Articles

Why do hunter-gatherers refuse to be sedentary? New answers are emerging from the depths of the Congolese rainforest

This is where AI generated formats, Minecraft splitscreens, Reddit stories, 'Would You Rather' videos, and deep sea story spam come from.

A new push to carve data collection out of the humanitarian tech stack.

Editor’s Note: Due to the length of this piece, you may need to click a button to read the whole thing in your email. Every single stupid, loathsome, and ugly story in tech is a result of the fundamentally broken relationship between venture capital and technology. And, as with many things, it started with a blog.

Over the past year or so, I’ve been working with The Gaian Way to design an artistic calendar to visually represent time as the local ecosystem experiences it. Inspired by a similar effort in Puerto Rico, the calendar looks at twenty common tree and shrub species in southern New England,1 and depicts a year of their collective activity as colorful rings of leaves, flowers and fruit, as well as the primary forces that drive them: daylight and precipitation.

Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it's not pretty)

The daily grind of non-playable characters offers a clever critique of capitalism’s ‘infinite loop of labour performance’

I, Robot.

Researchers say that's why universities need more AI resources so breakthroughs can continue.

Datings apps are totally cool if you have AI writing your love messages. Match Group might even make some AI chatbots itself in 2024.

Wowee! Relationship chatbots are terrible for your privacy in strange new ways while also being terrible for your privacy in regular old ways.

Apple’s Vision Pro headset suggests one possible future—but there are others.

"Owning our own work, and being beholden to no one but our readers and colleagues — as opposed to say, investors, venture capitalists, or out-of-touch executives — feels like the future."

You didn’t evolve to live in this techno-industrialised world. Find health and happiness by embracing your wild nature

Earth has endured 12 consecutive months of temperatures 1.5C hotter than the pre-industrial era for the first time on record, Europe's climate monitor said Thursday, in what scientists called a "warning to humanity".

Blair Attard-Frost on resistance to artificial intelligence, backlashes against the governance of AI systems, and possibilities for bottom-up AI governance led by communities and workers.

A fundamental design principle for techno optimists. How we need to move towards friction in digital culture. By Luna Maurer & Roel Wouters

Yesterday, Senator Ed Markey introduced the first legislation to explicitly refer to the environmental impacts of AI , together with several other members of Congress in the USA. Earlier in January we had been approached for feedback about a draft version of the bill, and we were happy to publicly endorse it. In this post… Why we endorsed the US AI Environmental Impacts Act

Social scientists and humanities experts explore how to harness the interaction, revealing urgent avenues for research and policy.

How one writer's trip to the annual tech conference CES left him with a sinking feeling about the future.

Following another summer of record heat waves, droughts, floods, and wildfires across vast swaths of the planet, the injuries done to the planet by the Industrial Growth Society have never been so conclusive. As I grapple with collapse, I wanted to speak with Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, an Indigenous Pamiri from Tajikistan, who has lived through it and come out the other side.

How do we find true belonging, and true community in the most literal sense of that word? To answer this question, Dr. Yuria Celidwen, from Chiapas, Mexico, combines Indigenous studies, cultural psychology, and contemplative science in her research.

Listen now | Why we ignore science

Algorithmic media have adopted and adapted divinatory practices and vernaculars of prediction, prophecy, probability, fortune-telling and forecasting – suggesti...

Most product teams commonly adopt a feature-centric mindset, finding them convenient for brainstorming, drafting requirement documents, and integrating into backlogs and ticketing systems. In this article, Andy Budd shows how fixation with features might be holding you back and how making a few small tweaks to your process could make an entire world of difference.

As the Great Unraveling continues apace, the need for radical change will become more apparent, causing more and more people to seek out alternatives. At that point, the winds of change will be blowing at our backs.

AI stealing our work. The collapse of social networks. The need to pay journalists to produce impactful journalism. Here is why we are asking for your email address to read 404 Media.

A wide-spanning investigation by 404 Media reveals more details about a secretive spy tool that can tracks billions of phone profiles through the advertising industry called Patternz. Google has taken action in response to 404 Media's inquiries.

Panel was originally composed of 28 men, a move condemned as ‘regressive’ and ‘shocking’