Author: Adam Lee

In their feverish and violent response to Donald Trump’s indictment, MAGA Republicans are acting like they believe their doomsday is imminent—and they might just be right.

AI futurists assume that faster thinking automatically produces greater intelligence, leading to a Singularity of transcendent machine minds. However, thinking speed is the less important half of intelligence. We should remember the failure of past predictions and have some humility about what the future holds.

The unnatural sight of a smoke-clouded sky triggers a primeval instinct in us. We don’t have to cower from nature as our ancestors did, but we should treat it as a sign that we need to change course.

The religious right no longer has the numbers or the influence to stop corporations from catering to shifting cultural norms, but they’re becoming more and more willing to use harassment and violence instead.

AI has demonstrated impressive talents, and new uses are being discovered every day. However, the existing AI programs are single-purpose. They aren’t the futurist dream of an artificial general intelligence that can solve any problem and rapidly improve itself. And there’s no telling how far off such a thing actually is.

To be a successful gardener, you have to think in years and seasons. Living at the pace of a plant is a welcome antidote to a culture built on convenience and instant gratification.

A private Christian university punishes employees for mentioning their preferred pronouns. It’s the latest cruel, futile attempt to hold back an incoming tide of cultural change.

Defenders of the free market say capitalism is the only economic system that could possibly work. A variety of counterexamples both from the U.S. and around the world throw that assumption into doubt.

No one actually supports free speech without restriction—but there’s a big difference between fighting hate and harassment, and censoring news unfavorable to the powerful.

Anti-vax ideology isn’t a harmless quirk or a side issue. It reflects a worldview unmoored from empirical reality, and that’s an extremely bad sign for a candidate’s ability to make the right choices in a crisis.