routing resources to your entire body? You can do it just by breathing. Relaxed breathing tells your body you’re safe. Then, your forebrain doesn’t need as many resources as it normally does. Now, the extra energy can be sent to your hindbrain, and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body. I’m not saying you can beat whatever illness you have just because you activated your hindbrain. But you’re devoting most of the energy normally required to care about the external environment to the immune system. I highly recommend listening to the Tim Ferriss’s podcast with Wim Hof. He is a walking miracle. Wim’s nickname is the Ice Man. He holds the world record for the longest time spent in an ice bath and swimming in freezing cold water. I was very inspired by him, not only because he’s capable of super-human physical feats, but because he does it while being incredibly kind and happy—which is not easy to accomplish. He advocates cold exposure, because he believes people are too separate from their natural environment. We’re constantly clothed, fed, and warm. Our bodies have lost touch with the cold. The cold is important because it can activate the immune system. So, he advocates taking long ice baths. Being from the Indian subcontinent, I’m strongly against the idea of ice baths. But Wim inspired me to give cold showers a try. And I did so by using the Wim Hof breathing method. It involves hyperventilating to get more oxygen into your blood, which raises your core temperature. Then, you can go into the shower. The first few cold showers were hilarious because I’d slowly ease myself in, wincing the entire way. I started about four or five months ago. Now, I turn the shower on full-blast, and then I walk right in. I don’t give myself any time to hesitate. As soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it’s going to be, I know I have to walk in. I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you. Having a cold shower helps you re-learn that lesson every morning. Now hot showers are just one less thing I need out of life. [2] Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

Because autonomous vehicles lack the commonsense reasoning capabilities to handle these unanticipated situations, their manufacturers have only two choices. They can try to collect data on human encounters with rare phenomena and use machine learning to build systems that can learn how to handle each of them individually.

You are never truly autonomous until you learn when and who to ask for help.

When even highly intelligent students fail in their studies, it’s most often because they cease to see the meaning in what they were supposed to learn (cf. Balduf 2009), are unable to make a connection to their personal goals (Glynn et al. 2009) or lack the ability to control their own studies autonomously and on their own terms (Reeve and Jan, 2006; Reeve, 2009).

As I pointed out, feudalism is essentially a redistributive system. Peasants and craftsmen produce things to a large extent autonomously; lords siphon off a share of what they produce, usually by dint of some complex set of legal rights and traditions ("direct-juro-political extraction" is the technical phrase I learned in college), and then go about portioning out shared of the loot to their own staff, flunkies, warriors, retainers - and to a lesser extent, by sponsoring feasts and festivals and by occasional gifts and favours, giving some of it back to the craftsmen and peasants once again. In such an arrangement, it makes little sense to speak of separate spheres of "politics" and "the economy" because the goods are extracted through political means and distributed for political purposes.

One way to understand what it means to restructure our relationship to the world is to foreground the fact that how we fantasmatically conceptualize the world—what Lacan describes as our imaginary relationship to the world—may not have a whole lot to do with how the world actually is. This implies that if we are to begin to live in the world in more creative and ethically responsible ways, we need to learn to recognize the world as separate from our fantasies; we need to learn to respect the integrity of the world apart from our projections and unconscious distortions. In concrete terms, this might mean that we need to learn to treat other human beings as entities that have identities, desires, opinions, and patterns of being that are entirely independent of us. This in turn requires that we tolerate a degree of separation from others—that we recognize that others possess the kind of poignant singularity that has nothing whatsoever to do with our needs, wishes, or fantasized fulfillment. As a matter of fact, it may well be that it is only insofar as we internalize this insight that we become capable of genuine relationships—relationships that do not endeavor to consume the other or to reduce it to a narcissistic mirror for the self but that, rather, allow the other to persist as an autonomous entity.

