Why the Father of the Microprocessor Rejects Artificial Consciousness

“Creativity, ethics, free will, and joyful love can only come from consciouness.”

“The immense mechanical intelligence, beyond the reach of the human brain, that comes from the machines we have invented will then add tremendous strength to our wisdom.”
~ Federico Faggin

In time, the bruising pursuit of market victories revealed a hollowness: material success did not translate into inner fulfillment.

That disillusionment became the seedbed for his eventual turn away from mere achievement toward the deeper mystery of consciousness.

Federico Faggin’s legacy is thus twofold. He gave us the silicon heart of the digital revolution, and he warns us against mistaking it for a soul.

His journey from wartime courtyards to boardroom battles to the Lake Tahoe awakening is not a retreat from rigor but an expansion of it. For he insists, with the stubborn clarity of both inventor and mystic, that the real frontier is not faster chips or larger datasets, but the fathomless depth of human awareness.

Tuesday, August 5, 2025

1. Why It Matters Now

The world is facing big problems: climate disasters, political chaos, fast tech changes, and people feeling spiritually lost. These crises aren’t just about politics or the environment—they challenge how we see ourselves and life itself. To fix the future, we need to upgrade how we think and feel as a species.

2. What’s the Point of Life?

Some thinkers (like Fabrice Grinda) and ancient Eastern wisdom (especially Indo-Iranic traditions) suggest the meaning of life is about feeling connected—to each other, the Earth, and the universe. We get glimpses of this deep truth through things like meditation, love without ego, altered states, and deep reflection.

3. What Ancient Traditions Teach

Philosophers and mystics described life as a spiritual journey—not to escape the world, but to become more present, wise, and helpful in it. Their teachings show that the highest truths aren’t abstract—they’re about living better, more connected lives.

4. How To Wake Up

Things and events that shift our state of mind aren’t just weird experiences. They can be tools to reconnect with our true selves, others and the universe. Humanity has always used them to access deeper truths.

5. New Ways of Belonging

The Alternative Planetary Futures Institute is exploring new ways to help people feel connected and purposeful. Public events (like Full Moon gatherings) and having a public Terran profile help create a sense of planetary identity—where we are participants in Earth’s unfolding story.

6. A New Kind of Ethics

1. The idea of “Enriching Complexity” means:It’s okay to be different (plurality)
2. Use technology with care (not control)
3. Let go of ego
4. Embrace evolution without needing perfection
5. It’s about being real and responsible without needing everything to be perfect or final.

7. What Science Is Telling Us

Modern physics says that everything is made of fields, not little particles. A “particle” is just a ripple in a field. Everything is connected, and what seems “separate” is really just a temporary form in a deeper unity. This matches what ancient mystics were saying all along: reality flows, it’s not made of solid, separate things.

8. Big Picture: Science Meets Spirituality

Science and ancient wisdom agree: Everything is interconnected and flowing

1. We are expressions of a bigger field of Being
2. The ego is not the center—Being is
3. It’s about realizing we are part of one living system.

9. What This Means for You

Consciousness isn’t just “in your head.” It’s a window into the universe’s awareness. Ethics isn’t about obeying rules—it’s about aligning with the deeper flow of life. The old models of control (master/slave, ruler/subject) are outdated. Instead, we are all waves in one cosmic ocean.

10. Unitarian Universalists Are Already on Board

1. Many Unitarian Universalists (UUs) already think this way. They believe in:Respecting all beings
2. Seeking truth from many sources
3. Living in harmony with nature
4. Finding meaning in connection, not dogma
5. Their spiritual style fits perfectly with this planetary view.

11. Where This All Leads

We’re entering a time where people are waking up—not to escape the world, but to love and care for it deeply. We don’t need to control the future—we need to participate in it wisely.It’s about becoming fully human by realizing:

1. We are not separate from the Earth or the cosmos.
2. We are its living, thinking, feeling part.

Key Takeaways:

1. The world is in crisis—we need deeper awareness
2. Ancient wisdom + modern science = planetary awakening
3. Consciousness and ethics come from feeling connected
4. You are not a “thing”—you are a ripple in the field of Being
5. We need new rituals, new ethics, and planetary belonging
6. The future depends on us learning how to resonate with reality

The rivalry between the United States and China over who will dominate artificial intelligence has moved to an obscure battlefield: A Geneva-based United Nations agency most people have never heard of.

