Staying current and competitive with AI will not only require an eye on the horizon for future trends, you’ll also need a vision that extends beyond the initial stages. You’ll need to build a long-term strategy around your AI goals to drive growth and efficiency through your inno … | Continue reading
One of the most enduring ideas in all the Universe is that everything that exists now will someday see its existence come to an end. The stars, galaxies, and even the black holes that occupy the space in our Universe will all some day burn out, fade away, and otherwise decay, lea … | Continue reading
Denis Villeneuve wasn’t the first person to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune for the big screen, but he is the first to have done so successfully. In the 1970s, the Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky came close. He handed art design to renowned com … | Continue reading
We all learn from our mistakes (eventually) but sometimes it would be nice to get it right the first time. Looking back from the more experienced end of my career, and having played most of the major roles around a boardroom table, I now have a good deal more clarity about what i … | Continue reading
Join Barbara Oakley as she delves into the concept of “Einstellung,” a psychological phenomenon where our brains become stuck in one way of thinking. Oakley explains how this tendency to stick with what we know from an early age narrows our cognitive abilities, as unused brain co … | Continue reading
In one of the most monumental discoveries of the 20th century, we learned that the Universe is not simply a static, unchanging background, but rather that space itself expands as time marches on. It’s as though the very fabric of the Universe itself is stretching so that distant … | Continue reading
People across the world are becoming increasingly concerned about climate change: 8-in-10 people see climate change as a major threat to their country.1 As I have shown before, food production is responsible for one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. There is rightl … | Continue reading
Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly planning to build a $100 billion data center and supercomputer that could lead to the creation of AIs far more capable than anything possible today. Power hungry: Soon after investing its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019, Microsoft set out … | Continue reading
As AI continues to advance, one major problem has emerged: “hallucinations.” These are outputs generated by the AI that have no basis in reality. Hallucinations can be anything from small mistakes to downright bizarre and made-up information. The issue makes many people wonder wh … | Continue reading
Billions of people around the world dutifully brush their teeth with toothpaste every day, but some are starting to question this status quo. These contrarians see sense in brushing but aren’t sure whether the paste is really necessary. And it’s not just laypersons wondering out … | Continue reading
Let our sponsor BetterHelp connect you to a therapist who can support you – all from the comfort of your own home. Visit https://betterhelp.com/bigthink and enjoy a special discount on your first month. Is polyamory a sustainable model for societies? Do partners really need to ma … | Continue reading
Arseny Moskvichev dreams of the day he can have a meaningful conversation with artificial intelligence. “By meaningful, I mean a conversation that has the power to change you,” says the cognitive and computer scientist. “The problem,” says Moskvichev, “is that LLMs are complete a … | Continue reading
The new Netflix series 3 Body Problem, based on Cixin Liu’s epic science-fiction trilogy, reignites an old debate among researchers concerned with the possibility of extraterrestrial communication. In the fictional account (spoiler ahead!), the trouble starts when one of the char … | Continue reading
Imagine two anthropologists, Willard and Orman, who stumble over some never-before-seen tribe. There is the usual first-contact kind of behavior: pointing, laughing, and frustrated misunderstandings. It becomes apparent that the anthropologists need to decipher this tribe’s langu … | Continue reading
The Universe is a vast, wondrous, and strange place. From our perspective within it, we can see out for some 46 billion light-years in all directions. Everywhere we look, we see a Universe filled with stars and galaxies, but are they all unique? Is it possible, perhaps, that if y … | Continue reading
Picking a few books to characterize an entire intellectual tradition is tough. That’s because, in my view, history isn’t driven by “great men” like the 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle thought. On the contrary, history is the product of many social, economic, political, cult … | Continue reading
Perhaps the most bizarre property we’ve discovered about the Universe is that our physical reality doesn’t seem to be governed by purely deterministic laws. Instead, at a fundamental, quantum level, the laws of physics are only probabilistic: you can compute the likelihood of the … | Continue reading
Do not annoy the gods. If there’s one lesson classical mythology teaches us, it’s that you should know your limits and mind yourself. Beware of hubris: the act of boasting arrogance and self-aggrandizement that man pitches against God, the gods, or the forces of nature. It’s stic … | Continue reading
Earthquakes in New York are even rarer than snowfall in Los Angeles. The one that struck the East Coast last Friday was one of the largest in the region in a century. And yet on the grand scale of things — no longer the Richter scale, by the way, but the Moment Magnitude Scale — … | Continue reading
Philosophy and science haven’t always gone hand-in-hand. Here’s why that should change. Daniel Dennett, an Emeritus Professor from Tufts University and prolific author, provides an overview of his work at the intersection of philosophy and science. Many of today’s philosophers ar … | Continue reading
The practice of “quiet quitting” isn’t anything new. In the cult satirical movie Office Space, protagonist Peter Gibbons, played by Ron Livingston, had quietly quit his job at the fictional corporate hellhole Initech long before the story even started. As he admits, his typical d … | Continue reading
It’s no secret that there is a seemingly endless string of problems to address in the world. You don’t have to look hard to find people suffering from all sorts of maladies: from illness to injustice, from war to famine, from poverty to pollution. There are some major problems fa … | Continue reading
A recent survey found that two-thirds of workers believe that by 2035 workers will have an edge in the labor market if they’re willing to have performance-enhancing microchips implanted in their bodies. Technologically enhanced humans have a rich history in science fiction, but t … | Continue reading
In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2015 science fiction novel Children of Time, a planet-wide evolutionary biology experiment goes wrong. Well, wrong from a human perspective. Instead of creating intelligent monkeys, the experiment results in intelligent spiders that become spacefaring. A c … | Continue reading
