Technology
Hyperreal: The next-level escape from the human condition
Our species-long efforts to escape reality are headed to an unreal place.
Wars of extreme convenience
The easier war gets, the more wars we'll see.
Is AI art causing future shock or age-old economic anxiety?
The tech isn’t the problem. Our civic failure to grow along with it is.
Morality is a technology to build a better world
It’s not just material technologies that make our lives better. Civilization is also a collection of moral technologies.
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.