The Trump administration announced in June — a full year early — that it will push for a second term for American diplomat Doreen Bogdan-Martin as secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, the organization that sets voluntary international standards for technology ranging from radio frequencies and broadband to 6G mobile phones.

This is the earliest the State Department has ever made this kind of push at the ITU, an indication of the growing urgency of the U.S.-China technological rivalry. The Trump AI Action Plan, released earlier this month, specifically names the ITU as key to America’s global tech dominance. But some observers worry that Trump’s tough-minded foreign policy approach may already be hurting the U.S. in its quest to keep Bogdan-Martin in office.

Last year there was a major discovery of circuitry for how our immune system in the body activates the brain. In the past couple of weeks we’re seeing progress in understanding how the brain controls the immune system, including the clinical relevance, the first of its kind, a new FDA approval. In this issue of Ground Truths I’ll review the recent reports that spotlight the pivotal role of reciprocal interactions between our brain and immune system.

1. Just seeing a person with signs of infection activates our immune response!

2. An implantable neuroimmune modulation device for autoimmune disease

3. The Alzheimer’s Disease Risk of APOE4 Carriers is Mediated via the Immune System

4. A Multiomics Study for Alzheimer’s and Cerebrovascular Diseases

Demis Hassabis and the crisis of pursuing optimization without purpose

The implicit wager of AGI, which he predicts by 2030, is that intelligence, abstracted, accelerated, and externalized, can solve any problem. Disease, poverty, climate, war. Feed it enough data, add enough layers, and the machine will converge on an answer. But what if the question itself is wrong? What if the problem isn’t scarcity of means but poverty of ends?

We are now entering what I would call the Age of Infinite Means. This is the era where the constraints on doing have all but collapsed, and the constraints on deciding what to do become existential. As I see it, to use an analogy from Hassabis the chess prodigy, the chessboard is open, the processor is primed, but nobody agrees on a strategy. Or worse, everyone agrees: maximize engagement (as social media algorithms often do by promoting outrage), dominate the market, optimize the KPI (as in the generative AI content farms churning out synthetic text to game search engines). In other words, pursue optimization in a system whose original objectives have been buried beneath quarterly incentives.

Hassabis is not alone in sensing the disquiet. But unlike many in his field, he is willing to make it explicit, even if only obliquely. His remarks function less as a formal philosophical position and more as a provocation, a cue for broader reflection, not a full diagnosis. That intelligence without wisdom is just entropy with good PR. That an AGI, given a blank ethical check, might do what corporations already do: automate mediocrity at scale.

One That Cannot Be Corrupted So Easily. We Must Decentralize, Become Transparent, and Organize Using New Systems.

We’ve explored many powerful tools that humanity has yet to integrate into the systems that govern our lives – tools that would very much help us at this moment in time. These tools include:

• Radical transparency
• Decentralization
• Collective “swarm” intelligence
• Group problem-solving
• High Trust Systems
• Peer-to-Peer Trust Building Teams
• Epistemology and truth-seeking
• Results-based systems and metrics

The key point is this: this is all fixable.

This is not just wishful thinking – it’s absolutely possible. Here are two examples of where we could start:

1. A New Operating System for Business (and capitalism) [HERE]
2. A New Operating System for Government [HERE]

JD Vance and the Tech Oligarchs Who Want to Burn Down the Dollar

There are conspiracies that sound too outrageous to believe, and then there are conspiracies so brazen that they hide in plain sight, documented in government filings and boasted about on podcasts. What I’m about to expose falls into the latter category: a systematic effort by some of America’s most powerful tech billionaires to accelerate the collapse of the American financial system because they believe they’ll profit from the chaos that follows.

This isn’t speculation. This isn’t connecting dots that don’t exist. This is based on direct conversations with people inside this movement, people who have explicitly told me that they view the destruction of the dollar as both inevitable and desirable, who see the suffering of ordinary Americans during financial collapse as an acceptable cost for achieving their vision of a Bitcoin-dominated economy, who have positioned JD Vance as their primary vehicle for implementing policies they know will undermine American monetary stability.

