Author: JulietWaters
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Can AI Make Us More Human?
And will we have a choice? I like working with ChatGPT as a thought partner. I don’t think of it as a coach, a therapist or an assistant, because I will never fully trust that it has the human qualities or expertise that I need from the people who fill those roles in my life. But…
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The Hidden Key to Informal Meditation: Unlock Your Brain’s Urge to Be Happy Anytime, Anywhere
I love my formal meditation. It’s taken me more than a few years to get there, but I love connecting every morning to a basic sense of okayness that is always there. I find this easiest to recognize early in the day when my body is still and my mind is free of distractions. Informal…
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How I Built My Wisephone
A little over ten years ago, I had what my charming meditation teacher calls a nervous breakthrough. I enjoyed my job as a freelance journalist and book critic in 2012, but the smartphone had ruined everything. The newspaper that had been the backbone of my income folded. Glossy thick magazines, now skeletal, were paying half…
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How Meditation Is Like Looking at The Sun
I was incredibly fortunate to experience the 2024 solar eclipse in optimal conditions. It was a warm spring day. The sky was clear. Montreal, the city I live in, was devoted to making this a communal experience, providing hundreds of thousands of eclipse glasses for free. Most of the schools were closed so that people…
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Harnessing The Unhappiness of Future Generations
Whether AI will support the happiness, or the misery, of future generations is up to us I didn’t need a world happiness report to tell me that young adults in North America are suffering alarming levels of unhappiness. I witnessed this first hand last week, when I went to see Dune with a young family member…
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The One Tool We Need To Thrive
About 20 years ago a group of neuroscientists put a young monk into an fMRI machine because they wanted to see if his brain behaved any differently than ordinary western brains. What they saw was so unusual that they had to take their system apart to make sure there were no glitches to explain it.…
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Primed to compute
Making algorithmic thinking a core skill A while back, some were calling coding a “new literacy.” With the advent of AI, the world seems to be leaning away from that. But what hasn’t disappeared is the need to strengthen the kind of thinking that coding requires. Whether we call it computational literacy, or algorithmic literacy, AI…
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Never mind the mindfulness
5 key differences between awareness meditation and mindfulness meditation I remember my first experience of awareness meditation like I remember the feeling of riding a bike without training wheels. Meditation master, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, used a Tibetan singing bowl for two very short guided meditations. In the first, the instruction was simple and clear: “Listen…
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Compassion over empathy in the era of AI
A while back, I had some very difficult news to convey to someone I cared about. Out of respect for privacy, I’m not going to go into details, but I knew this was news that was going to have a serious impact. I also knew the way that I delivered it might shape this person’s…
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The A, B, C and D of A.I.
I wrote The A.I. Primer for the Algorithm and Data Literacy Project by Digital Moment (where you can download it in English or French.) It’s intended as a very low floor to the learning trajectory of AI literacy, and is suitable for teens, teachers, and any adults who might feel intimidated by the idea of learning…
Clear Path Learning 