Tag: human beings
The Real Lessons of the Alabama IVF Ruling
When the Alabama Supreme Court found on February 16 that frozen embryos are protected by the state’s wrongful-death law in the same way that embryos inside a mother’s womb are, it set off one of those depressing and familiar 21st-century political firestorms.
The court had heard a complicated civil case touching on questions about the rights of families undergoing in vitro fertilization and the responsibilities of the fertility industry—questions that have long been neglected, to the great detriment of the
How to Talk to Whales
One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the sounds’
How Octavia Butler Told the Future
Somehow she knew this time would come. The smoke-choked air from fire gone wild, the cresting rivers and rising seas, the sweltering heat and receding lakes, the melting away of civil society and political stability, the light-year leaps in artificial intelligence—Octavia Butler foresaw them all.
Butler was not a climate scientist, a political pundit, or a Silicon Valley technologist. The author of imaginative and often disturbing speculative fiction such as Parable of the Sower (1993), she was a
The Return of the Pagans
Take a close look at Donald Trump—the lavishness of his homes, the buildings emblazoned with his name and adorned with gold accoutrements, his insistent ego, even the degree of obeisance he evokes among his followers—and, despite the fervent support he receives from many evangelical Christians, it’s hard to avoid concluding that there’s something a little pagan about the man. Or consider Elon Musk. With his drive to conquer space to expand the human empire, his flirtation with anti-Semitic tropes, his
Trump Is Becoming Frighteningly Clear About What He Wants
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In 2019, Kennedy Ndahiro, the editor of the Rwandan daily newspaper The New Times, explained to readers of The Atlantic how years of cultivated hatred had led to death on a horrifying scale.
“In Rwanda,” he wrote, “we know what can happen when political leaders and media outlets single out certain groups of people as less than human.”
Ndahiro
The Books Briefing: Should We Still Read ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’?
This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published to colossal success in 1852, has been in reputational free fall ever since. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about the trials of an enslaved man named Tom who accepts his suffering with Christian equanimity proved a boon to the abolitionist cause, though its actual depictions of Black people skimp on providing
A Progressive City Debates Crime
Plus: One moment that could have weakened Donald Trump’s influence
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Donald Trump is guilty of deplorable actions, under indictment for multiple crimes, and yet remains the most popular
Open Your Mind to Unicorn Meat
The chef presents me with a nugget of raw meat, tinged yellowish gray, then takes it back and drops it in a pan. “Today, you’re going to be having our whole-muscle chicken filet,” Daniel Davila tells me, searing the morsel. He lets it rest, chars some tomatoes and scallions, and throws together a beurre-blanc sauce. “Kind of a classic,” Davila says.
Davila works for Upside Foods, a start-up disrupting the world of animal proteins from its base in Berkeley,
Gödel, Escher, Bach, and AI
By now, you are most likely hyper-aware of the recent stunning progress in artificial intelligence due to the development of large language models such as ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Google’s Bard, and at least somewhat aware of the dangers posed by such systems’ frequent hallucinations and their predictable tone of supreme self-confidence and infallibility.
This tone can unfortunately lead highly intelligent people to believe that such systems, despite their propensity to hallucinate, are on a par, as thinkers, with … Read more
Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., and the Debates Worth Having
Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
If you could set up a debate between any two figures on any subject––and could be guaranteed that tens of millions of Americans would watch––what proposition would you want debated and who would argue each side?
The podcast host Joe Rogan made news