To understand how we reached this moment—where crypto accelerationists are actively working to engineer dollar collapse from within the highest levels of government—we need to trace the intellectual evolution I documented in ”The Plot Against America.” What began as abstract criticism of democratic institutions during the 2008 financial crisis has become a concrete blueprint for dismantling them through cryptocurrency-enabled financial sabotage.

Abstract

Diverse sets of complete human genomes are required to construct a pangenome reference and to understand the extent of complex structural variation.

Here we sequence 65 diverse human genomes and build 130 haplotype-resolved assemblies (median continuity of 130 Mb), closing 92% of all previous assembly gaps1,2 and reaching telomere-to-telomere status for 39% of the chromosomes. We highlight complete sequence continuity of complex loci, including the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), SMN1/SMN2, NBPF8 and AMY1/AMY2, and fully resolve 1,852 complex structural variants. In addition, we completely assemble and validate 1,246 human centromeres.

We find up to 30-fold variation in α-satellite higher-order repeat array length and characterize the pattern of mobile element insertions into α-satellite higher-order repeat arrays. Although most centromeres predict a single site of kinetochore attachment, epigenetic analysis suggests the presence of two hypomethylated regions for 7% of centromeres.

Combining our data with the draft pangenome reference1 significantly enhances genotyping accuracy from short-read data, enabling whole-genome inference3 to a median quality value of 45. Using this approach, 26,115 structural variants per individual are detected, substantially increasing the number of structural variants now amenable to downstream disease association studies.

Make your system(s) radically transparent. (to build trust – which is key)

Decentralize your leadership position by swarming the system and harnessing the wisdom of the crowd.

In our next article, we will explore the concept of using a swarm to interview an individual who has achieved significant success by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to manage businesses. But what does this entail exactly? We plan to select 10-20 participants from our problem-solving group, form a small swarm, and employ existing Collective Swarm Intelligence technology to generate optimal questions for the interview. Essentially, the swarm itself will be responsible for posing the questions.

Envision expanding this approach on a grander scale—introducing the concept of Swarmed Journalism. Picture a podcast or TV show where guests face interrogation by a swarm consisting of potentially millions, or even billions, of individuals answering pointed questions from the group. This could involve scenarios where a city, such as Cleveland, seeks answers from its newly elected mayor, or where influential figures like Presidential candidates or business magnates like Bill Gates or Peter Thiel respond to the top ten questions posed by a swarm of four billion people.

It begins with a brief look at small experiments that flickered but never scaled. It follows with large-scale cultural movements and theoretical frameworks that shaped discourse, but failed to anchor into institutional or structural power. Then it turns to four specific case studies:

• Tzar Monk, a bold political reframe of post-authoritarian continuity in Russia
• The Apocalypse Aversion Project, an early warning signal turned slow resignation
• The Transformative Trinity, a major proposal of the Hipster Energy movement
• The Church of Earth, a platform for spiritual economics and cooperative governance

The Big Visions That Shaped Eras (but Didn’t Work)

The father of personal computing, Alan Kay, and Daylight founder, Anjan Katta, on building a future where technology enhances human wisdom, rather than replaces it.

We explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping our relationship with computers, whether current computing paradigms serve us well as AI becomes ubiquitous, and what new models of human-computer interaction we might need to thrive alongside intelligent machines.

Make your system(s) radically transparent. (to build trust – which is key)

Decentralize your leadership position by swarming the system and harnessing the wisdom of the crowd.

In our next article, we will explore the concept of using a swarm to interview an individual who has achieved significant success by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd to manage businesses. But what does this entail exactly? We plan to select 10-20 participants from our problem-solving group, form a small swarm, and employ existing Collective Swarm Intelligence technology to generate optimal questions for the interview. Essentially, the swarm itself will be responsible for posing the questions.

Envision expanding this approach on a grander scale—introducing the concept of Swarmed Journalism. Picture a podcast or TV show where guests face interrogation by a swarm consisting of potentially millions, or even billions, of individuals answering pointed questions from the group. This could involve scenarios where a city, such as Cleveland, seeks answers from its newly elected mayor, or where influential figures like Presidential candidates or business magnates like Bill Gates or Peter Thiel respond to the top ten questions posed by a swarm of four billion people.

