There is an important warning here for everyone giddy with the recent advances of generative AI. Breathtaking developments in the realm of technology do not render history obsolete. It lives on alongside the latest gadgetry, because the present is not where history ends and the future begins; it is where the past and the future fuse.
It is not every day that I read a prediction of doom as arresting as Eliezer Yudkowsky’s in Time magazine last week. “The most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances,” he wrote, “is that literally everyone on Earth will die.
Monetary policy is more like the World Cup than it is like mathematics or great literature.
Demography isn’t destiny. If population size was history’s major determinant, China might have conquered Europe in the 15th century, and Britain certainly would not have conquered India in the 18th.
If I had a time machine, 1972 isn’t the destination I would choose for Britain — not with so much inflation, strike action and strife just around the corner.
First the economy overheats, then winter comes to Wall Street. January was especially horrible for the cutting-edge investor, and February might be even worse. At the end of last month, big tech stocks were down nearly 8%, according to the New York Stock Exchange’s FANG+ index — and that was before shares of Meta Platforms Inc. (the company formerly known as Facebook) fell off a cliff last week.
The pandemic is over. The pandemic is not over. The transition from the pandemic to the endemic phase of Covid-19 is rife with uncertainty and confusion. This is why the world economy, and particularly the U.S. labor market, look so weird right now.
The public wants prophets. The historian writes stories about the past, but what the public wants is the history of the future. This leads to a paradox.
It was Sunday night on Aug. 15, 1971, and many Americans were watching television — the most popular show that evening being the Western series “Bonanza.”
Maybe you stayed safe in the plague year. Most of us have. But did you stay sane? A growing body of research shows that the damage to our health caused by COVID-19 went far beyond the disease itself.
With just two days remaining before the final votes are cast, President Donald Trump’s obstacles to re-election look insurmountable. The pandemic he wished would miraculously go away is entering its third wave.
There are nine reasons Trump may still win, but none seem likely.
Seven reasons Americans are “nowhere near as alienated from their democratic system” as Germans in the 1920s.
We are, in short, hitting the road as if it was 1957 again, implicitly heading for herd immunity — and substantially more excess deaths — until a vaccine turns up.
