The Long View
Look closely at our dilemma, and you see not decline, but leadership. We are being buffeted by the first waves of a storm spreading around the world. We’re not worst, but merely first.
Category: Technology
Voting Machines, Fake News, and the Future of Democracy
The biggest threat to the integrity of our elections isn’t the machines, but the users.
What Will Replace Democracy?
What’s Next after democracy may already be ascendant.
Democracy in the Age of the Algorithm
Breaking up the Russian/Republican project might end that particular campaign, but it won’t disarm this cheap, readily available weapon, just waiting to be used again.
Boredom, a Eulogy
Boredom has disappeared from our lives and with it, the ingenuity it spawned.
SCOTTeVEST, Fox News, and a Dunning-Kruger nightmare
A shrinking world and the exponential explosion of computing power has sparked a biological arms race with no certain outcome, unleashing a Dunning-Kruger nightmare.
Challenge and opportunity in AI
At a fundamental level our challenge is not Vladimir Putin or Communism or Capitalism or terrorism or crime. Survival for us depends on winning the same race won by our ancestors, a race to adapt our bodies, our cultures and our technologies to emerging demands before those demands overtake us.
Science and politics in a democracy
Our political process is premised on the notion that everyone is equal and therefore everyone’s perception of reality deserves a roughly equal weight. Apply this logic to questions of scientific expertise and the results are either comedy and tragedy, sometimes both.
A couple of weekend longreads
Two excellent long pieces for a quiet weekend.
Welcome to the machine
As we look for ways to understand what happened in Election 2016 and what looms ahead, we should perhaps be thinking less about questions of policy and more about the impact of data overload on our minds. We may be bumping against biological limits in our capabilities, limits that require us to develop new social and technological adaptations to help us cope. A rationalist model of how human beings should best process information may be approaching the end of its evolutionary utility.