This hateful regime wants to exhaust us and convince us that victory will be theirs. We have the individual and collective power to prove them wrong.

It’s my belief based on many times in our history when the reality was bleak and the light was hard to find. But the Confederacy did lose, slavery was abolished, Hitler and the thousand-year-Reich did die by suicide in a bunker, Joseph McCarthy’s attack on Americans as communists ended with shame and his death from alcoholism at 48, John Lewis did not give up the dream of civil rights after a bloody beating on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Throughout our 249-year-old democratic project, Americans have forged ahead and refused to accept that the promise of freedom and justice cannot be realized and must be abandoned.

All this gives me hope. All this reminds me not to get overwhelmed by the daily madness. It doesn’t mean ignoring the tragedies and the ongoing nightmare. Rather it gives me hope that the fight is worth it and we can’t allow ourselves to indulge in the feeling that our democracy is finished.

Part of our task right now is to recognize that hope is a discipline, a way of grasping what’s at stake. This requires looking to the past and envisioning the future to strengthen our capacity to manage the present. Some days that task will be harder than others, but I beseech you to build that muscle and hold tightly to hope.

The Tyranny of the Link

Connection does not equal equality. It never did. What Barabási’s network science reveals is that the structure of our systems, their wiring, their topology, makes some forms of inequality not just common but mathematically inevitable. He states

‘The rich get richer phenomenon is not unique to money,’ ‘…it pervades society and nature, and it is encoded in the very fabric of our connected world. The more connected a node is, the more likely it is to receive new links.’

The lesson is cruel: the moment nodes connect, inequality emerges. The moment ideas spread, a few dominate. This is the case with the networks behind the Web, Hollywood, scientists, and even the cell.

The core of the dilemma lies not in the technology, but in the architecture of power. It is not simply that a few companies build large AI models; it is that they increasingly control the underlying terrain: compute capacity, proprietary datasets, foundational architectures. The field of AI is no longer defined by invention alone but by who controls the preconditions for scientific advancement. And those preconditions are consolidating into the hands of a small number of companies, with the consequence that the AI systems we rely on begin to reflect a narrowing of values, incentives, and visibility.

The only meaningful antidote to this creeping enclosure is what we might call “Civic AI”, not merely AI developed by or for the state, but systems engineered with the public in mind at every layer. Compute must not be a scarcity auctioned off to the highest bidder. Datasets must not be the secretive spoils of web crawlers, our online footprints and low-paid labor. Models must not be obscured from audit and adaptation by legal obfuscation. What is required is not just access, but infrastructure: publicly provisioned, openly governed, and constructed with permanence in mind.

Some will balk at the idea of state intervention. And yes, many of us have legitimate grievances with slow, bureaucratic, or poorly maintained public systems. But without public investment, there would be no roads, no railways, no electrical grids. Why are we outsourcing the infrastructure of cognition, models that will become capable of reasoning, generating, and deciding, to a cluster of firms driven by market logic rather than public mandate? It is a choice masquerading as inevitability. And it is one that must be reversed.

Instead, we would create what we call the Living Curriculum. It is not a curriculum in the traditional sense. There are no fixed subjects, no standardized assessments, no single path. It is a living, evolving, relational process through which human beings discover who they are, how they connect, and how to live meaningfully together on a fragile, interdependent planet.

The Living Curriculum is rooted in four fundamental capacities: Power Within, the deep sense of self-trust and purpose; Power With, the ability to collaborate without coercion; Power To, the creative capacity to act with agency; and Power Through, the collective emergence of systems more intelligent than any one part.

To be clear, this is not an idealistic fantasy. It is a strategic proposal grounded in decades of research in developmental psychology, neuroscience, education theory, and systems thinking.

ProtoBind-Diff generates novel compounds from protein sequence alone – a potential accelerant for early-stage discovery in aging biology.

AI models for drug discovery are becoming more capable, more flexible and, in some cases, more biologically agnostic. One of the more recent entries into this growing field comes from Singapore-based biotech Gero, which has announced ProtoBind-Diff: a generative model for small molecule discovery that works entirely without protein structural data.

