Boring people don't listen. They tell their own stories, over and over, and never make any attempt to engage in our story, our lives. And so we avoid them. AI, on the other hand, is a superb listener. So much so that people, particularly teens, are turning to chatbots for companionship. But in doing so, do we run the risk of all becoming the same kind of person, wanting the same kinds of friendships, with the same kinds of interactions? In a word, boring.
To the untrained eye, exhaustion and disengagement can look identical. Boredom is typically a form of cognitive under-stimulation, while burnout is emotional and physical overextension. Both can leave people feeling unmotivated and fatigued. But here's the twist: in cultures that tend to glamorize busyness, many employees feel safer saying they're burned out than bored. Burnout signals you worked "too hard." Bored, on the other hand, signals the opposite.
Archimedes discovered that the volume of water displaced by an object is equal to the volume of the object itself, enabling him to determine the crown's purity.
The perplexing baby-snatchings, reported in the journal Current Biology, suggest that humans aren't the only intelligent species with youngsters that pursue apparently pointless activities that can be destructive to other creatures.
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