What is time, really? Is it the slow wheel of the seasons, turning winter into spring each year as our ancestors watched the sky? Is it the steady beat of a heart and the rise and fall of the chest as we breathe each second? Or is it the digital numbers flickering on our screens,…
Moral progress often involves expanding our circle of concern beyond our own kind. In past centuries, basic rights were denied to many humans on the basis of race, gender, or class; over time, these distinctions have been eroded as we recognized shared personhood. In recent decades, we’ve begun to seriously discuss rights for non-human creatures.…
In a dimly lit laboratory sometime in the not-so-distant future, a machine hums softly to itself – a machine no human fully understands. It improves upon its own design in rapid iterations, each version smarter than the last, until the pace of its thinking leaves human intellect far behind. At that moment, the story of…
The journey toward inter-species communication
A culture of weird science