Whereas most AI platforms for target-conditioned drug design depend heavily on 3D structures or docking simulations, ProtoBind-Diff is trained solely on protein sequence and ligand information. It learns from over a million active protein–ligand pairs, drawing on pre-trained embeddings to infer chemically meaningful interactions from primary sequence alone. According to the authors of the model’s preprint, this enables ligand generation across the full proteome – including “orphan, flexible, or rapidly emerging targets for which structural data are unavailable or unreliable.”

The implications for geroscience – a field often constrained by limited target tractability – are of note; by enabling molecular design for sequence-known, structure-unknown targets, ProtoBind-Diff may offer a more efficient route into the biological gray zones of aging.

This is the key to everything. We can turn a million people into one wise, creative, and powerful brain. Decentralize all systems on Earth – governments, businesses, and more – with swarm intelligence

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE – Sometimes referred to as “The Wisdom of Crowds,” or “Human Swarm Intelligence,” or just “swarming.” It is the shared group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and combined efforts of individuals. It is real and testable. It usually requires several conditions to optimize: 1) Decentralization 2) Diversity of Opinion – aka individualism 3) Coordination/Alignment/signal (How do the individuals interact, what problem are they solving together, and do they understand the problem?) 4) Aggregation – a way to aggregate answers from the group, often technological 5) Trust – in both the system and earned trust with each of the people in the swarm

SWARM – a decentralized group of individuals who collaborate or coordinate their actions in a collective manner, often facilitated by technology, who are on the same problem solving mission together.

A new weeklyish feature on awesome and interesting stuff at the frontier of science, technology, and beyond

The internet loves bad news. Researchers have shown that negative headlines attract more clicks, and antagonistic emotions, such as outrage, stimulate more viral sharing. So, one easy way to grow an independent media company or newsletter would be for me to focus relentlessly on all the most terrible things happening in the world.

I really don’t want to do that. The news cycle is a mess, and the world is full of crisis. But while the news media typically excels at pulling our attention toward developments that are sudden and negative, the press often fails to educate audiences about changes in the world that are slow or positive, even as the latter stories sometimes matter more in the long run.

That’s the thinking behind the Sunday Morning Post, a weeklyish rundown of the most interesting or wondrous stuff I’m seeing in science, technology, economics, and beyond. The goal of this feature is to utterly and completely fail every test of the 24-hour news cycle. I want to share findings and discoveries and stories that will be as critically relevant to our lives in 10 years as they are in 10 hours.

What it is
The age reversal breakthrough we’ve all been waiting for will soon be here, faster than I ever imagined. Dr. David Sinclair’s lab has cracked the code on epigenetic reprogramming, potentially moving from $400,000 gene therapies to $100 pills that can reset biological age by 50 – 95% in just four weeks. What started as theory in 2017 became the proven science of epigenetic reprogramming in 2020, and now AI is accelerating development at unprecedented speed. As Sinclair puts it: “Imagine in 10 years you just take a pill three times per week for a month and you get younger.” This Moonshot is becoming reality.

Why it Matters

From Gene Therapy to Pills: The Demonetization Revolution

Sinclair’s lab is using AI to accelerate the speed of discoveries and demonetize costs. The idea of epigenetic reprogramming was previously thought to require viral vectors or gene therapies, which could be expensive.

But as Dr. Sinclair and I discussed in my new deep-dive Moonshots podcast with him, recent research using a host of AI tools has yielded surprising results. (Check out the pod, it’s one of my best conversations with Sinclair!) His team at Harvard has used AI to discover a host of molecules that can be taken as a pill able to reverse aging. As Sinclair told me, “This would only cost a hundred dollars or less to make for a month’s course of treatment.” That’s roughly three dollars a day to potentially reverse decades of aging.

The Mouse & Primate Studies That Change Everything

Earlier this year, Sinclair’s lab tried an experiment that delivered stunning results. Mice given the oral cocktail “Monday, Wednesday, Friday for four weeks” didn’t just feel younger, quantitative biological age tests confirmed that they actually were younger. “All the mice that were on the treatment ended up behaving and being physiologically younger.”

