A technologically advanced culture cannot flourish without getting better at anticipating the future. That’s why science fiction matters. That’s why scenario planning matters. That’s why complex software simulations that enable us to forecast things like climate change on the scale of decades matter.

And here I want to bring us back to another idea... See more

tendency to judge everything from the perspective you occupy, so that the few thousand weeks for which you happen to be around inevitably come to feel like the linchpin of history, to which all prior time was always leading up. These self-centred judgements are part of what psychologists call the ‘egocentricity bias’, and they make good sense from

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But the ancient questions are reemerging due to the unsettling nature of technological change. We are being forced to confront these timeless, existential questions by developments that cause conflict between the three cities: like the possibilities of artificial intelligence, or the moral questions raised by genomics, or the tension between freedo... See more

As humans we’ve long been forged on the anvil of the mysteries: Why are we here? Why do we die? What is love? We are tuned like a cello to vibrate with such questions. What is entirely new is the amount of information we are receiving from all over the planet. So we don’t just receive stress on a localized, human level, we mainline it from a huge, ... See more