For Eliezer Yudkowsky, the day OpenAI launched, the world ended. “That was the day I realized that humanity probably wasn’t going to survive this,” he said on a recent podcast with Ezra Klein. For the uninitiated, Yudkowsky is no fringe voice. He founded the Machine Intelligence … | Continue reading
Every so often, advocates of a fringe theory — one that doesn’t fit the evidence as well as the mainstream theory — do what they can to breathe life back into it. Sometimes new evidence has come to light, legitimately challenging the mainstream theory and demanding that previousl … | Continue reading
People really like Japanese philosophy. If you ever see a list of “untranslatable words” or “beautiful words from around the world,” then you will notice how Japanese ideas are often overrepresented. Whenever I explore a Japanese concept on the Mini Philosophy social media pages … | Continue reading
There have been those who thought broadly about play and recognized its importance for adults. One of the first was the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. In 1938, when he published his seminal book on play, Homo ludens, it was quite radical to argue that play was a central organizi … | Continue reading
Do you actually control your own mind? Three experts in philosophy and neuroscience explain: It’s not so simple. Uri Maoz, PhD, Daniel C. Dennett, PhD, and Sam Harris, PhD explore how unconscious processes shape decisions we believe are conscious. From brain experiments that reve … | Continue reading
When Anastasia Marchenkova hears a founder claim they’re building a million-qubit quantum computer, she doesn’t roll her eyes or dismiss the claim outright. Instead, she runs through a series of questions: “What needs to be true for that to happen? Is it a physics problem? Or a m … | Continue reading
In many ways, the Big Bang was the biggest idea to ever come out of Einstein’s General theory of Relativity. This tremendously successful theory gave us everything from gravitational waves to black holes based on one profound insight: that the fabric of spacetime itself would evo … | Continue reading
A sharp border separating the physical and the mental is intuitively obvious. It is the reason why most cultures believe in a soul of some kind — an entity distinct from the body that experiences its sensations and beliefs. Science, too, has generally seen this border as impenetr … | Continue reading
Behind every cruise, every smile, every unexpected thrill, there’s a world of non-ship-related innovation making it all possible. These innovations create new destinations, streamline the guest experience with technology, design for a more sustainable future, or otherwise enhance … | Continue reading
Here on Earth, life began very early on after our planet’s formation: at least 3.8 billion years ago and possibly even earlier. By 2.7 billion years ago, it had developed photosynthesis. A little later, aerobic respiration developed, followed by eukaryotic cells, multicellularity … | Continue reading
For most of human history, we could only imagine what made us who we are. Then, just over two decades ago, the Human Genome Project — the international scientific effort to decode the three billion letters of human DNA — changed everything. Critics at the time called it too expe … | Continue reading
It’s time for Macy to move home. She’s scored a promotion and she’s tired of hearing the man in the apartment above play his French horn. So, she books a few viewings with her real estate agent and starts looking at houses. After looking at three places, she falls in love: It’s a … | Continue reading
What happens when the technology mediating nearly all our information begins to decide what speech is acceptable? Free speech scholar Jacob Mchangama warns that AI’s growing role in search, email, and word processing means its hidden biases could shape freedom of thought itself. … | Continue reading
We are living through the collapse of the old world, and the quiet construction of a new one. From artificial intelligence and clean energy to bioengineering and digital governance, the core systems that defined the last century are rapidly being dismantled and replaced. But this … | Continue reading
In 1924, while imprisoned at Landsberg Prison following the failed Beer Hall Putsch, a 35-year-old political agitator named Adolf Hitler began writing his manifesto, Mein Kampf. In it, he called for the destruction of the Treaty of Versailles, the creation of a new German Reich t … | Continue reading
Our search for work-life balance reflects a very real desire: to feel less consumed by obligations, less stressed, and more fulfilled. In my book, The Visual Detox, I explore how the images we’re exposed to shape our inner balance, for better or worse — and I demonstrate how art … | Continue reading
To discover what’s out there in the Universe, you simply have to look. This image shows the full COSMOS (Cosmic Evolution Survey) from the Hubble Space Telescope: its largest ever survey of the Universe. Hubble photographed 575 adjacent and slightly overlapping views of the un … | Continue reading
When military historians attempt to make sense of a conflict like the Second World War, they tend to examine the external conditions of battles, such as which army possessed the most advanced weapons, experienced generals, favorable terrain, and reliable supply lines. Nicholas Wr … | Continue reading
Astronomer David Kipping explores humanity’s oldest question: If the universe is vast and ancient, why haven’t we found anyone else in it? He argues that our longing to discover another Earth often clouds our reasoning, and that the greatest challenge in the search for life isn’t … | Continue reading
From the beginning of humanity, cultures and societies vary in tradition, religion, art, philosophy, and customs. One constant that remains unchanging? The essential need for love and partnership. Dr. Helen Fisher explains the drive for love from an anthropological perspective, … | Continue reading
Tomas Pueyo is the author of Uncharted Territories, a newsletter helping readers understand deeply how the world works today to navigate the world of tomorrow. You can subscribe to it here. Do you like the Mediterranean? Should we make more seas like it? Today, the Mediterranean … | Continue reading
For a long time throughout the 20th century, the main goal of cosmology was twofold: to measure the expansion rate of the Universe today, known as the Hubble constant, and to measure how the expansion rate was changing over time, then known as the deceleration parameter. After … | Continue reading
What if the universe is a machine, and every moment in our past, present, and future is already encoded in the positions of its particles? Physicist Sean Carroll explores the unsettling implications of classical mechanics, from Newton’s laws to Laplace’s thought experiment, showi … | Continue reading
I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Alex Morris over the last few years. He’s one of the most thoughtful investors I know: measured, patient, and relentlessly focused on quality over noise. This week, for my Long Game column in Big Think, I spoke with him about his recent bo … | Continue reading