In parallel to his work using “pills,” his team at Life Biosciences is also collecting primate data using viral gene therapy treatments that make this breakthrough undeniable. Working with green monkeys—our closest research analogs—Sinclair’s team achieved something unprecedented: “95% of the age goes backwards” in optic nerve tissue. As Sinclair puts it, “some of the data is just stunning. You can map whether you reverse the age of the optic nerve in these animals.” The effect is controllable and semi-permanent: “The longer you leave it on, the younger the tissue gets,” and the rejuvenation persists even after treatment stops.

These aren’t mere lab curiosities. Primates share 93% of our DNA and have similar aging mechanisms. When age reversal works this dramatically in our closest biological relatives, human translation becomes not just possible, but probable.

Sinclair’s Vision for The Next Decade (2025 – 2035)

When I asked Sinclair to envision 2035, his response was immediate: we’re looking at three distinct delivery methods racing to market, each more accessible than the last.

Method 1: Gene Therapy (2026): Sinclair’s co-founded company Life Biosciences enters human trials next January, targeting glaucoma and stroke in the eye. Gene therapies typically cost $300,000 – $400,000 per eye, potentially reaching $2 million for rare diseases. “The reason is there are a lot of hurdles to get through to get to the market. And just producing this stuff is expensive,” says Sinclair, noting it’s “costing us more than $10 million just to make the first batch to go into humans.” But his mission is democratization: “My lab is in existence to make this for everybody. We’re not here to charge as much as we can. We’re here to make it hopefully eventually pennies on the dollar.”

Method 2: Gene Therapies Using Yamanaka Factors in Humans (2030s): A one-time injection makes you able to activate youth genes by simply taking an antibiotic for a few weeks. “Every time we want to get rejuvenated or we have an injury, we need to heal quickly, then we turn them on.” The system uses doxycycline, a safe antibiotic, to activate the engineered genes. “We’ve engineered it so you can just take an antibiotic (doxycycline) for a few weeks, it’s very safe, and you turn on the age reversal.”

Method 3: The Age Reversal Pill (2035): These pills are under development now and are likely to become available over the next 3 – 10 years. These are AI-designed and/or AI-identified molecules that can activate epigenetic cellular reprogramming. The pills have two major advantages. First, they’re cheap. Second, “they evenly go throughout the body to all the tissues” once swallowed. This is Sinclair’s ultimate target: accessible, affordable, comprehensive age reversal.

The Longevity Escape Velocity Timeline

While colleagues debate whether we’ll reach Longevity Escape Velocity by 2030, Sinclair focuses on the science: “Now that the Information Theory of Aging and the reset seem true, we’re entering the clinic with these age reversal technologies that can be used multiple times—not just once, but you can keep doing it maybe 20 times, 100 times.”

He stands by his earlier prediction: 

“The first person to live to 150 has already been born.”

For teenagers today, Sinclair said, “we can expect them to live well into the 22nd century.

Your Mission: Bridge the Gap

The technology exists. The timeline is clear. Your challenge is staying healthy long enough to intercept these breakthroughs.

What you need to know: What we’re looking at now isn’t the worst job market college graduates have ever seen. It is, however, the worst such market compared with workers in general that we’ve ever seen, by a large margin. Nobody knows for sure why this is happening, but it’s not a good omen. And the recent graduates themselves will be hurt, not just in the near term, but for the rest of their lives.

So what does a business do in the face of this kind of uncertainty? It tries to avoid making commitments that it may soon regret.

And hiring recent college graduates is a significant commitment. Whatever their formal training, young people need to acquire real-world experience to be effective in their new jobs. Employers need to be willing to spend time and money while new hires gain this experience. And in this uncertain environment, that’s not a commitment employers are willing to make. They may hold on to their existing workers, at least for now, but they won’t hire.

In addition to generating and evaluating design candidates, there are several additional ways that LLMs, sometimes coupled with other AI technologies, are being used to accelerate various activities in the product development process:

Identifying and analyzing customer/user needs, products, and features. LLM-powered software solutions are being used, particularly by consumer companies, to synthesize a vast array of product reviews, social media posts, customer service transcripts, and other sources of customer data to identify addressable market segments and the product categories and features/functions that would best address the as-yet unmet needs of customers.