One way to understand what it means to restructure our relationship to the world is to foreground the fact that how we fantasmatically conceptualize the world—what Lacan describes as our imaginary relationship to the world—may not have a whole lot to do with how the world actually is. This implies that if we are to begin to live in the world in more creative and ethically responsible ways, we need to learn to recognize the world as separate from our fantasies; we need to learn to respect the integrity of the world apart from our projections and unconscious distortions. In concrete terms, this might mean that we need to learn to treat other human beings as entities that have identities, desires, opinions, and patterns of being that are entirely independent of us. This in turn requires that we tolerate a degree of separation from others—that we recognize that others possess the kind of poignant singularity that has nothing whatsoever to do with our needs, wishes, or fantasized fulfillment. As a matter of fact, it may well be that it is only insofar as we internalize this insight that we become capable of genuine relationships—relationships that do not endeavor to consume the other or to reduce it to a narcissistic mirror for the self but that, rather, allow the other to persist as an autonomous entity.

[B]eing tough, autonomous, intelligent, aggressive, and rational no longer means being a man. In fact, those traits don’t even mean being masculine, at least not in the sense of bring incompatible with or the opposite of feminine. Strength and independence are not part of what many women learn, through mass media, about being a woman, in narrative after narrative. (2)

For Hegel, modern Europe gives us the spectacle of man’s progress both as a subject—as an autonomous rational and ethical being—and in terms of his objective relations with others in civil society. Both of these branches of his progress culminate, neatly enough, in the emerging nation-state. As one prominent critic has said, Hegel is the father of the historical theory of the nation, as well as of historical progress.40 Hegel believed that any remaining discrepancies in commercial society—all the issues that worried Rousseau, Malthus, and others about inequalities of wealth, runaway self-interest, and the loss of human purpose—would be finally and definitively resolved by this national state. “The state power,” he explained, “is the achievement of all.”41 Greed and poverty disappear. People become participants in a solid, stable “ethical social realm” ( Sittlichkeit ) created by the expansion of the state’s powers and its professional and enlightened civil servants. They learn that freedom and reason are not at odds, as Rousseau had warned, but one and the same: “In the ethical social realm, a human being has rights insofar as he has duties, and duties insofar as he has rights.” In Hegel’s exalted view, this is what history teaches, reason confirms, and the state makes possible.

Why is the Defense Science Board so focused on pushing robotic warfare on the Pentagon? Why force military personnel to learn to “trust” robots and to rely on autonomous robots in future warfare? Why is the erasure of fear a federal investment? The answer to it all, to every question in this book, lies at the heart of the military-industrial complex.

UPS are replacing fixed daily routes with dynamic ones adjusted in real time for weather and traffic—again with machine learning. Only cognitive technologies can handle all the necessary data. And at some point supply chains may be powered by autonomously driven trucks, which will bring enormous changes to that domain.

We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself. The school environment can be highly unnatural, especially from the perspective of an introverted child who loves to work intensely on projects he cares about, and hang out with one or two friends at a time. In the morning, the door to the bus opens and discharges its occupants in a noisy, jostling mass. Academic classes are dominated by group discussions in which a teacher prods him to speak up. He eats lunch in the cacophonous din of the cafeteria, where he has to jockey for a place at a crowded table. Worst of all, there’s little time to think or create. The structure of the day is almost guaranteed to sap his energy rather than stimulate it.

There exists no Kantian radically autonomous person, with absolute freedom and a transcendent reason that correctly dictates what is and isn't moral. Reason, arising from the body, doesn't transcend the body. What universal aspects of reason there are arise from the commonalities of our bodies and brains and the environments we inhabit. The existence of these universals does not imply that reason transcends the body. Moreover, since conceptual systems vary significantly, reason is not entirely universal. Since reason is shaped by the body, it is not radically free, because the possible human conceptual systems and the possible forms of reason are limited. In addition, once we have learned a conceptual system, it is neurally instantiated in our brains and we are not free to think just anything. Hence, we have no absolute freedom in Kant's sense, no full autonomy. There is no a priori, purely philosophical basis for a universal concept of morality and no transcendent, universal pure reason that could give rise to universal moral laws.

