AI vs humans: The ‘singularity’ keeps getting postponed
AI boosters keep postponing the advent of artificial general intelligence.
Society
You Can Learn a Lot About Someone’s Mind From the Way They Talk
Scientists are uncovering how the hidden effort of talking affects everything from everyday conversations to spotting deception and fake news.
Emergence
You might think, as I did, that that emergence is coming out of something and leaving difficulty behind, but I discovered, as I wrote this piece, it is in fact about becoming a different kind of creature for a world turned upside down. The Labyrinth is a training ground for a re-entry.
Debating degrowth: A response to Jason Hickel
We really believe that degrowth is a more complex, substantial and significant concept and movement than its treatment in the Hickel interview. We think that the degrowth movement has a very important role to play in the challenging political context.
Moral Ambition: Redefining Success for the Global Good
In today’s episode, Nate sits down with Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman to discuss the concept of moral ambition, which he defines as the desire to be one of the best, measured by different standards of success: not by big payouts or fancy honorifics, but by the ability to tackle the world’s biggest problems.
Jane Goodall, the gentle disrupter whose research on chimpanzees redefined what it meant to be human
Anyone proposing to offer a master class on changing the world for the better, without becoming negative, cynical, angry or narrow-minded in the process, could model their advice on the life and work of pioneering animal behavior scholar Jane Goodall.
A Theory Gone Flat
A lesson for me is that these people pay too much attention to their brain chatter and not enough to the actual universe full of sunsets and stars. We could all learn from this: consult the actual universe, not what you would wish to be true.
The Other Shore of the Nile
In the age of the Limits to Growth report, Illich challenged audiences to look beyond the quantitative account of limits which presses the case for technocracy, and to engage in a reflection on the desirability of chosen limits, the ways in which they serve to create the conditions of possibility for lives worth living and worlds worth living for.
What do we really need?
So, it is not the case that the market’s functioning is a reflection on who we are and how we choose to behave, how we meet our needs. We do not need to be homo economicus for the market to thrive.
The Launch of Transition Town Warri
Last month, I had the honor and privilege of being invited to participate in the launch of Transition Town Warri. While the explicit purpose of my trip to Nigeria was simply to co-facilitate an introductory Transition Launch Training, as I’ve done many times before, it ended up being much more than that.
The Influence of Psychopaths: Why Humanity Is Better Than We Think
In this week’s Frankly, Nate reflects on intraspecies predation (ours) and the impact psychopathic actors have on the mean and median of human behavior – in the past all the way up to our modern society.
In Common
And so now I’m home again, back to the farm, back to the book publication, back to a million things to do, back to trying to grow some produce and grow some politics that’s not far-left or far-right but equal to the present moment by dispensing with those figments of modernism and doing my bit to articulate more vital political traditions like Romanticism and distributism.
