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.”

Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis

Dr. Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel and related trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.

A Bigger Boat | Frankly #26

In this Frankly, Nate shares some context about how he thinks about the recent global banking and financial market news.

More in this tag

Jul 06 2023

Global polycrisis: The causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement

by Dr. Michael Lawrence at The Cascade Institute….. In this framework, a global crisis arises when one or more fast-moving trigger events combines with...
Sep 14 2023

Treading Thin Air

by Geoff Mann in Uncertainty and Climate Change….What we need is a much more honest assessment of what we do not or cannot know, which is, among other important...
Sep 14 2023

Prefixing the world

by Jonathan Rowson in Perspectiva…The metacrisis is the historically specific threat to truth, beauty, and goodness caused by our persistent misunderstanding,...
Sep 14 2023

I want a better catastrophe

by Andrew Boyd in bettercatastrophe.com…The apocolypse is already happening.

Sep 14 2023

Keep humanity’s future in sight and integrate the polycrisis lens

from transformphilanthropy.wingsweb.org….The climate crisis is one of the most pressing global challenges of our time. However, only a tiny fraction of global...
Sep 14 2023

Heat is not a metaphor

by Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Harpers Bazaar….Let me be clear: “Living on a menopausal planet” does not mean the extreme heat we are experiencing is just a natural...
Sep 14 2023

Where dangerous heat is surging

by Niko Kommenda, et al in the Washington Post….The danger of climate change is often associated with huge disasters: floods, fires, hurricanes. Heat, on the...
Sep 14 2023

The fear of a nuclear fire that would consume Earth

by Thomas Moynihan at BBC.com…..Perhaps the lesson for AI is that the dramatic risks should command our attention, but so too should the more tangible, less...
Sep 10 2023

America is using up its groundwater like there’s no tomorrow

By Mira Rojanasakul et al, in The New York Times…..“From an objective standpoint, this is a crisis,” said Warigia Bowman, a law professor and water expert at the...
Sep 10 2023

What the fossil fuel industry doesn’t want you to know

In TedX with Al Gore……In a blistering talk, Nobel Laureate Al Gore looks at the two main obstacles to climate solutions and gives his view of how we might...
Sep 10 2023

RISD’s center for complexity developing design manual for maintaining life on earth

by Tim Maly on RISD.org…RISD’s Center for Complexity (CfC) has served as a think tank bringing together transdisciplinary experts and academics with real-world...