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From Scrubbing Toilets to Talking around the Water Cooler: Why AI Won't Kill the Jobs of Those Who Clean Up Our Mess
Anyone lucky enough to have seen Wim Wenders’ 2023 masterpiece Perfect Days is familiar with the dignity of professional Japanese toilet cleaners. Ma…
1 year, 2 months ago
Nostalgia vs. Progress: The Left's Dilemma in Post-Industrial America
Once upon a time, it was very easy for the American left to determine progress. The working class was good, the traditional left knew, and so progres…
1 year, 2 months ago
When AI Breaks Your Heart: The Week Nothing Changed in Silicon Valley
Tech nostalgia. Winner-take-all economics. The cult of "storytelling". A Stanford educated aristocratic elite. This was the week that nothing changed…
1 year, 2 months ago
From Brazilian Model to Nuclear Advocate: How one Woman's Radical Climate Anxiety is Generating a "Rad Future"
I’m not sure on this one. On the one hand, Isabelle Boemeke is a pin-up of an environmentally activist generation - going from superstar Brazilian mo…
1 year, 2 months ago
Forget AI—How Bio-Threats and Network Collapse Are the Real Existential Threats to Humanity
Few of the world’s great scientists have given more thought to the existential threats to humanity than the irrepressible British cosmologist and ast…
1 year, 2 months ago
AI Godfather Geoffrey Hinton warns that We're Creating 'Alien Beings that "Could Take Over"
So will AI wipe us out? According to Geoffrey Hinton, the 2024 Nobel laureate in physics, there's about a 10-20% chance of AI being humanity's final …
1 year, 2 months ago
A Black Moses: The Quest for a Promised African-American Land in Oklahoma
We all are familiar, of course, with Robert Altman’s classic 1971 movie about the settling of the west, McCabe and Mrs Miller. But most of us, I’m gu…
1 year, 2 months ago
America Never Was a Democracy—And That's Why It's Dying Now
Should we be defending American democracy if it never really existed? That’s the controversial thesis at the heart of Osita Nwanevu’s new book, The R…
1 year, 2 months ago
That Frog in the Boiling Water is Us: Why Progress Won't Save Us From Climate Catastrophe
In what climate pessimists define as our environmentally apocalyptic times, we’ve become the metaphorical frog in the boiling water. That, at least, …
1 year, 2 months ago
The Week AI Began to Act: The Dawn of an AI Stone Age in Which Machines Have Their Own Tools
How many more times can we report on a week in tech that changed the world? But here we go again…. We just had a week in Silicon Valley where everyth…
1 year, 2 months ago