A collection of 17 posts
Why do so many people reflexively favour social solutions to climate change while discounting the promise of technological breakthroughs? The answer lies in our evolutionary past.
Technology steers my life along tracks chosen for my digital double, not for me. But this proxy personalisation wouldn’t work at all if I didn’t play my part.
The Simon Abundance Index 2024 finds Earth’s resources 509% more plentiful than in 1980.
Explaining the “accel/decel” split at the heart of the OpenAI power struggle.
Like the first iPhone, Gutenberg’s Bible opened up avenues of development that entrepreneurs have been exploiting ever since.
ChatGPT has been programmed to avoid giving accurate information if it may cause offense.
The opposition to nuclear energy is not the only way in which mainstream environmentalists have, with the best of intentions, hurt the cause of climate action.
Fake news isn’t new. More than a century ago, newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer helped stir up enthusiasm for war against Spain by hyping the dubious claim that Spanish agents had used explosives to sink the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. The cry of “Remember
After decades of experience, the sharpest naturalists in history may have been able to identify a few hundred species in the field.
Sending millions more people to clinicians, creating a society even more fearful of lurking diseases, and systematically robbing people of the normal arc of life and death–this, I am afraid, is where the digital health expansion is heading.
I took it as a good sign that by the time I got back to our family brunch all I could talk about was what I’d read about this kid (Palmer Luckey) and his incredible company (Oculus).
Amazon would still have paid tax revenue, and, more likely than not, other tech startups would have followed, growing the taxable population even further.
In an age of heated polarization of it will be difficult for politicians to convince their opponents that damaging videos are in fact deepfakes.
We’re blinded by incremental progress in electronic gadgets of marginal utility—new smartphones, larger monitors, and more powerful computers.
China now stands poised to lead the world in the development of artificial-intelligence technologies, which rely, for their machine-learning algorithms.