Sublime

The steadily accumulating mass of our understanding and the ability to control a growing number of variables that affect our lives (ranging from food production that is sufficient to feed the world’s entire population to highly effective inoculation that prevents previously dangerous infectious diseases) has lowered the overall risk of living, but

So, optimizing utility changes over many parallel worlds actually also optimizes wealth itself over time. That’s sort of the message.

The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.

If a life of foraging is really better than a life of farm labor, why wouldn’t humanity find a path back from agriculture to hunting and gathering? The best guess is that early farm settlements faced a one-way demographic trap. Here is a simple illustration: Suppose that the first generation of farmers got a boost from farming. Instead of eating tw

Innovation and wealth creation that fuel social systems, if left unchecked, potentially sow the seeds of their inevitable collapse. Can this be avoided or are we locked into a fascinating experiment in natural selection that is doomed to fail?