Are the Internet and AI affecting our memory? What the science says

Adrian Ward had been driving confidently around Austin, Texas, for nine years — until last November, when he started getting lost. Ward’s phone had been acting up, and Apple Maps had stopped working. Suddenly, Ward couldn’t even find his way to the home of a good friend, making him realize how much he’d relied on the technology in the past. “I just instinctively put on the map and do what it says,” he says.

Ward’s experience echoes a common complaint: that the Internet is undermining our memory. This fear has shown up in several surveys over the past few years, and even led one software firm to coin the term ‘digital amnesia’ for the experience of forgetting information because you know a digital device has stored it instead. Last year, Oxford University Press announced that its word of the year was ‘brain rot’ — the deterioration of someone’s mental state caused by consuming trivial online content.

Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review

The Environmental Law and Policy Annual Review (ELPAR) is published by the Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI’s) Environmental Law Reporter (ELR) in partnership with Vanderbilt University Law School. For seventeen years, ELPAR has provided a forum for presentation and discussion of the best environmental law and policy-relevant ideas from the legal academic literature. Published as an annual special issue of ELR, ELPAR is designed to fill the same important niche by helping to bridge the gap between academic scholarship and environmental policymaking.

Yes, You’re Being Watched on the Internet

When you go shopping or visit the doctor, your smartphone tracks your journey there. What we like and share on Facebook and Instagram. What we listen to on Spotify or watch on YouTube. Our credit card transactions.

“All of those things create a data trail,” said Duke’s Jolynn Dellinger, who teaches classes on privacy law and ethics and technology at the Law School and Duke Science and Society.

In Dellinger’s course, “Privacy in a Post-Dobbs World: Sex, Contraception, Abortion and Surveillance,” students consider all the traces that people of reproductive age leave online on a daily basis, and how those could potentially be used against them.

Every moment of the day, almost every website, app and device we use is collecting our data. Where we go, who we talk to, what we look for on the internet, what we buy.

For people seeking abortions and also for their partners, it’s not hard to imagine how these digital footprints could suddenly become dangerous.

[LISTEN]: Your Brain Is The Next Tech Frontier

We’re entering a new era of brain monitoring and enhancement, but what are the ethical implications? This hour, TED speakers explore the potential and pitfalls of merging our minds with machines.

Guests include legal scholar and AI ethicist Nita Farahany, neurotechnologist and entrepreneur Conor Russomanno, neuroscientist and physician Sergiu Pașca and sous chef Kate Faulkner.

A Night Out With Science

It’s a Thursday evening in Durham and a little “Friday feel” permeates the food and entertainment hub surrounding Motorco Music Hall. Walkers on the sidewalk. Diners at outside tables. People grabbing drinks after work. Inside Motorco a few dozen people have gathered by the stage, but not to see a buzzworthy indie band. Rather, great white shark specialist and science communicator Michelle Jewell takes the microphone.

“What’s your favorite shark?” a young girl asks at one point.

“Not to be basic, but it’s the species I study,” Jewell says. She’s an entertainer, but in everything funny or clever she says is a nucleus of scientific fact. Great whites, she notes, are smart. “You can watch them suss you out.”

This is Periodic Tables, Duke Science and Society’s science café, and Jewell is a seasoned communicator who knows she’s there to entertain a lay audience. Her presentation centers on shark myths. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s ridiculous and sometimes, such as when Jewell shares a picture of the conveyer belt of teeth inside a shark’s gums, it’s a little gnarly, which keeps the audience locked in. Yet for each myth Jewell addresses, she shares research-based facts about the predators she studies.