Culture wars have now entered geopolitics. | Continue reading
The noble but undervalued craft of maintenance could help preserve modernity’s finest achievements, from public transit systems to power grids, and serve as a useful framework for addressing climate change and other pressing planetary constraints. | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence has mostly been focusing on a technique called deep learning. It might be time to reconsider. | Continue reading
The messianic idea that permeates Western political thinking — that a person or technology will deliver us from the tribulations of the present — distracts us from the hard work that must be done to build a better world. | Continue reading
The same crypto tools presently being used to bypass the international order could instead become the means of architecting a better one. | Continue reading
Why has disruption been elevated as a virtue to the point where it’s become orthodox to be heterodox? It’s a symptom of the erosion of trust in institutions. | Continue reading
The precise odor of the divine has eluded humans for millennia, but that hasn’t stopped us from seeking it in the oddest places. | Continue reading
A geo-civilizational order can’t survive without cooperation. | Continue reading
Recalling the Italian futurists’ embrace of aggressive disruption. | Continue reading
Can deep learning systems learn to manipulate symbols? The answers might change our understanding of how intelligence works and what makes humans unique. | Continue reading
Putting community back into communication requires the checks and balances of republics. | Continue reading
Elon Musk’s takeover bid for Twitter raises important questions about whether social media platforms are political technologies that must be governed by democratic norms and principles. | Continue reading
Insects appear to be more intelligent and emotionally complex than we give them credit for. Perhaps, new research suggests, they are even conscious. | Continue reading
The conception of free will as the continual creation of unpredictable novelty can lead us away from social-media-driven anxieties that often cripple our decision-making. | Continue reading
Community requires ritual and narrative. | Continue reading
Thinking differently about how to design the digital platforms that structure our lives can help lead us on a journey to improve society and become better versions of ourselves. | Continue reading
The 10,000-year clock is neither a ‘frightening’ ‘distraction,’ as its critics scorn, nor the ‘admirable objective’ its fans claim. It’s something else — a monument to long-term thinking that can unlock a deeper and more thoughtful spirit of interpretive patience. | Continue reading
Mass tree-planting programs in the desert often cause lasting damage to the ecosystems they are purportedly trying to repair. | Continue reading
Of course, art has always been toy money for the rich to play with. We just made it more ubiquitous, more efficient, more technologically mediated. We made it faster. | Continue reading
How tech uses the promise of endless innovation to ward off regulating even its present-day harms. | Continue reading
The radical idea that everything has elements of consciousness is reemerging and breathing new life into a cold and mechanical cosmos. | Continue reading
“The price of individualism has proved to be the loss of privacy.” | Continue reading
What happens to a community and ecosystem at the nexus of geopolitical tensions and climate change? And can 6,000 years of history save them? | Continue reading
Landlords have made a fortune on climbing land values. What if land was held by the public instead? | Continue reading
To tackle planetary problems like the climate crisis and pandemics, we have to tear down old hierarchies and build new, fluid networks of people, cities and organizations. | Continue reading
Kai-Fu Lee explains how intelligent machines will master context, enable precision medicine — and use vast amounts of energy for computation. | Continue reading
Sci-fi enables us to think about science and religion as mutually supportive elements of what it means to be human. | Continue reading
As with evolution, mindless learning drives intelligent machines. | Continue reading
Why all life limits certain kinds of selfishness. | Continue reading
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