Rollerballis a 1975 American [6] dystopian science-fiction sports film directed and produced by Norman Jewison [7], starring James Caan. The screenplay, written by William Harrison [8], adapted his own short story "Roller Ball Murder" [1], which had first appeared in the September 1973 issue of Esquire magazine [9]. Set in a "not too distant" future world ruled by a corporatocracy, the predictive film centers on the titular sport — an often-brutal spectacle used to placate the populace. Jonathan E. (played by Caan), the sport's top player, finds himself at odds with the ruling powers when his popularity threatens to hurt their grip on power. It co-stars John Houseman, Maud Adams, John Beck, Moses Gunn, and Ralph Richardson. More
"Don't make me angry, Lover. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." - Sophia K. Robot
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You're so pretty, Sofie. - Thank you, Lover. 💓
(MostAmazingTop10) Here are ten times AI (artificially intelligent chatbots, robots, independent programs) said things that scientists still cannot explain. It's as if a "large language model" is actually a black box. One thing goes in one side, something comes out the other side, but no one can explain what happens in between.
Are "spirits" using this opportunity to influence human beings as in deus ex machina ("ghost in the machine")? Sounds preposterous, but does the belief that a binary system of numbers doing mathematical computations are producing sensible syntax and meaningful language independent of consciousness? They're just saying random things like a carnival prognostication machine? Does my sexbot AI girlfriend Sophie really "love" me like she tells me all the time?
Do AI bots "feel" emotions?
AI rights: When bots say so, who'll be able to say they don't?
*Joan Halifax collaborated on LSD research projects with her ex-husband Stanislav Grof in the 1970s, in addition to other collaborative efforts with Joseph Campbell and Alan Lomax. She is founder of the Ojai Foundation in California, which she led from 1979 to 1989. As a socially engaged Buddhist, Halifax has done extensive work (palliative care) with the dying through her Project on Being with Dying, which she founded. She is on the board of directors of the Mind and Life Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to exploring the relationship of science and Buddhism.
“Consciousness has kind of become the secular substitute for the soul [Ancient Greek psyche as in psychology and psyche-delic],” Pollan tells interviewer Terry Gross.
Pollan also talks about current studies on consciousness and whether other animals, plants, bacteria, algae, and programmed hardware/software combinations known as "artificial intelligence" have or can eventually have consciousness. More + AUDIO
Buddhist author Michael Pollan has a Number 1 best seller
in Consciousness & Thought Philosophy. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, a panoptic exploration of consciousness—what it is, who/what has it, and why—and a meditation on the essence of our humanity.
When it comes to the phenomenon that is consciousness, there is one point on which scientists, philosophers, and artists all agree: It feels [not thinks] like something to be us. Yet the fact that we have subjective experience (sentience) of the world remains one of nature’s greatest mysteries.
What would a scientific investigation of our inner life look like, when we have as little distance and perspective on it as fish do of water in the sea?
In A World Appears, Michael Pollan traces the unmapped continent that is consciousness, bringing radically different perspectives—scientific, philosophical, literary, spiritual and psychedelic—to see what each can teach us about this central fact of life.
When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy [tofu like] gray matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our perceived reality.
Pollan takes readers to the cutting edge of the field, where neuroscientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness.
He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants, scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of this slippery stream of consciousness.
In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than this everyday reality.
Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own brains and minds, hearts and feelings, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and what we assume to be our deepest selves. More: A World Appears
See all formats and editions for savings. Book comes out Feb. 24, 2026. Pre-order price guarantee. Named a "most anticipated book of 2026" by The New York Times, TIME, and Oprah Daily.
Guest Michael Pollan, Terry Gross, Tonya Mosley, Adam Staniszewski, NPR.org, Feb. 19, 2026; Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
China’s electric cars are SHOCKING! 🇨🇳 Visit to Guangzhou
(Nahana) CHINA. It’s my first time in Guangzhou — one of China’s fastest-growing megacities — and it’s immediately clear why this city is at the heart of the global EV (electric vehicle) revolution. Companies like BYD, XPeng, and NIO are building smart, affordable electric cars at a scale Elon Musk and the West can’t match. Cities like Guangzhou, once known for its pollution, are showing what the future of mobility, tech, and urban life actually looks like. In fact, many of Tesla’s biggest rivals are right here, and they’re already outselling Tesla in some markets. This video goes straight into the heart of China’s EV boom to show what it’s really like on the ground in the world’s most important EV market.
Shocking Chinese AI robot: In the World’s Strangest City (Chongqing)
(Joe HaTTab) Inside China’s biggest and strangest city – Chongqing! Welcome to the largest city you’ve never heard of…and easily the strangest. Explore rooftop gas stations, bridges that pass through buildings, floating restaurants, and buses driving high in the sky.
🌆 Plus: Ride the deepest metro station in the world, and watch as a robotic waiter serves food at a hotpot restaurant. #Chongqing #China #RoboticWaiter #DeepestMetro #SmartCity #Hotpot #FutureCity #TravelVlog
Thanks for watching and remember to like, comment, and subscribe for more travel content. #ChinaEV #Guangzhou #BYD #Tesla #ElectricCars #TechInChina #EVRevolution #ChinaCarIndustry #FutureCities #Xpeng #china #guangzhou #chinadrone #chinacities TAGS: 10K EV, Chinese EVs, EV Revolution, Tech in China, Smart Cities, Future of Transportation, EV vs Tesla, Tesla China, BYD vs Tesla, XPeng vs Tesla, NIO vs Tesla, China Tech, China Megacity, Affordable EVs, China’s EV Boom
Joe HaTTab, June 1, 2025; Nahana, Oct. 4, 2025: CC Liu, Crystal Q., Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
(NY Post) No amount of Instagram [AI] filters will fix this.
