The tech community came together for the launch of the Great Progression event series, curated by Peter Leyden and produced by Freethink. | Continue reading
In "Raising AI," author De Kai argues that AIs are more like society's children than machines under our control. | Continue reading
Sam Altman’s World Network uses iris-scanning Orbs to give people a way to prove that they are people — and not AIs — online. | Continue reading
Mistakes made by the US government 100 years ago could help us determine the best way to regulate AI-manipulated images and videos today. | Continue reading
A secret prototype, a hardware deal with Jony Ive, and millions of AI images suggest OpenAI is making a play for your social media feed. | Continue reading
From where we stand, the true limits to growth are currently unknowable and need not affect any decisions we make today. | Continue reading
Have we begun to lose faith in the future? The idea of ‘progress’ didn’t truly exist throughout the majority of human history. Most ages didn’t see history as an upward […] | Continue reading
Despite outperforming humans at many tasks, multimodal LLMs struggle to read time on a clock — just like many people with dyslexia. | Continue reading
Pessimists Archive is a project to jog our collective memories about the hysteria, technophobia, and moral panic that often greets new technologies, ideas, and trends. | Continue reading
The appearance of a nonsense term in multiple scientific papers has exposed how flawed data in training sets can become embedded in AIs. | Continue reading
Jony Ive and Sam Altman join forces as OpenAI acquires io, Ive’s secretive AI hardware startup, for $6.5 billion. | Continue reading
We need to figure out what drives progress, what might cause it to slow down or stop, and what, if anything, we can do to re-accelerate it. | Continue reading
What happens when you ban cars? Step inside the first walkable neighborhood of its kind in the US. | Continue reading
Officials' warnings about the impact of video games on kids were never proven true. They may be making the same mistake with social media. | Continue reading
If violent video games caused real-world violence, we'd see spikes in crime right after their release. Instead, we see the opposite. | Continue reading
The 21st-century version of the Royal Society could be the Substack network that we are just starting to build out today. | Continue reading
Rather than meticulously crafting each line of code, developers can now “vibe” with AI tools using natural language. | Continue reading
"The idea that nuclear energy is inherently dangerous has become a kind of cultural reflex.” | Continue reading
The militaries that leverage the low-cost capabilities of AI the most will have a decisive advantage in the future. | Continue reading
When news outlets quote warnings of an impending AI catastrophe, they rarely mention the two main movements behind this narrative. | Continue reading
The FDA’s clearance of Precision Neuroscience's flexible electrode array pushes the startup ahead in the race to BCI commercialization. | Continue reading
Indie developers continue to push the video game industry forward as big-name publishers focus on safe bets and machine-pressed sequels. | Continue reading
Threatened by their low cost, traditional telephone companies tried to get long-distance internet phone services banned in the 1990s. | Continue reading
AI could trigger a civilization-scale change for humanity the same way the steam engine helped usher in The Enlightenment 250 years ago. | Continue reading
"We’ve reached a point where Earth-bound manufacturing limits what biology can do—space unlocks an entirely new frontier." | Continue reading
Space startup Aetherflux has a mission straight out of sci-fi: harvest solar power in orbit and beam it down to Earth via laser. | Continue reading
AI and other new technologies could make things that are costly and scarce today, cheap and abundant for all tomorrow. | Continue reading
AstroForge isn't afraid to take risks if it means being the first to mine asteroids for the rare metals we need for many clean energy technologies. | Continue reading
Progress was agonizingly slow for most of human history, but the rapid progress of the last few centuries was not a fluke. | Continue reading
Three separate theories help explain why America enters a period of great progress every 80 years — and why another is coming soon. | Continue reading
President Donald Trump might clear the way for the building of 21st-century systems and open up the political space for a new way forward. | Continue reading
Anything that matters to humans should be under our control. The climate matters—so we should control the climate. | Continue reading
Rohit Krishnan dives deep into the global contest to develop the holy grail of technology: AI that can think, learn, and adapt like humans. | Continue reading
Chinese startup DeepSeek has proven that vast quantities of capital and cutting-edge chips aren't prerequisites for world-class AI. | Continue reading
Tariffs won't bring manufacturing back to the US, but there are ways to make it happen — if America is serious about doing so. | Continue reading
One of the most original and optimistic thinkers in America helps build out some big through lines on what's possible with AI in the next 25 years. | Continue reading
ChatGPT's Studio Ghibli imitations invite questions about the creative value of people and what we really mean when we talk about creativity. | Continue reading
A look inside Mindstate Design Labs' effort to design drugs that reliably produce specific states of consciousness. | Continue reading
Futurist Peter Leyden finds parallels between America in 2025 and at three pivotal points in its history, each 80 years before the last. | Continue reading
Combining AI and a deluge of open data has enabled some intelligence vendors to surpass the capabilities of government agencies. | Continue reading
These changemakers show that social innovation thrives when it draws on the knowledge and lived experience of the people impacted. | Continue reading
The Great Progression: 2025-2050, Leyden’s new series of essays and interviews for Freethink Voices, roughs out a new grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and make a much better world. | Continue reading
The Great Progression: 2025-2050, Leyden’s new series of essays and interviews for Freethink Voices, roughs out a new grand narrative of our historic opportunity to harness AI and other transformative technologies to drive progress, reinvent America, and make a much better world. | Continue reading
An exclusive excerpt from AI podcaster Dwarkesh Patel's first book, The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI 2019-2025. | Continue reading
To truly understand our historic moment, you need a comprehensive, big-picture, long-term perspective that deeply understands artificial intelligence and the next wave of transformative technologies. | Continue reading
Social innovation is proving that when we work together across sectors, lasting change is possible. | Continue reading
We have a historic opportunity to harness AI and other transformative technologies in order to make a much better world in the next 25 years. | Continue reading
Robotics startup 1X Technologies is now sending its humanoid robots into homes to help people with chores and provide companionship. | Continue reading