Welcome to OnlySky
Journey into a future shaped by creativity, critical thought, and secular habits of mind. Help shape what’s next!
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.
Z: The least religious generation ever
In an analysis that reads like porn for secularists, Daniel Cox details the degrees to which Gen Z is markedly more secular than any previous generational cohort.
About that handcart: Where’s it going?
Over the decades, and even centuries, people have variously claimed that we are, indeed, heading in the wrong direction.
Eco-friendly transportation? The good, the bad, and the pipe dreams
The saying about putting a fox in charge of the hen house grossly underestimates human ingenuity. We are not foxes, and so we have the ability to be much cleverer custodians of institutions we’re still destroying.
Nuclear panic and the satellite wars
Reading Time: 6 minutes In 1962, the US detonated a high-altitude warhead, with a yield of 1.4 megatons of TNT equivalent, some 250 miles above the Earth. The blast expelled the planet’s magnetic field for nearly half a minute, created a brief cavity in the ionosphere, and damaged
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.