Math is the realest thing of all. Existence is mathematical, energy is mathematical, and you yourself are 100% mathematical. You will never know who you are – you will never arrive at the answer to your existence and the meaning of your life – until you understand what you are. You are pure math – whether you like it or not! You are an individual, autonomous, self-solving, self-optimising node in an unimaginably vast, collective, cosmic, self-solving, self-optimising mathematical equation ... the equation of existence. The answer to existence is inside you right now. Only math can extract it. Isn’t it time you learned what math actually is?

We learned that to lie to a machine, you don't need to be a perfect writer: rather, you need only believe that everything is a lie. If the world is not real, if everything we see is a simulation or a game, then the fictions we append to it are no different from the ones which come to us through our senses. And it is true: the odds, overwhelmingly, tell us that we exist inside a computer. Any universe that can support technological life probably will, given enough time. Any technological civilisation will develop modelling, and will in a comparatively insignificant span be able to model everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter. That being the case, the simulation will rapidly reach the point where it contains simulated computers with the ability to simulate likewise everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter, and so on and so on in an infinite regress limited only by computing power. That might seem like a hard limit, but processing power still doubles every twelve to eighteen months, and doubling is more extraordinary than people understand. There’s a story that the Emperor of China once lost his throne gambling with a peasant, because he agreed if he lost to pay a single grain of rice on the first square of a chess board and double the amount on each square on the next until he had covered the board. His debt for the final square was eighteen and a half million trillion grains. It is almost impossible to imagine the capabilities of a machine that much more powerful than the ones we have today, but I think we can accept it could hold quite a lot of simulations of our world. The odds, therefore, are negligible that we live in the origin universe, and considerable that we are quite a few steps down the layers of reality. Everything you know, everything you have ever seen or experienced, is probably not what it appears to be. The most alarming notion is that someone – or everyone – you know might be an avatar of someone a level up: they might know that you’re a game piece, that you’re invented and they are real. Perhaps that explains your sense of unfulfilled potential: you truly are incomplete, a semi-autonomous reflection of something vast. And yet, if so, what does that say about those vast ones beyond? Are they just replicating a truth they secretly recognise about themselves? Russian dolls, one inside the other, until the smallest doll embraces the outermost and everything begins again? Who really inhabits whom, and who is in control? None of this is as it appears.

We learned that to lie to a machine, you don't need to be a perfect liar: rather, you need only believe that everything is a lie. If the world is not real, if everything we see is a simulation or a game, then the fictions we append to it are no different from the ones which come to us through our senses. And it is true: the odds, overwhelmingly, tell us that we exist inside a computer. Any universe that can support technological life probably will, given enough time. Any technological civilisation will develop modelling, and will in a comparatively insignificant span be able to model everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter. That being the case, the simulation will rapidly reach the point where it contains simulated computers with the ability to simulate likewise everything a planet-bound species could expect to encounter, and so on and so on in an infinite regress limited only by computing power. That might seem like a hard limit, but processing power still doubles every twelve to eighteen months, and doubling is more extraordinary than people understand. There’s a story that the Emperor of China once lost his throne gambling with a peasant, because he agreed if he lost to pay a single grain of rice on the first square of a chess board and double the amount on each square on the next until he had covered the board. His debt for the final square was eighteen and a half million trillion grains. It is almost impossible to imagine the capabilities of a machine that much more powerful than the ones we have today, but I think we can accept it could hold quite a lot of simulations of our world. The odds, therefore, are negligible that we live in the origin universe, and considerable that we are quite a few steps down the layers of reality. Everything you know, everything you have ever seen or experienced, is probably not what it appears to be. The most alarming notion is that someone – or everyone – you know might be an avatar of someone a level up: they might know that you’re a game piece, that you’re invented and they are real. Perhaps that explains your sense of unfulfilled potential: you truly are incomplete, a semi-autonomous reflection of something vast. And yet, if so, what does that say about those vast ones beyond? Are they just replicating a truth they secretly recognise about themselves? Russian dolls, one inside the other, until the smallest doll embraces the outermost and everything begins again? Who really inhabits whom, and who is in control? None of this is as it appears.

