Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The only way to live in the world right now without touching AI is to rid yourself of all connection to the internet, and I don’t know how I would go about that, nor that I would want to. Given these conditions, it lifts my heart a little to see that there are those willing to try for a trickster move, a way to turn the machines against all of our expectations.
We are able to see why a root cellar is necessary. We are able to reimagine our path through life so that we are on the sustainable root cellar way, not the way of void following implosion.
A major new entry to the Oz-pocalypse sub-genre was recently published, which may be one of the most profound works of cli-fi seen to date. This is the novel Juice (Tim Winton, Picador, 2024), which paints a vivid future history of a climate change-ravaged Australia, and wider world.
By applying a concept widely used in mathematics and computer science, Carole Crumley has radically changed the way anthropologists see and study societies.
When I talk about being an Earthling, I am not talking about symbolism. I am talking about work and care and the responsibility of being part of a healthy whole. This is what being part of the land means.
We don’t do this because we believe we’ll win. We do it because survival is about more than resources—it’s about meaning. And meaning is what we leave behind.
The dramatic drop in the cost of AI demonstrated by Chinese upstart DeepSeek is great for buyers of AI tools, but very bad for the incumbent developers of those tools.
As anticipated 50 years ago by the Club of Rome, tensions between our ever-expanding modes of exploitation and the finiteness of the planet’s resources have now become a critical factor in the evolution of human societies.
But getting back to the matter of simplicity and complexity… the simpler, the more localized and embedded your life, the deeper and more extensive your relationships are.
Thus, I seek stories that teach humility, and how to live ecologically. The best avenue seems to be stories that come from the tried-and-true more-than-human world, not the self-flattering drivel we fabricate.
In At a Loss For Words: Conversation in an Age of Rage she breaks down the burning crisis of our time — the rise of authoritarian governments — and explains why we are letting it happen. Reading it, I find that she has helped me with my confusion and invigorated my weary mind.
Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr (1904-2005)—who, I’m told, was a very smart person—concluded, late in life, that high intelligence may be a lethal mutation. In this article, we’ll explore some reasons for this startling and paradoxical assessment.
