I think the interesting and most difficult challenge for Mrs. Clinton if she becomes President is how to bring America together.
The great danger and fear that I have is that in the last fifty to seventy years, power has increasingly concentrated not only in the federal government but in the presidency.
One thing I can say is that I don’t think we know very much about Donald Trump, which is one of the things that’s scary about him but also one of the things that’s exciting about him.
In an environment where everybody can pick up everybody’s tools, we’re all weirdly empowered now. And I mean kind of weird in an almost fey sense like, our powers are weird, they make us weird, and they make our our conflicts weird. It’s again that idea that our tools are interacting with our human flaws in really really interesting ways.
One of the primary questions, or problems as I see it, is this “illusion” that sameness will bring safety. People start to thinking that if we are surrounded by similar people, like-minded people, if we have communities based on sameness, that will bring us safety. That’s an illusion. That’s not the case at all.
When I look at the signs today, I see a very strong trend back to what I call tribalism, back to nation-states, nationalism, religiosity, all those divisive forces that many intellectuals in the 1940s, ’50s, thought were going to disappear gradually. That did not happen.
Hannah Arendt loved it when unexpected things happened in politics. She thinks and thought that spontaneity, newness… She used the word “natality,” which is often misused and abused in her work by others, but it means birth, birthliness. And she thought that what made human beings different from other animals is not that we were rational, but that we could start things new.
Can we have agreements or the mechanisms for enforcing agreements between governments without having to appeal to the ambiguity of international law?
To understand human nature, I focus on human language and what it can reveal about how we think. Unlike other animals, humans can communicate an infinite number of thoughts through language. And one reason that language is powerful is because we can use each of our words flexibly, with several different meanings.
The United States plants more than 170 million acres of corn and soybeans a year, more than any country in the world. And the primary mechanism in the US that we use to subsidize agriculture is actually called the Federal Crop Insurance Program. So, the crop insurance program in the US is also the largest such program globally, with over $100 billion in liabilities annually. So it’s a very big program.
Neoliberalism is broken. The economic model of the last thirty years. It worked for a bit, dragged the bottom two thirds of the world's population up the income scale dramatically, facilitated the tech revolution. But it's stopped working. Read more →
This is going to be a conversation about science fiction not just as a cultural phenomenon, or a body of work of different kinds, but also as a kind of method or a tool. Read more →
General purpose computers are in fact astounding. So astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them. To figure out what they're for. To figure out how to accommodate them and how to cope with them. Read more →
When we talk about technologies such as AI, and policy, one of the main problems is that technological advancement is fast, and policy and democracy is a very very slow process. And that could be potentially a very big problem if we think that AI could be potentially dangerous. Read more →
When lower primates form a hierarchy, those at the bottom undergo a change in their dopamine system. This makes them more likely to consume drugs in an addictive fashion. Now, if this turns out to be true of our species, that would mean that human beings are particularly vulnerable if they're in some way dominated or don't have any power. Read more →