The Soft Disinformation Contagion
How we learned to reason poorly with accurate data.
Jorge Iniesta Cases
· 7 min read
technology
A collection of 20 posts
Why Tech Is Feminist
Nature is sexist. Technology is the equaliser.
Zion Lights
· 7 min read
Authorship in an Age of Automation
The quiet erosion of responsibility in an age of machine-generated prose.
Kieran Beville
· 6 min read
Why We Distrust Technology
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.
Marian L. Tupy
· 5 min read
The Digital Mirror of Narcissus
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.
Timandra Harkness
· 11 min read
More People, More Prosperity: The Simon Abundance Index
The Simon Abundance Index 2024 finds Earth’s resources 509% more plentiful than in 1980.
Marian L. Tupy
· 5 min read
To Accelerate or Decelerate AI: That is the Question
Explaining the “accel/decel” split at the heart of the OpenAI power struggle.
Sean Welsh, Michael Timothy Bennett
· 13 min read
The Communication Revolution
Like the first iPhone, Gutenberg’s Bible opened up avenues of development that entrepreneurs have been exploiting ever since.
James Hannam
· 10 min read
Artificially Intelligent Offense?
ChatGPT has been programmed to avoid giving accurate information if it may cause offense.
Lawrence M. Krauss
· 12 min read
Why Environmentalists Pose a Bigger Obstacle to Effective Climate Policy than Denialists
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.
Maarten Boudry
· 10 min read
Machine Learning, Deep Fakes, and the Threat of an Artificially Intelligent Hate-Bot
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
James D. Miller
· 6 min read
Technology and the Golden Age of Taxonomy
After decades of experience, the sharpest naturalists in history may have been able to identify a few hundred species in the field.
Malcolm Cochran
· 6 min read
A Contrarian View of Digital Health
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.
John Mandrola
· 6 min read
Down the Rabbit Hole of Political Intolerance in Silicon Valley
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).
Blake J. Harris and Clay Routledge
· 10 min read
We Can Put an End to State Bidding Wars
Amazon would still have paid tax revenue, and, more likely than not, other tech startups would have followed, growing the taxable population even further.
Christopher Sabaitis
· 6 min read