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Category: Humanity

We cooperate to survive, but if no one’s looking, we compete

We cooperate to survive, but if no one’s looking, we compete

Jonathan R Goodman writes: Reading classic works in evolutionary biology is unlikely to make you optimistic about human nature. From Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, there is a fundamental understanding among biologists that organisms, especially humans, evolved to maximise self-interest. We act to promote our own success or that of our family. Niceness, by contrast, is just a mirage, and morality more broadly is just an illusion. Sociobiology – the infamous movement of the second half of…

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Human connection to nature has declined 60% over the last 200 years, study finds

Human connection to nature has declined 60% over the last 200 years, study finds

The Guardian reports: People’s connection to nature has declined by more than 60% since 1800, almost exactly mirroring the disappearance of nature words such as river, moss and blossom from books, according to a study. Computer modelling predicts that levels of nature connectedness will continue to decline unless there are far-reaching policy and societal changes – with introducing children to nature at a young age and radically greening urban environments the most effective interventions. The study by Miles Richardson, a…

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The era of degenerative-AI

The era of degenerative-AI

Charlie Warzel writes: It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it…

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How the tech broligarchy is planning to use AI to destroy humanity

How the tech broligarchy is planning to use AI to destroy humanity

  Elon Musk and his racist billionaire friends are grooming J.D. Vance to install their dystopian plan for a techno-fascist future where they use AI to dominate and exploit humanity. What do the richest people on Earth want? More, according to author and astrophysicist Adam Becker, who has studied the ideology, motivations, and plans of the modern-day pharaohs. Instead of using their wealth to help humanity, they want control, dominance, and an exit strategy from Earth for themselves and their…

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Our crisis, not of loneliness, but of people becoming invisible

Our crisis, not of loneliness, but of people becoming invisible

Allison J Pugh writes: Paul was a gig worker in the San Francisco Bay Area. Formerly a project manager in tech until several companies in a row laid him off, he started working entirely for platforms like Lyft, Uber and TaskRabbit. He managed to eke out a living, but the jobs posed a different problem. ‘Honestly, a lot of times, I go out and the person doesn’t even know my name, even though I introduced myself as Paul,’ he told…

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New study challenges the story of humanity’s shift from prehistoric hunting to farming

New study challenges the story of humanity’s shift from prehistoric hunting to farming

Phys.org reports: A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has turned traditional thinking on its head by highlighting the role of human interactions during the shift from hunting and gathering to farming—one of the biggest changes in human history—rather than earlier ideas that focused on environmental factors. The transition from a hunter-gatherer foraging lifestyle, which humanity had followed for hundreds of thousands of years, to a settled farming one about 12,000 years ago has been…

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How the logic of technology threatens democracy and humanity

How the logic of technology threatens democracy and humanity

Mike Brock writes: [H]ere is what makes AI and Musk and Thiel’s belief in the logic of technology as the basis for civilization so authoritarian. There’s no room for emotion in the cold logic of math. This technocratic vision of society, where algorithms and “rational” systems dictate human affairs, is not just misguided—it’s fundamentally anti-human. It’s a worldview that reduces the rich tapestry of human experience to a series of equations, that sees efficiency as the highest virtue and messiness…

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How humanity moved from eternal to finite time

How humanity moved from eternal to finite time

Thomas Moynihan writes: Do you recall the first time you knew you would die? It’s a milestone, realising your time is limited. That things happened before you, and will happen afterward, in your absence. As we grow up, the understanding of death comes in stages, but it culminates in acknowledgment of one’s own – unavoidable yet unpredictable – mortality. Sometime between the ages of six and 10, children become aware that their time is inescapably bounded. Roughly the same might be said…

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Transhumanism: The AI death cult ruling Silicon Valley

Transhumanism: The AI death cult ruling Silicon Valley

Àlex Gómez-Marín writes: In 1963 there was an exhibition at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. It was entitled “The Most Dangerous Animal in the World”. In it, next to a window with bars, the following text could be read: “You are looking at the most dangerous animal in the world. It alone of all the animals that ever lived can exterminate (and has) entire species of animals. Now it has the power to wipe out all life on…

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Human culture is changing too fast for evolution to catch up – here’s how it may affect you

Human culture is changing too fast for evolution to catch up – here’s how it may affect you

frank60/Shutterstock By Jose Yong, Northumbria University, Newcastle Research is showing that many of our contemporary problems, such as the rising prevalence of mental health issues, are emerging from rapid technological advancement and modernisation. A theory that can help explain why we respond poorly to modern conditions, despite the choices, safety and other benefits they bring, is evolutionary mismatch. Mismatch happens when an evolved adaptation, either physical or psychological, becomes misaligned with the environment. Take moths and some species of nocturnal…

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The most terrifying predator on the planet? Humans

The most terrifying predator on the planet? Humans

GrrlScientist writes: What’s the scariest animal on the planet? Some people claim lions are. Or tigers. Or maybe wolves. Others might say sharks. But, as we learned from a recent question that went viral online, there are a lot of women out here who say that men are the most fearsome of animals — more terrifying even than meeting a bear when alone in the woods. And they are far from alone in this assessment, it appears. A recent study…

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Pivotal moment for humanity as disasters threaten to converge

Pivotal moment for humanity as disasters threaten to converge

Science Alert reports: A new review of literature on global climate change written by an international team of more than 200 researchers leaves no room for doubt: humanity is heading for disaster, unless significant steps are taken to change that course. How disastrous? The research team mentions trillions of US dollars in climate-related damage, billions of people pushed into hardship around the world, and millions of lives lost as a result of a rapidly warming planet. The report focuses specifically…

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Evolution might stop humans from solving climate change, says new study

Evolution might stop humans from solving climate change, says new study

University of Maine: Central features of human evolution may stop our species from resolving global environmental problems like climate change, says a new study led by the University of Maine. Humans have come to dominate the planet with tools and systems to exploit natural resources that were refined over thousands of years through the process of cultural adaptation to the environment. University of Maine evolutionary biologist Tim Waring wanted to know how this process of cultural adaptation to the environment…

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Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating? Or why he just got fired?

Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating? Or why he just got fired?

Ross Andersen wrote in July: On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed. The powerful AI that his company had released in…

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Climate-linked ills threaten humanity

Climate-linked ills threaten humanity

The Washington Post reports: The floods came, and then the sickness. Muhammad Yaqoob stood on his concrete porch and watched the black, angry water swirl around the acacia trees and rush toward his village [Bagh Yusuf, in Sindh province, Pakistan] last September, the deluge making a sound that was like nothing he had ever heard. “It was like thousands of snakes sighing all at once,” he recalled. At first, he thought villagers’ impromptu sandbags, made from rice and fertilizer sacks,…

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Ancient fires, spurred by human activity, drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

Ancient fires, spurred by human activity, drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

The New York Times reports: Wildfires are getting worse. Parts of the United States, scientists say, are experiencing wildfires three times as often — and four times as big — as they were 20 years ago. This summer alone, smoke from Canadian blazes turned North American skies an unearthly orange, “fire whirls” were seen in the Mojave Desert and raging flames in Maui led to disaster. Records of the distant past can reveal what once drove increased fire activity and…

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