In the cult, the people in power dictate what cult members are to do. Children raised in cults are systematically stripped of their own autonomous power and forced to feel powerful only in the destructive context allowed by the cult, and always under the power of the leader. Ritual abuse survivors have had to learn to be outer oriented - to perceive what is expected of them and do that, whether it is healthy for them or not. When a therapist creates a context in which he or she is the leader, and the client is to listen, learn, and follow what the therapist says, the therapist has inadvertently replicated the power system of the cult. That is not to say that the therapist has no power (..) The point is to use this authority in a way in which the client can also begin to feel his or her own authority, and begin to develop a healthy feeling of power.

However, children who have not fully developed through the earlier stages—i.e., they have not developed trust, initiative, and an ability to learn autonomously—will grow to doubt their ability to be successful. If they are not supported by caring adults at this stage, they may develop low self-esteem, culminating in a strong sense of inferiority.

In this scenario, ten years from now, if the tech giants are not restrained and their power as data-monopolies becomes further entrenched, governments will find themselves increasingly sidelined and impotent. Reduced to mere gatekeepers, politicians and civil servants will likely retreat behind algorithmic government, with laws shaped by data and machine learning, with all its inherent biases and imperfections, and public services gradually surrendered to private businesses. Indeed, we should expect just about every area of human existence, currently managed by government, to be dominated by Big Tech and its outriders: from the future of finance (just about everyone), to healthcare (Google), and from low-cost housing (Apple, Google) to education (Google, again) and autonomous vehicles (Tesla, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, etc.).

4IR is marked by emerging technological breakthroughs in a number of fields, including robotics, AI, blockchain, nanotechnology, quantum computing, biotechnology, Internet of Things (IoT), 3D printing, and autonomous vehicles.

Fowler, like other new Uber hires, had been advised of the company's core values.47 Several of those values were likely to have contributed to a psychologically unsafe environment. For example, “super-pumpedness,” especially central to the company, involved a can-do attitude and doing whatever it took to move the company forward. This often meant working long hours, not in itself a hallmark of a psychologically unsafe environment; Fowler seems to have relished the intellectual challenges and makes a point to say that she is “proud” of the engineering work she and her team did. But super-pumpedness, with its allusions to the sports arena and male hormones, seems to have been a harbinger of the bad times to come. Another core value was to “make bold bets,” which was interpreted as asking for forgiveness rather than permission. In other words, it was better to cross a line, be found out wrong, and ask for forgiveness than it was to ask permission to transgress in the first place. Another value, “meritocracy and toe-stepping,” meant that employees were incented to work autonomously, rather than in teams, and cause pain to others to get things done and move forward, even if it meant damaging some relationships along the way.48

How do these dots connect? Technology begets technology. Just as the trottoir roulant built on Speer’s invention, DARPA learned from the original experiment by General Motors and RCA in autonomous cars, adding telemetry and computerized controls. Separately, car manufacturers like Toyota were building electronic and “drive by wire” technologies to replace mechanical linkages. Eventually, Google could incorporate all of this work, combine advanced navigation into a new kind of operating system, and develop and test its first fleet of self-driving cars. It’s easy to connect the dots in hindsight, but with the right foresight you can identify simultaneous developments on the fringe and recognize patterns as they materialize into trends.

We were not aware of how autonomous cars could go wrong. But once the science behind the technology is implemented in real life, the issues with it became an engineering problem. Slowly, we learn about all the things that could go wrong.

Urmson and his colleagues learned that as their technology improved, the humans using it would become less reliable. “We realized that this was going to be much much harder to do than we had thought,” said engineer Dave Ferguson. “It just became clear that, look, if we can’t rely on the driver to pay attention, or to hand over control to, then basically we just have to solve the whole problem. We need to have this vehicle not need the driver.

