Two Minds Blog

  American's stress levels have increased significantly since 2017, as shown in the Gallup poll graph above. The American Psychological Association's " Stress in America " survey showed a jump in stress levels during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 that never completely resolved, followed by another jump in 2024 that people mainly attributed to the U.S. political environment. The latest APA survey, conducted in October 2024, showed that 77% of U.S. adults  were feeling significant levels of stress in their lives, similar to the number at the height of the pandemic in 2020 -- and that was before the election results were known. The fall 2025 APA report is likely to be very interesting. In my sector of the economy, higher education, people are finding their lives substantially  more stressful in 2025 than they were in 2024, for all kinds of reasons . Given the well-known negative effects of stress on concentration, anxiety, depression, and physical health, how can we kee...

  Artificial intelligence is now so ubiquitous that it can be hard to remember its public debut (with ChatGPT) occurred on November 30, 2022. In a little over 2 years, we have all gotten used to AI systems that can understand natural language requests, read our intentions, and produce lengthy and reasonably accurate creative responses in the form of text, images, and video. Most articles about AI in 2025 are about how to use these tools more effectively, or about the next upgrades that are coming, rather than about the amazing fact that we have these tools at all. Here's a look at how quickly AI tools have reached human-level capabilities, and in some cases exceeded them: If you are at least a little bit worried about this, you aren't alone. The American public is much less enthusiastic about AI's benefits, and has much greater concern about its risks, than the technology experts who are developing AI. Right now, a great deal of that worry is about job loss. Looking farth...