metazine

Technologies of disruption are also the platform for social consensus.

AI puts a new spin on old questions about free will: Is an actor the genuine author of their actions? Are they responsible for their choices? Can they be held accountable for them?

Few discoveries would be more consequential than identifying the specific neural structures responsible for subjective experience.

In India and China, the nation-state is a legacy of Western modernity.

Work has never been able to provide people with the kind of value that a vocation, spiritual belief system or community once did. But AI might change that.

Tech leaders keep saying “we” must decide AI’s future. Here’s an actual plan to include the public.

Waiting for a disaster to save us.

For most of human history, climate disrupted our shared beliefs. Now communications technologies do. We are caught between frames.

Increasing desertification now means large parts of Earth are becoming inhospitable. Can gene-edited bacteria save our planet from drying out?

The competition awards a prize of $50,000 for essays submitted in English and Chinese.

If China reads India through the lens of colonial subordination, India reads China through the lens of betrayal.

We are headed toward a world of productivity without prosperity, execution without verification and capacity without constraint. But this outcome is not inevitable.

Technology, like climate, shapes culture.

Might the arrival of a radical break in the historical continuum — artificial intelligence — accelerate the collapse of procreation?