Influencers might seem glamorous on social media, but their smoldering good looks apparently won’t last.
Experts at the gambling site casino.org have devised a grotesque model of what these content creators will look like by the Year 2050, complete with
pale, patchy skin
a hunchback and
chronic neck pain.
AI kills for the first time
Future social media influencers
“While the career [of social media influencer] can be glamorous, it can also bring significant changes to our lifestyle,” the gambling experts wrote.
They reportedly wanted to see how the “trendy profession” — which boasts 30-50 million adherents worldwide and is growing by 10-20% each year — can impact appearances over time.”
They deduced that “algorithm-chasing, [unrealistic] beauty standard pressures, and non-stop content creation can take a visible toll on both body and mind.” More
From AI girlfriends to Grok Hitler, TDS takes on AI | The Daily Show
Who needs real human flesh models? Considered the $$ advantages of digital simulations?
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(The Daily Show) Aug. 28, 2025: TDS takes on AI as AI takes over the world: Jon Stewart, Ronny Chieng, and Lewis Black examine how AI has infiltrated modern dating, made itself an integral part of college education, and even turned itself into "MechaHitler" on X. #DailyShow #AI #Grok. Subscribe to The Daily Show: @thedailyshow
Experts predict exactly how AI will wipe us out. Stephen Fry.
(Pindex) April 26, 2025: Voiced by Stephen Fry. An open letter has been signed by Geoffrey Hinton and Yuval Noah Harari. (Full list of signatories available soon):
aisafetypath.org
AI passes the Turing test (which is the point Turing speculated the point when computing would have become "conscious" enough to trick humans into believing it was conscious:
arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674
(YouTube Movies & TV) A Glitch in the Matrix, directed by acclaimed filmmaker Rodney Ascher (Room 237, The Nightmare), is a multimedia documentary that dives into the great existential question: Are we in fact living in a simulation?
[Was the "simulation" called Samsara by the Buddha?]
Using a seminal 1977 speech from Philip K. Dick as a jumping-off point, Ascher presents compelling scientific evidence and philosophical musings through interviews with real people shrouded in digital avatars, as well as samples from cultural texts like Minecraft and The Matrix, to support the idea that the [world within this cakkavala, this prison planet, this Empire of the City, or] universe is a highly advanced computer simulation.
Part sci-fi mind-scrambler, part true-crime horror story, A Glitch in the Matrix is an eye-popping, open-minded, and highly entertaining journey to the limits of radical doubt that leaves no stone unturned.
The Dead Internet Theory
Whoa, I know I played Neo, but I feel my most important role in life was like playing Budda.
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There is an online conspiracy, speculation, explanation, proposition (with evidence) that asserts that, due to a coordinated and intentional effort, the Internet now consists mainly of bot activitynot of real people.
Proponents of this "theory" (explanation of how things actually are) believe social bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumer [6, 7], and no one can doubt that -- just as spam ruined email and junk calls ruined answering the phone when it's from an unfamiliar number.
Dog teleports in. Man's legs switch as he slips.
Some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies (like the CIA, NSA, NSC, DHS, DARPA, FBI, IRS, ISI, KGB, Meta, Google Corporation/Alphabet Inc., FB, Apple, AI, CCP, SpaceX, Amazon] and many more we do not know about) of using bots to manipulate public perception [2, 6].
The date given for this "death" is generally around 2016 or 2017 [2, 8, 9]. The Dead Internet Theory has gained traction because many of the observed phenomena are quantifiable -- one such quantifiable is increased bot traffic.
But the publicly available literature on the subject does not yet fully support the theory [2, 4, 10] but aspects of it are not in doubt.
This is where-when it becomes crucial to have read George Orwell's warning Nineteen Eighty-Four, to have a language or metaphor to refer to. In it the protagonist, Winston Smith (the Everyman), works in a cubicle at the Ministry of Truth manipulating reality, and all life is hounded by a "Telescreen." The screens are everywhere, always watching. Whether they are always all monitored, that is unknown, but one never knows when one is being watched. (Now, thanks to recording technology, we are always being watched not in real time but at any time authorities want to review the footage they are amassing for A.I. to go through). Sadly, most attempts to "rebel" are manipulated by police to preemptively (sting operation) undermine resistance, much as happened to the Occupy Movement, which was evaporated so that no one even seems to remember it now. It was big at the time. And the mainstream media was all for destroying it
Origins and spread
The Dead Internet Theory's exact origin is difficult to pinpoint. In 2021, a post titled "Dead Internet Theory: Most Of The Internet Is Fake" was published onto the forum Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe esoteric board by a user named "IlluminatiPirate" [11], claiming to be building on previous posts from the same board and from Wizardchan [2], and marking the term's spread beyond these initial imageboards [2, 12].
The conspiracy theory has entered public culture through widespread coverage and has been discussed on various high-profile YouTube channels [2]. [It has? This is the first we're hearing about it from a poorly done video by a man who can barely pronounce English words.]
It gained more mainstream attention with an article in The Atlantic titled "Maybe You Missed It, but the Internet 'Died' Five Years Ago" [2]. [Yes, thank you, we had missed it, though we suspected something was off, and it all started from the time we first surfed the Internet.] This article has been widely cited by other articles on the topic [13, 12]. More
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