I’ve written at length about the growing influence of pro-extinctionist sentiments within Silicon Valley. Pro-extinctionism is, roughly put, the view that our species, Homo sapiens, ought to go extinct.1 Well, it looks like we just witnessed “the first example ever of someone openly being fired…

The word “antinatalism” was introduced in the early 2000s to describe the ethical view that procreation is morally wrong. There are several reasons one might accept antinatalism: Philosophical pessimism: the world is a very bad place, and hence it’s wrong to bring people into this world. The…

The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemy Get our newsletter! Get our newsletter! Ludd, drawn here in 1812, was the fictitious leader of numerous real protests. Granger Collection, New York In an essay in 1984—at the dawn of the…

A programming note: I initially wanted to cover Microsoft’s earnings today, but I am changing the schedule a bit as I felt more inspired to write today’s piece. Almost two decades ago, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the first tech company to exceed $100 Billion annual revenue threshold in 2007. At that…

Rich Sutton March 13, 2019 The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin. The ultimate reason for this is Moore's law, or rather its generalization of continued exponentially…

Update 8/8/2025 – I wrote this the day before a certain post by a popular developer services company. I’ve seen some comments this is a rebuttal – it wasn’t meant to be! But clearly there’s a lot of similar messaging going around the industry right now. As a restaurant owner – I’m astounded at the…

Listen to this story 00:0024:16 These days, everyone seems to have an opinion about A.I. companions. Last year, I found myself joining the debate, publishing a paper—co-written with two fellow psychology professors and a philosopher—called “In Praise of Empathic A.I.” Our argument was that, in…

While many tech founders seem to bask in the glow of a spotlight, Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp would rather be anywhere else—particularly if “anywhere else” is outdoors and among some plants. And while his peers are building rocket ships and tweaking algorithms in an attempt to increase our…

From: screwtape@infernalinitiatives.org To: wormwood@earthlyerrors.com Subject: The AI Masterstroke Wormwood, my dear, I hope this email finds you mired in delightful mischief. Your recent report on your patient's spiritual wobbling pleased me greatly, but I sense you're missing the grand design.…

In The Republic, Plato envisions a society where the family is abolished. The state, rather than parents, oversees reproduction, deciding who should mate to produce the best offspring. Children are not raised by their biological parents but are placed in state nurseries, ensuring that no child…

Imagine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her childhood, when she mentions, somewhat casually, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He introduced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had gotten her first period, without her…

TESCREAL—pronounced “tess-cree-all.” It’s a strange word that you may have seen pop up over the past few months. The renowned computer scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru frequently mentions the “TESCREAL” ideologies on social media, and for a while the Twitter profile of billionaire venture capitalist Marc…

New data collected from more than 200,000 people across the world shows that young people aren’t as happy as they used to be. Listen to this article · 5:40 min Learn more By Published April 30, 2025Updated May 1, 2025 Sign up for the Well newsletter, for Times subscribers only. Essential news and…

Fred Freundlich is an American researcher who has been working for Mondragon, the world’s largest group of worker cooperatives, for the last 25 years. Here’s our interview about what it’s like to work for a company that is also a democracy and why we need to create more social businesses. Elle…

The Quest for Global Flourishing We all desire to flourish. The flourishing of all people should be made a national and international priority across the globe. To promote flourishing, we need to understand its determinants and its distribution: Who is flourishing and who is not? Who needs help, and…

by Lily L. Tsai and Alex Pentland (1) The authors explore how AI can foster new forms of civic engagement and direct democracy at both local and national levels. They propose designing digital infrastructure to enable collective decision-making and reduce polarization by encouraging interactions…

Credits Saffron Huang is co-founder and advisor at the Collective Intelligence Project, working on enabling more democratic emerging technologies, and a researcher on the Societal Impacts team at Anthropic. Sam Manning is a senior research fellow at the Centre for the Governance of AI. As AI…

by Divya Siddarth, Saffron Huang, and Audrey Tang (1) The authors describe a set of scalable “alignment assemblies” that can be used to enable progress, safety, and participation in democracy in an AI-enabled future. They describe how the lessons of the Federalist Papers—particularly around…

Sections Follow the authors Molly Kinder As the world reflects on Pope Francis’ legacy following his death last week, his leadership on social and economic justice is rightly being celebrated. But far less known—yet still profoundly prescient—is his visionary leadership on artificial intelligence.…

Yaqub Chaudhary is a Visiting Scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. At the time of writing, several leading AI companies have demonstrated new conversational agents that can generate intelligible fluent speech with a wide range of vocal…

Brian Patrick Green, Ph.D., is the Director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, USA. He is author of the book Space Ethics, contributing author to Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations, and co-author of…

Welcome to the last installment of the Convivial Society for 2024. Come January, this iteration of the newsletter will celebrate its fifth year. It’s been a joy to write, and a pleasure to connect with readers over the past five years. Thank you all. In this short installment, I offer you a…

Sometime around 1830, a young Frenchman of aristocratic family, with liberal sympathies, got on a boat headed to America. He wanted to see the new democracy in action. He travelled around and reported what he saw: a vigorous spirit of self-government that manifested in a hundred little ways. But he…

“The substance of the good life must be taken into consideration if radical political reform is to become a live option.” — Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) In 1943, Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist who was living in England at the time, was…

Let me tell you a story. This story begins in a garden, at the very beginning of all things. All life can be found in this garden: every living being, every bird and animal, every tree and plant. Humans live here too, and so does the creator of all of it, the source of everything, and he is so close…

This is the second in my ongoing series of fortnightly essays. If you’d like to receive all of them as they are published, please subscribe. Otherwise, you can sign up for free to receive some of them. There is no such thing as a perfect society, and anyone who tries to build one will either go mad…

There is a growing consensus among social scientists and philosophers alike that a sense of life’s meaning and purpose is a key aspect of flourishing, and one that is irreducible either to happiness (in the sense of positive emotion) or goodness (in the sense of personal virtue). A group of…

Welcome back, in relatively short order, to the Convivial Society. This is an uncharacteristic installment in that it follow so quickly on the previous one and has, to my mind, a rather blog-ish feel to it (at least in its initial conception). But I hope you’ll indulge me, because the striking…

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Before getting on to the usual business I wanted to note that a few days ago I was more than a little surprised to discover that I had been included in Vox’s Future Perfect 50, a list of “innovators, thinkers, and…

The curtains open, and the stage lights flicker on. The heat of old incandescent bulbs and the dull hum of their analog workings can be sensed by the audience seated in the first few rows nearest the theater stage. There are no actors between the parted curtains. All that is heard is a baby’s cry…

Welcome to a special installment of the Convivial Society. On Monday, a friend emailed to let me know that the philosopher of technology Albert Borgmann had passed away overnight. While I may not mention Borgmann as often as Illich, Ellul, or Arendt, he has undoubtedly been a critical voice shaping…

Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. This is a relatively brief post taking a recent Apple ad as a point of departure. I won’t rehash the criticisms that have already been offered elsewhere, but I did not want to pass on the opportunity to reflect on how we…