by Aaron Horvath in The Hedgehog Review…If the question is how to do more good with your giving, then the answer MyGoodness provides comes with crisply quantified moral clarity.
Octavia Butler on creativity, the power of our obsessions, and how we become who we are
by Maria Popova in The Pocket…“Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful positive obsession blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest, the most intense of our chosen struggles.”
How jazz shaped the civil rights movement
by Lesley McClurg in interview of Larry Tye on KQED.org…He profiles the trio in his new book, “The Jazzmen.” In it, he pieces together over 250 interviews, including family members and former bandmates, to illustrate how their appeal among both Black and white audiences paved the way for the Civil Rights Movement. Tye joins us to share more.
Looking Back at the Future of Humanity Institute
by Tom Ough in Asteriskmag.com…The rise and fall of the influential, embattled Oxford research center that brought us the concept of existential risk.
An ancient Chinese text that’s surprisingly relevant today
by Richard Heinberg in Resilience.org….I’ll leave the last words to the Old Master, this time from the Bahm translation:
Whenever someone sets out to remold the world, experience teaches that he is bound to fail.
For Nature is already as good as it can be.
It cannot be improved upon.
He who tries to redesign it, spoils it.
He who tries to redirect it, misleads it.
‘I couldn’t believe the data’: how thinking in a foreign language improves decision-making
Research shows people who speak another language are more utilitarian and flexible, less risk-averse and egotistical, and better able to cope with traumatic memories
More in this category
The Desert of the Anthropocene: An ongoing installation from artist Ravi Agarwal
The long engagement is a part of an ongoing investigation into the current state of the nature, both as a crisis which traverses a political realm, but also a cultural contestation of how ‘nature’ is thought of in the era of the Anthropocene.
The surprising thing A.I. engineers will tell you if you let them
by Ezra Klein, The New York Times…This is an example of “alignment risk,” the danger that what we want the systems to do and what they will actually do could diverge, and perhaps do so violently. Curbing alignment risk requires curbing the systems themselves, not just the ways we permit people to use them.
This changes everything
In a 2022 survey, A.I. experts were asked, “What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?”
Regular old intelligence is sufficient–even lovely
Precisely twenty years ago, I published a book called “Enough” that outlined my fears about artificial intelligence and its companion technologies like advanced robotics and human genetic engineering
Q&A with Noam Chomsky about the future of our world for the SXSW23 Wonder House
Q&A with Noam Chomsky about the Future of our world.
We asked Noam Chomsky about the future of our world, our systems of government and power and our need to come together to address the challenges of our time. The laureate professor and public intellectual shared his thoughts with UArizona College of Social & Behavioral Sciences Dean Lori Poloni-Staudinger.
The A.I. Dilemma
The challenges of AI for human culture.
Elon Musk and others call for pause on A.I., citing ‘profound risks to society’
More than 1,000 tech leaders, researchers and others signed an open letter urging a moratorium on the development of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems.
The age of AI has begun
Artificial intelligence is as revolutionary as mobile phones and the Internet.
Our new promethean moment
To observe an A.I. system — its software, microchips and connectivity — produce that level of originality in multiple languages in just seconds each time, well, the first thing that came to mind was the observation by the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Noam Chomsky: The false promise of ChatGPT
Could AI degrade our science and debase our ethics?
Blue foods can help solve multiple global challenges
Blue foods – fish, shellfish, algae and aquatic plants – can be instrumental in solving multiple global crises, new analysis shows.
“If you could win the popular imagination, you change the game”: Why we need new stories on climate
People without much sense of history imagine the world as static. They assume that if the present order is failing, the system is collapsing, and there is no alternative. A historical imagination equips you to understand that change is ceaseless. You only have to look to the past to see such a world, dramatically different half a century ago, stunningly so a century ago.
A guide to 9 global buzzwords for 2023, from ‘polycrisis’ to ‘zero-dose children’
We’re having a polycrisis. The pandemic has resulted in too many zero-dose children. Charities are not always succeeding in tarmac-to-arm.
Tasting the Pickle: Ten flavours of meta-crisis and the appetite for a new civilisatio
Perspectiva is a registered charity operating as a collective of scholars, artists, activists, futurists and seekers who believe credible hope for humanity’s future lies in forms of economic restraint and political cooperation that are beyond prevailing epistemic capacities and spiritual sensibilities.
‘Extinction is on the table’: Jaron Lanier warns of tech’s existential threat to humanity
Jaron Lanier, the eminent American computer scientist, composer and artist, is no stranger to skepticism around social media, but his current interpretations of its effects are becoming darker and his warnings more trenchant.