Writing

Today I am celebrating my 53rd birthday. I am fortunate to be doing so with friends and family and, knock on wood, in good health. This makes it all the more important to me to continue helping to fight the [...]  Read more

I have written and spoken a lot about how technological progress is incompatible with privacy . One example I have used is someone bioengineering a virus in their basement. It turns out a much simpler example is what we are [...]  Read more

The Democratic primary is coming into focus and it is not a pretty picture. Essentially the choice comes in two groups: incrementalists (Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, Klobuchar) and socialists (Sanders, Warren). The incrementalists want to go back more or less to [...]  Read more

I have written previously about the need to regulate the use of facial recognition technology . The calls for regulation have become stronger in the wake of Kashmir Hill ’s New York Times article about Clearview AI . It is [...]  Read more

For any billionaire out there: fund nuclear fusion now! Consider this: the people who fund successful nuclear fusion are guaranteed a spot in the history books. And that spot will be immediately followed by spots for anybody else who spent [...]  Read more

In yesterday’s post I summarized the 2010s as fighting past battles that keep us stuck in the industrial age. The agenda for the 2020s should be about inventing the knowledge age instead. The suggestions here draw heavily on my book World [...]  Read more

On this last day of the 2010s here is a recap with a single theme: we are fighting the battles of the past instead of inventing the future. We are doing that at a time when humanity is facing an [...]  Read more

I am spending the last two days of the decade cleaning up. We moved into our current place about 8 years ago and have accumulated a lot of stuff during that time period. It will be interesting to see how [...]  Read more