Artificial Intelligence rightly belongs in the Trinity with evil gods Pandemic and Atomic. — Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war. — Leaders from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and other A.I. labs, “A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn,” The New York Times, May 30, 2023 Last week…

The best way to assure history will repeat is to make sure no one can learn from it. — Picture this: a surreal scene straight out of a dark comedy. The Red Army, armed with bulldozers and tanks, digs trenches and sets up shop in the infamous Red Forest near the Chernobyl nuclear site. Yes, you read that right. The very same place where trees turned red, frogs mutated…

The Society of Professional Journalists must be rolling over in its digitally-dug grave. — Telling myself I needed to know from where and by whom I am about to be pwned, regardless of my insignificant place in the grand scheme, I watched the entire Joe Biden standup routine at the White House Press Corps annual roast. I admit, my expectations were low and easily…

I see plenty of prophets, but nobody astride Shadowfax, rearing on a hilltop. Daniel Schmachtenberger: I think there are very near term risks in AI, in bioweapons, in planetary boundaries, in supply chains and quite a few things. Meaning, there are certain problems that the existing NGOs and nation-states and…

Is it not a dangerous idea to give hairless apes unlimited energy? Four months ago I posted Foggy Forecasts for Clean Energy Futures that peered down the dark well of climate change diagnoses and concluded: Most of the predictions push us up to somewhere between two and three degrees of…

Extrapolations is life on gluten. It’s just all the bad stuff. — Might plays by Aristophanes or Shakespeare be played out against a backdrop of climate change a half-century from now? That was my take on the Apple+ series Extrapolations. RogerEbert.com show-runs it this way: Each of “Extrapolations”’s eight episodes introduces a new conflict set in a slightly different time in the…

Instead of tagging tropisms, we could simply reimagine. — In my previous post, I ranted about a mailing from a major climate action group that had declared the climate catastrophe can’t be allowed to define our future. Were that true, the next most obvious question would have to be, so how do we go about that? If you ask…

and other perils of publishing in the Age of Consequences I recently got sucked into reading a Climate Reality mass email blast with the subject line: [Deadline Approaching] We can’t let climate catastrophe define our future. It turned out the “deadline” was “Please, will you rush your gift before our…

Pandemic Box Score: China 4, USA 1 — David Wallace Wells opines in The New York Times: This isn’t a question limited to abstract, virtual-reality-style debates on op-ed pages and social media. In at least 30 states, The Washington Post reported last week, legislatures have already passed laws limiting public health powers in the wake of the pandemic…