Digital Loneliness: How Many Connections Do We Really Have?

Artificial Intelligence and Ethics

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital age, it is time to think deeply about how moral and ethical values can be integrated into machines and the potential impact this will have on human societies. However, as human beings, we must turn to our darker side and ask ourselves: Even if we encode our accepted ethical and moral values into systems, will we humans adhere to them, and do we even want to?

Technology That Speeds Up Time

Every day, thousands of notifications, short videos, accelerated content... Could the technologies we invented to save time actually be stealing moments from us? Studies show that modern humans touch their phones 2,617 times a day and their attention is interrupted every 7 minutes on average. In an experiment conducted at the University of Virginia, people couldn't tolerate thinking for more than 15 minutes and preferred to give themselves electric shocks. In this age of speed, could our own minds be starting to feel foreign to us? In this section, we explore topics ranging from Hartmut Rosa's theory of social acceleration to Milan Kundera's novel Slowness, from Tarkovsky's aesthetics of slow-moving time to Zen philosophy. And we ask the question: Does speed enrich life, or does it take away its depth?

The Age of Forgetting as a Luxury: To Remember or to Forget?

Our memory flaws make us human. Our memories fade, diminish, and sometimes get rewritten. But perhaps it is precisely these flaws that give meaning to our lives. Will artificial intelligences that store our memories with crystal clarity in the future make us more ‘us’... or will they take away our luxury of forgetting, which transforms us into human beings? From Bergson's view of memory as a creative process to Nietzsche's consideration of forgetting as a fundamental condition of life; drawing from Proust's memory windows opened by the Madeleine cake, in this section we ask: Does flawless memory bring us an immortal freedom, or is it a heavy burden that chains our identity?

Super Intelligence: Humanity's Final Invention?

What would happen if a machine became 170,000 times smarter than humans in 90 minutes? Would it be more difficult to go to the kitchen and make coffee or to solve a physics problem? How would we know when artificial intelligence has reached a level of intelligence equivalent to ours? Could artificial intelligence manipulate us humans? Could it deceive us? In this section, we discuss what general intelligence is and why it could be both humanity's greatest hope and its greatest threat.

Digital Loneliness: How Many Connections Do We Really Have?

Our screens have never been so bright, but our souls have never felt so dark. Modern humans have thousands of “friends” on social media, but when they silence their phones at night, they fear being alone with themselves. We have so many connections, but how many people do we truly connect with? In this section, we discuss the loneliness of the digital age, where connections have increased but bonds have weakened. We seek to understand the fake intimacy of filtered lives on social media, the invisible labyrinth of algorithms, and the growing shadow of modern loneliness, guided by the great thinkers from Sartre to Camus, from Dostoyevsky to Rumi.