The saved and the damned of Proxima Centauri B
How might Christianity work intelligent alien life into their worldview? Did everyone get a Jesus?
AI: The newest squirrel distracting evangelicals from their own decline
Evangelicals have expressed both dread regarding AI’s popularity and power, and excitement about its potential to turn around their decades-long decline.
How is climate anxiety impacting young people?
A landmark survey suggests that climate anxiety—a chronic fear of environmental doom—is taking an outsized psychological toll on the young.
What would you write to the future?
The Future Library Project is collecting books that won’t be published in our lifetime.
How do we talk about impending doom so that people will listen?
Books like ‘The Ministry for the Future’ offer a useful vocabulary for hashing out solutions to our overheating world.
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.
On ‘tomorrow sorrow’: How we grieve the future today
Humans have the capacity to grieve the world ahead, knowing how much is going wrong today. But tomorrow sorrow can make us stronger actors.
Gen Z views are rapidly splitting in half by gender—and the gap is not small
Today’s young people are going through a significant shift. Young women appeared to be more concerned with and aligned to progressive values and issues, while young men are moving in a more conservative direction.
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.