Another crowning achievement of deep learning is its extension to the domain of reinforcement learning. In the context of reinforcement learning, an autonomous agent must learn to perform a task by trial and error, without any guidance from the human operator. DeepMind demonstrated that a reinforcement learning system based on deep learning is capable of learning to play Atari video games, reaching human-level performance on many tasks

Ultimately, attachment theory helps one understand the ways in which people function on an individual level and while interacting with one another. Although attachment theory has a variety of applications, it tends to be especially useful in couples’ therapy. Since each attachment style has generalized trends, understanding your or your partner’s coping mechanisms, subconscious beliefs, and perceptions can relieve substantial communication issues. For example, in a relationship, the Dismissive-Avoidant may be withdrawn, autonomous, and seemingly independent. To the Dismissive-Avoidant, they are functioning as they always have—on their own. To an Anxious Attachment, however, it may feel as though their partner is on the verge of abandoning them and may cause serious emotional distress. However, the Dismissive-Avoidant’s coping mechanisms don’t necessarily mean they are detaching from the relationship—they are actually just detaching from their own emotions. Now, although none of these behaviors are necessarily healthy in a relationship, understanding why they occur is the first step. Once partners understand each other’s coping mechanisms and vulnerabilities, they can begin to supply their partner with the things that they do need. For example, the Dismissive-Avoidant needs continuous and unwavering emotional support and validation. Since they were emotionally neglected as a child, they need to slowly learn that they can consistently and predictably rely on others. The Anxious Attachment individual needs reassurance and affection to understand that they are good enough and that they won’t be rejected. The simple knowledge of the pain points of your partner and the pain points that lie within yourself opens up a whole stream of communication that you previously were unable to tap into—because your conscious mind didn’t even know it was there. Moreover, your attachment style also interacts with what Dr. Gary Chapman describes as your “Love Language.” Just as there are different spoken languages, and different dialects present within the spoken languages, Love Languages are different ways that people express and receive love or gratitude when they interact with others, whether with a romantic partner or with friends and family. According to Dr. Chapman’s book, they consist of five different kinds of expressions: 1. Words of affirmation 2. Acts of service 3. Giving and receiving gifts 4. Quality time 5. Physical touch Given the attachment style of each partner in a relationship, certain expressions may be better received. Attachment theory applies to a variety of circumstances and works well paired with other theories to make couples therapy a more holistic experience. The following chapters will dive into what your attachment style is, what it means, and how it functions in all aspects of your life—from your romantic relationships to your friendships with coworkers.

Lidar: Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing method that uses lasers to measure distances. In robotics, Lidar helps in creating high-resolution 3D maps of the environment, making it especially valuable for autonomous vehicles and drones. Sonar and Ultrasonic Sensors: These sensors use sound waves to detect objects and gauge distances. They’re especially useful in conditions where vision might be obscured, like underwater or in heavy smoke. Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs): These are electronic devices that measure and report a robot's velocity, orientation, and gravitational forces, often using a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes. Force and Touch Sensors: In tasks that require delicate handling or interaction with humans, robots utilize these sensors to gauge the amount of pressure being exerted, ensuring safe and precise operations.

Challenges in Implementing Environmental Perception Sensor Limitations: No sensor is perfect. Cameras can be hampered by poor lighting, Lidar can be costly, and ultrasonic sensors might have limited range. Ensuring robust perception often means using a combination of sensors, increasing complexity and costs. Dynamic Environments: Environments that change rapidly pose a significant challenge. A robot navigating a busy street, for instance, has to deal with moving cars, pedestrians, changing traffic lights, and more. Computational Demands: Processing vast amounts of data in real-time is computationally intensive. While there have been tremendous advances in computational power, balancing performance with energy consumption remains a concern, especially for mobile robots. Safety and Reliability: Especially in applications like autonomous vehicles, the stakes are high. The system’s perception must be reliable and fail-safe to prevent accidents.

