Occasionally, financial speculation fastens onto transformational technologies that have the potential to create a genuinely new economy. | Continue reading
Getting the whole spectrum of governments, academia and civil society to track “natural capital” would help create shared efforts toward solving shared problems like the climate crisis. | Continue reading
Like every kind of intelligence, AI will develop appropriate representations of the world to accomplish what it needs for its various tasks. | Continue reading
Recognizing that forest ecosystems, like societies, have elements of intelligence would help us leave behind the old notion that they are inert and predictable. | Continue reading
Effectively addressing planetary problems requires working through intermediaries like nation-states and corporations, not simply bypassing them. | Continue reading
To save the biosphere, curb upstream consumption — not just downstream emissions. | Continue reading
The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political. It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us. | Continue reading
The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political: It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us. | Continue reading
Is there another path than accelerated Western modernization? | Continue reading
Political, religious and science fiction stories hundreds of years old form the basis of China’s rapid growth in artificial intelligence technology. | Continue reading
The hype around a new AI language generator reveals the sterility of mainstream thinking on AI today — and indeed on how we think about thinking itself. | Continue reading
President Xi’s vision of “dual circulation” is a darkly pessimistic economic strategy, fit for a new Cold War. | Continue reading
If we manage to find intelligent life somewhere in the cosmos, then, strange as it may be, at least it will provide evidence that we are not alone in bearing the burden of consciousness. | Continue reading
“I actually feel pretty comfortable in New York. I get scared, like, in Sweden,” mumbled Lou Reed, the legendary frontman of the Velvet Underground, while playing the disheveled city-dweller in the 1995 movie “Blue in... | Continue reading
We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it’s here and what we can do to temper it. | Continue reading
Grafting the lessons of old cooperatively owned companies to the online economy. | Continue reading
“The scandal is not, as the term Anthropocene implies, that the boundaries between the human and nature get blurred. Rather, the scandal is that we humans still have not learned to think about ourselves in terms of the microbial — the viral — world of which we are a part.” | Continue reading
The idea of a home-owning middle class is broken. | Continue reading
What has not been questioned enough during the COVID-19 crisis is unrelenting capitalism itself. | Continue reading
“It is detestable to consider the armchair mental gymnastics of ‘robot rights’ as a pressing ethical issue in light of real threats and harms imposed by AI today on society’s most vulnerable.” | Continue reading
The distorted experience of time through the COVID-19 pandemic reveals it to be an atemporal liminal passage between two great historic eras. | Continue reading
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how valuable it is for governments to have operational expertise, plan for the long-term and socialize certain risks. | Continue reading