Daniel Rourke /stream

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In “Fragment on Machines,” Marx made the case that with investment in automated technology, which he called fixed capital, capitalism is able to reduce necessary labor time and increase both surplus…

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Dale Baker was introduced to simulation theory five years ago as an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Iowa. The idea that our reality may be nothing more than a computer-generated…

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Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.

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Imagine a world where there is no food for us to feed on, and the only way to survive is to resort to cannibalism. A group of British researchers has envisaged…

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Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of…

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Museum curators have made a surprise discovery in Vincent Van Gogh's Olive Trees: a grasshopper embedded in the paint. The experts from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City discovered…

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The Triassic Period was a gnarly time to be alive on Earth, and not only because it was Act One of the age of dinosaurs. This epoch stretched from 251 to…

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The Triassic Period was a gnarly time to be alive on Earth, and not only because it was Act One of the age of dinosaurs. This epoch stretched from 251 to…

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Up to about 100,000 years ago, our human ancestors coexisted with Neanderthals in Europe and interbred with them for thousands of years. The Neanderthals eventually went extinct, but many of us…

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These are just the facts. On July 22, 2013, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, gave birth to her first child, Prince George. Two weeks later, an enormous “fatberg” was discovered in the…

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No one knows how to talk about climate change right now. I don’t have an idea about where to begin, and I write about it professionally. On the one hand, the…

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Teeth reflect our lifestyle, for better or for worse. And since teeth are so durable, they’re being used to rewrite some of what we know about our ancient ancestors.

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Ever since Microsoft's chatbot Tay started spouting racist commentary after 24 hours of interacting with humans on Twitter, it has been obvious that our AI creations can fall prey to human…

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The future we’ve been warned about is beginning to saturate the present. We tend to imagine climate change as a destroyer. But it also traffics in disruption, disarray: increasingly frequent and…

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Science fiction, cyberpunk included, has always been a bit of a boys club. Think of the names that we most readily associate with the genre. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson,…

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In “Fragment on Machines,” Marx made the case that with investment in automated technology, which he called fixed capital, capitalism is able to reduce necessary labor time and increase both surplus…

Bookmark

Dale Baker was introduced to simulation theory five years ago as an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Iowa. The idea that our reality may be nothing more than a computer-generated…

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Imagine a world where there is no food for us to feed on, and the only way to survive is to resort to cannibalism. A group of British researchers has envisaged…

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NOTE 1: The original piece talked about Cultural Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I retracted the language of the proposal, because of appropriate criticism, since I realized it might be too…

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Museum curators have made a surprise discovery in Vincent Van Gogh's Olive Trees: a grasshopper embedded in the paint. The experts from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City discovered…

Bookmark

The Triassic Period was a gnarly time to be alive on Earth, and not only because it was Act One of the age of dinosaurs. This epoch stretched from 251 to…

Bookmark

The Triassic Period was a gnarly time to be alive on Earth, and not only because it was Act One of the age of dinosaurs. This epoch stretched from 251 to…

Bookmark

Up to about 100,000 years ago, our human ancestors coexisted with Neanderthals in Europe and interbred with them for thousands of years. The Neanderthals eventually went extinct, but many of us…

Bookmark

Star Trek was one way of dealing with the social anxieties of the 1960s. Since sci-fi mirrors the present, ecological collapse requires a new dystopian fiction Build an imaginary world in…

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Teeth reflect our lifestyle, for better or for worse. And since teeth are so durable, they’re being used to rewrite some of what we know about our ancient ancestors.

Bookmark

Ever since Microsoft's chatbot Tay started spouting racist commentary after 24 hours of interacting with humans on Twitter, it has been obvious that our AI creations can fall prey to human…

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The future we’ve been warned about is beginning to saturate the present. We tend to imagine climate change as a destroyer. But it also traffics in disruption, disarray: increasingly frequent and…

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Editor’s Note: This article includes an in-depth inquiry into the online activities of political groups for which misogyny, racism, and anti-semitism become defining features; as such, images and mentions of those topics are found…

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Trump’s younger supporters know he’s an incompetent joke; in fact, that’s why they support him. Around 2005 or so a strange link started showing up in my old webcomic’s referral logs.…