Viewed from orbit, Jackass Flats — situated in southern Nevada about 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas — could easily be confused for Mars. The alluvial basin is full of tan and gray regolith, hued slightly red, and almost completely surrounded by carved, rocky hills. It was here, … | Continue reading
“The classic example of a hijack is masturbation,” Edward Slingerland tells me. We’re talking about all the evolutionary quirks that humans tend to exploit — the cases where we’re “built” for one purpose, but decide to put that structure to other uses. And masturbation is a class … | Continue reading
Why are bad habits so hard to break? Neuroscientist Carl Hart, PhD, journalist Charles Duhigg, and psychologist Adam Alter, PhD explain how your brain wires habits as cue-routine-reward loops that control nearly half of your daily life. They show why willpower alone rarely works … | Continue reading
Here on Earth, humanity’s global energy needs only seem to increase over time. A combination of increasing populations, the widespread development of heating and cooling, a reliance on modern electronics, and the introduction of new energy-intensive technologies (such as the bloc … | Continue reading
The best horror stories are those that don’t rely on jump scares or bloodied campground killers to frighten. The scariest part of The Wicker Man isn’t its eponymous effigy; it’s realizing what the natives of Summerisle will do to placate their gods. And while the ghosts haunting … | Continue reading
On a busy day, over 25,000 people visit the Vatican Museum in Vatican City, the world’s smallest country at 0.17 square miles, tucked in the middle of Rome. While the museum boasts one of the greatest collections of art in the world, the main attraction for many people (including … | Continue reading
Hutch, who had taught Julia the art of visualization, had told her that the nature of anything, including cognition, was best understood in the doing. She missed his wisdom. Instead of struggling against the infected artificial brain in its frozen state, she had to reanimate it. … | Continue reading
Brands that stand the test of time innovate to stay relevant and build upon the product imagery that first captured customers’ hearts. So-called legacy brands and their associated images include Timberland boots, the Burberry raincoat, Tiffany diamonds, and Levi’s jeans. Even Di … | Continue reading
In the 1920s, we first measured the distances to objects beyond our own Milky Way, and swiftly discovered that the Universe was expanding: consistent with how Einstein’s General Relativity tells us the Universe would evolve. If the Universe was expanding today, that implies it wa … | Continue reading
In 2011, Earle Havens, Director of the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance at Johns Hopkins, had a mission: He needed to convince his university to buy “an enormous collection of fake stuff.” The collection, known as Bibliotheca Fictiva, compr … | Continue reading
Gratitude connects us, but how we express it might matter more than we think. Baylor professor of psychology and neuroscience Sarah Schnitker explores how practicing gratitude can lead to stronger relationships and greater well-being. Her lab found that gratitude expressed throug … | Continue reading
During the late 19th and early 20th century, coal miners in Europe and North America used canaries as living carbon monoxide alarms. Due to their high metabolism and sensitive respiratory system, these small, yellow songbirds succumbed to the invisible, odorless gas much faster t … | Continue reading
Every year, the same meteor showers recur once again. This comet, imaged in 2015 and known as C/2014 Q2 Lovejoy, brightened sufficiently to become as bright as magnitude +4: visible to the naked human eye even under fairly light-polluted conditions. When Comet Halley returns, … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that the Universe and the objects present within it, as we see them all today, have changed over time as the Universe has grown up over the past 13.8 billion years. Galaxies are larger, more massive, more evolved, and are richer in stars but fewer in number than th … | Continue reading
“Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in an 1816 letter — when the United States turned 40 years old, and the War of Independence was slowly starting to fade from … | Continue reading
This video The alarm bells are sounding for young men. Will we listen? is featured on Big Think. | Continue reading
Here in our modern Universe, even in just our own Milky Way, we observe stars in all different stages of life: molecular gas clouds that are contracting and fragmenting, leading to protostars and young stellar objects, becoming full-fledged stars with protoplanetary disks around … | Continue reading
If the U.S. were only 100 people, this is what they’d believe: 63 are Christian, 30 are religiously unaffiliated, and 7 have a non-Christian faith. This graph maps those differences out into more specific categories, bringing blink-of-an-eye clarity to a complex topic. But it doe … | Continue reading
An important fact of life is that it’s often difficult to know what will make you happy, but quite easy to identify what will make you miserable. When faced with a difficult problem — and how to spend money in a way that will improve your life certainly is — it can help to work b … | Continue reading
What can fiction reveal that history and journalism leave hidden? Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Lawrence Wright turns to the novel to explore the lives caught in conflict in Israel and Palestine. His book The Human Scale uses narrative to confront the unequal ways lives are valu … | Continue reading
I recently returned from two weeks in Europe, where many conversations circled a similar theme: Europe’s struggle to keep pace in the AI era. In Lisbon, the former Portuguese finance minister Paulo Portas put it bluntly: “If Europe doesn’t innovate, it will become the museum of t … | Continue reading
Of all the planets visible in the night sky, either with the naked eye or the aid of a powerful telescope, none is more recognizable or iconic than Saturn. With its giant system of rings, Saturn’s appearance is immediately discernible, setting it apart from all the other known pl … | Continue reading
Anxiety doesn’t vanish with practice. In fact, in actor Jesse Eisenberg’s experience, it can grow even sharper even after repetition. Eisenberg’s stories from stage and film sets reveal what performance anxiety teaches us about how the brain works, and how we can rewire it to wor … | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence is trained on data. It will process billions of words of human text, countless images, and the inane, ridiculous questions of its human users. It will learn to write in the active voice most of the time, and to keep sentences under 200 characters. It will … | Continue reading