The Invisible ‘Energy Transition’
EPOCH TIMES ……….. The world, we’re told, is not only undergoing an “energy transition” but an “accelerating” one. Except it’s not.
Bring on the Bots
CITY JOURNAL …………. Elon Musk, never one for understatement, recently said that “one of the biggest risks to civilization” is that there “are not enough people” because the “foundation of the economy is labor.” He was reacting both to long-term trends and to the recent lockdown-induced collapse in America’s birthrate.
Techno-optimism and the rule-of-threes: why the world will soon enter an era of mass flourishing
BIG THINK ……….. We have evidence, hidden in plain sight, that the world is poised for another of history’s rare “mass flourishings,” to use the expression by Nobel economist Edmund Phelps. That evidence is not found in any single headline-grabbing invention, or the stock value of any single company, but is visible instead in the…
The Hard Math of Minerals
ISSUES IN SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY . …….. The great twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman once said that “it is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is.” But we do know one unequivocal fact: delivering useful energy services to society has always been about materials.
‘The Age of AI and Our Human Future’ Review: Where Is My Thinking Machine?
WALL STREET JOURNAL . …….. Amazement and alarm have been persistent features, the yin and yang, of discourse about the power of computers since the earliest days of electronic “thinking machines.” In 1950, a year before the world’s first commercial computer was delivered, the pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing published an essay asking “Can machines…
Transition to Nowhere
CITY JOURNAL ………..The leaders of California and China have at least one thing in common: fear of blackouts. In late September, following widespread and economically debilitating losses of power, China’s vice premier Han Zheng ordered the country’s energy companies to ensure sufficient supplies before winter “at all costs” and added, ominously, that blackouts “won’t be…