Freddie Mercury Performs at the 2023 San Francisco Pride Parade. The best thing this week in A.I. art. We live in an age of miracles.
A web site that serves up random (but curated) articles on intellectually interesting topics. Not explicitly driven by A.I. but more and more things just will be (at least partially) as a matter of course.
Great essay on sci-fi titan Gene Wolfe. I don’t recommend him much, because “The Book of the New Sun” is so oblique in its genius and his other stuff I’ve read is even weirder. But if any particular approach was going to convince you he’s worth the effort, it’s this one.
The 80,000 Hours Podcast recently released a curated series on A.I. I’ve had a number of people tell me they felt my newsletter had helped them get more up-to-date on A.I. issues, and while I certainly appreciate the compliment, I promise there’s a lot more to know. If you want to start seriously educating yourself, this is probably the single best place to start.
A Taxonomy of Magic. Really interesting essay on the psychological reasons magic exists in stories and is so popular.
Really cool article about technical advances in Desalinization. This is a technology that has always made sense to me (97.5% of the water on earth is salty!), but was bedeviled by energy needs and technical glitches. Excellent news for climate change mitigation here.
Delightyfully Nerdy Blog by author and historian Ada Palmer. She is author of the awesome “Terra Ignota” series. I am adding this one to my blogroll. Also there is a related podcast.
Lab-grown meat company adds recovered Wooly Mammoth DNA to make burgers taste 'more intense'. It’s hard to believe this is not from The Onion. Capitalism, baby!
The history of the word "planet" is probably not what you think it is. Interesting on its own terms, but also for me the deeper meaning is a reminder of how even simple things in our lives often have complex and ambiguous histories, and I should be less sure that however I happen to think about something has more than arbitrary significance.
A serious look at what A.I. is likely to be like in 2030. This is only seven years away, folks! It all still seems very abstract right now but it will come, and things will be different than ever they were. It’s easy to fall into thinking about this entirely in economic terms (will I have a job?), but to me the greater questions are political, psychological, and ultimately spiritual. That is: As the models get more and more powerful, and more and more available at a trivial price, how will we maintain a functioning democracy? How will we keep from depression and ennui? How will we find meaning and presence? These are live questions, in the lifetime of everyone reading this. Get ready!
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, as always you can like, comment, and share to help me out. But also: I hereby officially solicit links and pointers to interesting things in science, tech, and sci fi. You can email them to me at OGWiseman@gmail.com. I cannot, on my own, read the entire internet!
Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with another original story.