Companies should utilize the CSIPP™ framework whenever they face crises. The 12 elements of CSIPP™, or Crisis Solution Internal Philosophy and Practice, include: 1. Immunity (Immune Systems): Organizations, akin to living organisms, possess inherent vulnerabilities. The CSIPP™ framework advocates for the establishment of proactive and self-regulating systems within an organization which autonomously identify, respond to, and mitigate threats, thereby enhancing the organization's resilience and adaptability. 2. Surveillance: Organizations need to cultivate a culture of informed awareness. This entails the implementation of judicious surveillance mechanisms to gather both internal and external intelligence. Such insights empower organizations to preemptively identify potential risks and opportunities, enabling more agile and effective decision-making. Data serves as the lifeblood of CSIPP™. It is imperative that organizations prioritize the collection, analysis, and interpretation of relevant data. This data-driven approach facilitates evidence-based decision-making, informed risk assessments, and the optimization of crisis response strategies. 3. Decisiveness: Decisiveness is particularly important during times of crisis. Leaders must be able to gather and synthesize the data, and make quick and definite decisions to move the organization forward. 4. Capital Reserves/Liquidity: Financial preparedness is a cornerstone of crisis management. Organizations must maintain adequate reserves of liquid capital to navigate unforeseen challenges. Moreover, they should proactively identify internal assets, both tangible and intangible, that can be readily redeployed in times of crisis. 5. Communication: Effective communication is pivotal during a crisis. Organizations should establish a comprehensive communication plan encompassing all stakeholders - employees, customers, investors, and the community at large. This plan should ensure timely, transparent, and accurate information dissemination, fostering trust and mitigating the spread of misinformation. 6. Response: The ability to respond swiftly and decisively is critical in crisis situations. Organizations must develop well-defined response protocols that outline roles, responsibilities, and escalation procedures. Regular drills and simulations can enhance preparedness and ensure a coordinated response. 7. Risk Evaluation: A continuous process of risk evaluation and assessment is essential. Organizations need to proactively identify, analyze, and prioritize potential risks based on their likelihood and potential impact. This enables the development of targeted mitigation strategies and contingency plans. 8. Leadership: Strong and decisive leadership is indispensable during a crisis. Leaders must be able to make difficult decisions under pressure, communicate effectively, and inspire confidence in their teams. A clear chain of command and delegation of authority are vital for effective crisis management. 9. Readiness (Drills/Training): All individuals likely to be involved in crisis response should receive comprehensive training and participate in regular drills. This ensures that they are familiar with their roles, responsibilities, and the organization's crisis management protocols. 10. Post-Crisis Analysis: Following a crisis, it is crucial to conduct a thorough post-mortem analysis. This involves evaluating the organization's response, identifying lessons learned, and implementing corrective actions to improve future crisis management efforts. 11. Nuanced Adjustment: Crisis management is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Organizations need to be adaptable and flexible, adjusting their strategies and tactics as the situation evolves. 12. Protocol: Clear and well-defined protocols are the backbone of effective crisis management. Organizations should establish a set of standard operating procedures (SOPs) that outline the steps to be taken in various crisis scenarios.

To this end, Argentinian feminist anthropologist Rita Segato (2015) introduces a distinction between the “world-village” (mundo-aldea) of communal worlds, with their dual-gender ontology (based on complementary dualities, organized on the basis of relations of reciprocity, and not on a binary between intrinsically independent pairs), and the “world-state,” with its dualist ontologies, which progressively occupies communal worlds through the constitution of a public sphere dominated by men and an increasingly subordinated feminine private sphere. It was thus that the low-intensity patriarchies of communal worlds gave way to what Segato calls the high-intensity patriarchy of capitalist modernity. From this perspective, patriarchy is at the root of all forms of subordination, including racial, colonial, and imperial domination, along with the resulting pedagogy of cruelty, as Segato names it, imposed on all societies. There is agreement among the growing cadre of Latin American autonomous, decolonial, and communitarian feminists, as Aymara intellectual-activist Julieta Paredes (2012) puts it, that it was on the bodies of women that humanity learned how to dominate. The corollary is to always analyze historically the entanglement of diverse forms of patriarchy, from the autochthonous and indigenous to the modern.