earthquake of perspective
Are AI art programs ripping off human artists?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Artists erupted in protest when they learned that AI art engines like Stable Diffusion were trained on their copyrighted works. This revelation has ignited a debate about the meaning of fair use.
Entropy, time, and the arrow of adolescence
Is there an inherent link between entropy and the momentum of time?
AI is getting scarily good
Reading Time: 7 minutes Technological advances have made it possible for computers to hold conversations, perform surgery, create art, and more. What room is left for humans?
The middle of history
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why today’s utopian ideologies are unlikely to take us all the way to utopia.
Between massacres: a uniquely American horror show in seven acts
Reading Time: 7 minutes A shooter enters a building in an American city and takes innocent lives. The name of the shooter is insignificant, while their race and gender are both significant and mostly predictable. The city is Buffalo, or Uvalde, or East Lansing, or Monterey Park, or a hundred others.
Dying out loud
A terminal ALS diagnosis led Dave Warnock to a question: Would he spend his remaining time trying to stay alive, or living?
Why did the color violet go viral after 1863?
Allen Tager has spent the new millennium thus far trying to find out why the color violet is so difficult to find through thousands of years of human history—until suddenly it was everywhere.
Could there ever be a Black Trump?
Reading Time: 3 minutes We’re living through a period of rising authoritarianism in US politics. The January 6th Capitol riot was not an isolated incident but a culmination of conservative extremism. Former President Donald Trump regularly flouted political norms and pushed his base toward what were
Why degrowth is wrong
Reading Time: 4 minutes Americans are obsessed with bigness. We build bigger and bigger houses. We drive bigger and bigger cars. We even eat bigger portions and consume more calories than anyone else, including more meat, the most resource-intensive of foods. In short, we idolize excess. We’re the r
Against doomism
Reading Time: 4 minutes Doom-laden scenarios get the most attention, but slow, bumpy progress toward a better world has always been more likely.
Why aren’t you a Trump supporter?
Reading Time: 7 minutes OnlySky · Why aren't you a Trump supporter? | Dale McGowan So you weren’t a Trump supporter in the last election, and you won’t be in the next one. Same here. Well done us. But the question stands: Why aren’t you a Trump
An ethical maze: Designing babies for a greater good?
Reading Time: 16 minutes “At ten months old, we were told he would need a heart transplant. There was no cure for his condition, so we would have to go to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital at some point. If they had a bed. And a heart. And agreed to the procedure.” Great Ormond Street, the fam