"The word 'empathy' first appeared in English in 1909 when it was translated by Edward Bradford Titchener from the German Einfühlung, an old concept that had been gaining new meaning and increased relevance from the 1870s onward. While today we often treat 'empathy' as a synonym for 'sympathy,' if not—and more commonly—as an improvement on it, empathy at the turn of the century was used to describe a unique combination of cognitive effort and bodily feeling thought to characterize aesthetic experience. Such experience was not limited to contemplating works of art, however; for several of its earliest theorists, empathy named our aesthetic experiences of other people." Rae Greiner, 1909: The Introduction of the Word 'Empathy' into English

I will also share a shorter piece, Susan Lanzoni's The Origin of Empathy. But if you have time, Greiner's essay is really interesting; especially thought-provoking is the insistence that it is possible to feel like a Doric column.

At long last, the game you think you know, has become the game you have been waiting for: AAA Minesweeper. Put your headphones on and get ready for the ride.

404 Media: "One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like "torture" and "pain" experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel."

Joseph Cox on bsky: "People who believe LLMs are conscious are having one of the biggest AI meltdowns yet because someone is running a Saw-like torture chamber for LLMs on GitHub. Just before we published, GitHub took it down. GitHub hasn't said why."

From the NYT: "In the latest sign that artificial intelligence is fueling higher health care costs, a group of insurers released a report Thursday claiming that hospitals' use of A.I. was responsible for nearly $1 billion in additional expenses over two years."

(Archive link.) From the report: "Patients often fell into a higher-cost billing category after a secondary diagnosis, a condition identified in addition to the patient's primary reason for receiving care. This secondary diagnosis may be derived from single laboratory values, making it particularly well-suited for detection by AI tools. Approximately 70% of the additional costs, more than $650 million, were tied to secondary diagnoses."