Technology
Solarpunk humanism: How we dream bigger than despair
Solarpunk offers a potent narrative space for imagining secular worlds to come, and how to get there.
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.
Virtual reality church: This tech isn’t just for gaming anymore
In which today's shrinking church reaches out to virtual reality—with weird results.
‘Cementing bias in a flower-scented maze’: A.I. and the eternal digital footprint
Artificial intelligence is big business, and it’s not going away.
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.
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.
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
Why AI isn’t an oracle of truth
Reading Time: 5 minutes Big Tech companies eager to find the next big thing have latched onto AI chatbots—but they’re racing ahead of what the tech can actually do.
Reclaiming human agency in how we think about AI
Reading Time: 9 minutes Online panic about AI models like ChatGPT follows a well-travelled path set by impoverished understandings of evolutionary theory. Can we reclaim human agency?
So this is 90 seconds to midnight
Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock, which for three quarters of a century has been used to depict humanity’s risk of global disaster from nuclear war. When the clock was first