Reading Time: 9 minutes Online panic about AI models like ChatGPT follows a well-travelled path set by impoverished understandings of evolutionary theory. Can we reclaim human agency?
Science
Science stories that matter, reported from a secular perspective at OnlySky, a secular community for nonreligious Americans.
Posted inWar and Peace
So this is 90 seconds to midnight
Reading Time: 4 minutes On January 24, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists officially moved the hands on the Doomsday Clock, which for three quarters of a century has been used to depict humanity’s risk of global disaster from nuclear war. When the clock was first launched, on the cover of the June […]
Posted inTechnology
Camera phones don’t prove God’s existence
Reading Time: 3 minutes Smartphones have created video evidence for many claims both unknown and underappreciated, but they’ve failed to support religious beliefs.
Posted inHealth
Your gas stove might make you sick, but your politics can kill you
Reading Time: 4 minutes Living longer and being healthy should be uncontroversial, nonpartisan ideas—but to the American right, they aren’t.
Posted inClimate Crisis
Four recent failures in climate change response
Reading Time: 6 minutes Welcome to 2023: another year of corporate and political mediocrity when it comes to climate change response. We’re in the middle of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, known colloquially as Davos after its Swiss Alps location, so rhetoric around climate change response (and related economic pressure points) is currently running hot. On Wednesday, an […]
Posted inRaising Freethinkers
The science you will never know
The science you will never know can kill you, and it can save your life. Getting scientific answers right is more important at this point in history in countless ways than it has ever been. You and I cannot be productive contributors to every scientific conversation, except in one way: by pointing, on a given issue for which we lack expertise, to the people who do know what the hell they’re talking about.
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
AI is here: Are we finally ready to rethink the value of being human?
Reading Time: 6 minutes It’s been a good few months for machine-learning software—and a confusing one for the humans trying to live their best lives around it. Last fall, digital art generators like Midjourney and DALL-E drew the alarm of illustrators, photographers, and other digital artists: not just because the algorithms were trained on data not expressly sanctioned by […]
Posted inPolitics
Did anti-vaxxer deaths from COVID swing elections?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Anti-vaccine conservatives suffered a disproportionate death toll during the COVID pandemic, compared to liberals who got vaccinated in huge numbers. Could this dynamic have affected the outcome of any elections in 2022, and if so, which ones?
Posted inDeep Dive
2022: The year in global review, Part II
Reading Time: 9 minutes Our exercise in the folly of year-end lists continues! In Part I of this global review for 2022, three key themes emerged from this year’s major news events. The first was “Europe on fire”, and the implications of energy infrastructure policy for the environment and future imperialist tyranny. The second dealt with the collapse of […]
Posted inTechnology
What I found in that dusty shop in Arabia in 1985 changed everything
Reading Time: 5 minutes It was summer 1985, and I found myself at scorching midday deep in the dry-as-dead-bones central marketplace, the souk, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was hunting for, of all improbable things at that time, a “personal computer” (PC). Ever since a fellow American expatriate demonstrated the wonders of his clunky, DOS-powered IBM PC at his […]