Stanislaw Lem’s first-contact novel Solaris (1961) is the Polish writer’s most celebrated and enduring legacy. It features an ocean planet that conjures up life with no apparent purpose, at best perversely reflecting human wounds and desires. Unintelligible, alien, and therefore … | Continue reading
We do this all the time in the lab. At so many junctures in our work, something takes an unexpected turn, or a solution stubbornly eludes us. We try to use those moments to refocus our attention and press on with renewed energy. We continually have to “pinch past” our perceptions … | Continue reading
The world now sits on the precipice of transformational change driven by the emergence of new technology. Perhaps counterintuitively, as this transformation carves out a very special and complementary place for human neurodivergence, it will serve to powerfully elevate the crucia … | Continue reading
Astrophysically, normal matter — even with all the different forms it can take — cannot on its own explain the Universe we observe. Beyond all the stars, planets, gas, dust, plasma, black holes, neutrinos, photons, and more, there’s an overwhelming suite of evidence suggesting th … | Continue reading
Humans are increasingly pushing into space: NASA’s Artemis program plans to return astronauts to the moon and establish a permanent orbiting lab in the next few years, and private companies like Blue Origin and Space X plan to ferry tourists beyond Earth for a price. And where hu … | Continue reading
Peculiar sets of numbers populate this 1936 map of the U.S. Each state is labeled with a number that is about the same order of magnitude as the others: Nebraska is 978.2, West Virginia is 975.4, and so on. Similar numbers show up next to the local product or industry shown for e … | Continue reading
If you’re sexually active, you will (almost certainly) contract a sexually transmitted infection (STI). This fate is largely predetermined thanks to the most common STI: human papillomavirus (HPV). It’s so ubiquitous that 90% of sexually active men and 80% of sexually active wome … | Continue reading
With almost deflated resignation, I hear leaders observe how difficult their work is now. How things change so quickly. Those conversations never leave me. Discussions about the speed of change in the mainstream often refer to the growth in technology. But there is so much more. … | Continue reading
According to the theory of the hot Big Bang, the Universe had a beginning. Originally known as “a day without a yesterday,” this is one of the most controversial, philosophically mind-blowing pieces of information we’ve come to accept as part of the scientific history of our Univ … | Continue reading
AIs that can generate videos, quickly translate languages, or write new computer code could be world changing, but can they ever be truly intelligent? Not according to the embodiment hypothesis, which argues that human-level intelligence can only emerge if an intelligence is able … | Continue reading
People navigating the healthcare system can feel like they’re trapped in a labyrinth. They fumble through dark passageways and blind alleys, hand outstretched and each step tentative. All the while, they fear the next corner will hide another monster — disease, injury, or financi … | Continue reading
Have you ever wondered what the full story with the galactic center is? Sure, we have stars, gas, and an all-important supermassive black hole, but for hundreds of light-years around the center, there’s a remarkable story going on that’s traced out in a variety of elements at a w … | Continue reading
If there’s one question that has been present throughout human history across all cultures, it’s the question of the origin of all things. Why is there a Universe? How come we exist in it to be able to ask this question? Across millennia, different cultures offered mythic narrati … | Continue reading
Not all rich people are geniuses – most of them are just lucky. Professor and author Brian Klass joins us to debunk a common misconception about wealth – that all those who have it are smarter than average. Klass uses probability to explain that though this is an easy assumption … | Continue reading
When each of us is first born into this world, it might feel like the world was made for humanity. For the past few generations — now encompassing every living human being — there have been billions of us, spread out across every continent, with sprawling cities, towns, villages, … | Continue reading
Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? If so, how do scientists search for and identify it? Finding life beyond Earth is extremely difficult, partly because other planets are so far away and partly because we are not sure what to look for. Yet, astrobiologists have learned a … | Continue reading
Despite what you might have been told, the universe didn’t begin, not really. It’s tempting to picture the embryonic universe, before the Big Bang, as a seed, pregnant with all the possibility of the cosmos to come, ready to germinate. But as far as we understand, the universe wa … | Continue reading
In 350 BCE, Aristotle wrote a book about the soul — or, more accurately, different types of souls. For Aristotle, a soul is what turns a lifeless lump of flesh into a walking, talking, singing, fighting, crying, and laughing thing. It’s what animates the inanimate, but it’s also … | Continue reading
There is a common plot device used in science fiction where a primitive life form will encounter some strange or more advanced technology. Initially, the creature simply stares at the device. Like a monkey with an iPhone, they bash and abuse the technology. Over time, either the … | Continue reading
It’s hard to imagine given how abundant and macroscopic life on Earth is today, but for nearly all of Earth’s history — upwards of three billion years and likely closer to four — there were no organisms more complex than a single-celled life form on our world. It wasn’t until the … | Continue reading
By instinct and tradition, humankind has sought to understand its environment as thoroughly as possible — to ward off dangers, embrace beneficial opportunities, and make helpful predictions. Charting the world — and, beyond that, the cosmos — out to the very frontiers of detectio … | Continue reading
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, you would have forgiven physicists for hoping that they were on track to understand everything. The universe, according to this tentative picture, was made of particles that were pushed around by fields. The idea of fields filling space … | Continue reading
There are three types of thinkers. Which one are you? Temple Grandin, author and professor of animal science at Colorado State University, recognized early in her life that her mind worked differently from those of her peers and colleagues. As a neurodivergent woman in a male-dom … | Continue reading
Does this sound familiar? You have an important project due, but as soon as you log in for the day, your inbox pings relentlessly. You decide to sort the mess, but now you have a team meeting to attend. Before that meeting is even over, co-workers are messaging you for help putti … | Continue reading