The coming cleanup era
It's nice to imagine building a big, shiny future. But there's some un-sexy work to do first.
When we abolished borders
After a while, it was hard to remember why we'd drawn the lines to begin with.
The future is a prisoner's dilemma
Our future is increasingly made worse by a refusal to cooperate.
Climbing the Kardashev ladder: How civilization survives
The power to control ever-greater amounts of energy is a hallmark of civilization’s progress, and humanity is poised to take the next big step.
An urgent message from the future
I'm sure you have questions.
What would you write to the future?
The Future Library Project is collecting books that won’t be published in our lifetime.
Our AI future: Don’t fear the Singularity
AI futurists assume that faster thinking automatically produces greater intelligence, leading to a Singularity of transcendent machine minds. But speed is the less important half of intelligence.
Our AI future: heaven, hell, hype and hogwash
Existing AI programs are single-purpose. They aren’t the futurist dream of an artificial general intelligence that can solve any problem and rapidly improve itself.
What do trees say to each other?
The more we look, the more intelligence we find in nature. Even trees are capable of communicating, sharing resources, and responding to their environment.
Our AI future: What AI can and (probably) can’t do
AI has genuine potential both to liberate humans from toil, or to allow greed and bias to run wild.
The blind, dangerous enthusiasm of a ‘Techno-Optimist’
Billionaire Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto makes the case that technology is a pure blessing, that more is always better, and it shouldn’t be regulated or held back by anyone or anything. Here’s a skeptical counterpoint.
Longtermism: the good, the bad and the ridiculous
Some philosophers stray into religious fantasy when they argue that a far-off utopian scenario supersedes any obligations to the present.