Modern technology now allows the earth to support more than eight billion inhabitants, and many get to enjoy the myriad, wonderful conveniences of modern life. Yet new digital technologies — so lucrative to inventors and entrepreneurs, and so alluring to users — often lead to problems and side effects that society as a whole must…

Civilization faces many challenges, with concerns about climate change, nuclear war, risks associated with the rise of artificial intelligence, and a long list of other problems. Despite the hard work of many groups and institutions around the world, no clear, acceptable way of fully resolving these problems has yet been offered. I have proposed that…

Daniel Kahneman’s book — Thinking, Fast and Slow — helps readers avoid cognitive pitfalls and encourages everyone to double-check any quick, “intuitive” response they may have to a problem. This is immensely helpful (letting one avoid many common mistakes), yet progress on really hard problems requires a different, “extra-slow” method that I refer to as…

Society seems to get stuck when dealing with problems of the Anthropocene — problems like climate change, environmental degradation, and risks posed by the rise of artificial intelligence. There’s trouble because of a complexity that overwhelms the current problem-solving capacity of society. Despite increasing awareness of the problems/risks, and despite ongoing discussion of possible solutions,…

As humans, we tend to do well with the typical, the ordinary, the expected. We rely on experience. This — quite naturally — makes it hard for society to anticipate, prepare for, and handle a pandemic like that seen with COVID-19. And — caught off guard — a crisis then demands our full attention: Failing…

  Civilization has set a trap for itself. Humanity has made amazing progress over the centuries — progress made possible by the rise of the expert. But this progress creates a new problem, as ever-more-complex technologies are deployed at an accelerating rate. Billions of different devices, protocols, ideas, traditions, and people interact — second by…