Exploring and synthesizing existing research and data. In industries such as life sciences, chemicals, and materials, there is a vast and rapidly growing body of published research and databases. It can be challenging for scientists to keep up with the literature in their own subdiscipline, not to mention the adjacent or even distant areas of other research, which could bring insights for breakthroughs in their field. Oftentimes, the volume of machine-readable data being made available is growing even more rapidly than published papers.

Few stories better reveal what Dalio’s book Principles is truly about. Not finance. Not strategy. But the meticulous art of learning from one’s errors, of building a life in which mistakes are not buried, but broadcast, dissected, and translated into algorithms for better thinking. Dalio’s eventual success, building the world’s largest Hedge Fund, wasn’t in spite of that moment. It was because of it.

The Two “Yous”

This is a big problem. The first fertility transition was a good thing — it was the result of the world getting richer, it saved human living standards from hitting a Malthusian ceiling, and it seemed like with wise policies, rich countries could keep their fertility near replacement rates. But this second fertility transition is going to be an economic catastrophe if it continues.

The difference between a fertility rate of 1 and a rate of 2 might seem a lot smaller than the difference between 2 and 6. But because of the math of exponential curves, it’s actually just as important of a change. Going from 6 to 2 means your population goes from exploding to stable; going from 2 to 1 means your population goes from stable to vanishing.

Shrinking populations are continuously aging populations, meaning that each young working person has to support more and more retirees every year. On top of that, population aging appears to slow down productivity growth through various mechanisms. Immigration can help a bit, but it can’t really solve this problem, since A) when the whole world has low fertility there is no longer a source of young immigrants, and B) immigration is bad at improving dependency ratios because immigrants are already partway to retirement.

For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source

There’s always been a lot of hand wringing over how the “mainstream media” covers particular issues, especially political ones, but we’re at a point where the term “mainstream media” is pretty much an anachronism. Independent media wields significant influence now, and we have the collective ability to drive attention and interest toward issues regardless of how they’re covered by the legacy media. That’s not to say that traditional media doesn’t continue to play an important role in our information ecosystem, but it’s no longer the gatekeeper it once was. [Nieman Lab]

$250K from LinkedIn in one year

Platforms like Threads and Bluesky are often cited as the main Twitter competitors, but LinkedIn was probably the greatest beneficiary of the post-Elon Twitter exodus, especially since it absorbed a lot of the business influencers who used to publish long viral tweet threads. I think one of LinkedIn’s biggest assets is that it doesn’t have restrictive character limits, and instead simply hides longer posts behind a “read more” button. This allowed people to start using it as something closer to a real blogging platform — a more scalable Medium, at least when it comes to business content. [Creator Spotlight]

What makes you happy? Perhaps a good night’s sleep, or a wonderful meal with friends?

I am the director of the Happiness Lab at Drexel University, where I also teach a course on happiness. The Happiness Lab is a think tank that investigates the ingredients that contribute to people’s happiness.

Often, my students ask me something along the lines of, “Dr. Z, tell us one thing that will make us happier.”

As a first step, I advise them to spend more time outside.

Achieving lasting and sustainable happiness is more complicated. Research on the happiest countries in the world and the places where people live the longest, known as Blue Zones, shows a common thread: Residents feel they are part of something larger than themselves, such as a community or a city.

So if you’re living in a metropolis like Philadelphia, where, incidentally, the iconic pursuit of happiness charge was ratified in the Declaration of Independence, I believe urban citizenship – that is, forming an identity with your urban surroundings – should also be on your list.

Safety, social connection, beauty

Carl Jung, the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst, wrote extensively about the relationship between our internal world and our external environment.

He believed that this relationship was crucial to our psychological well-being.

More recent research in neuroscience and functional imaging has revealed a vast, intricate and complex neurological architecture underlying our psychological perception of a place. Numerous neurological pathways and functional loops transform a complex neuropsychological process into a simple realization: I am happy here!

For example, a happy place should feel safe.

The country of Croatia, a tourist haven for its beauty and culinary delights, is also one of the top 20 safest countries globally, according to the 2025 Global Peace Index.

The U.S. ranks 128th.

The availability of good food and drink can also be a significant factor in creating a happy place.

However, according to American psychologist Abraham Maslow, a pioneer in the field of positive psychology, the opportunity for social connectivity, experiencing something meaningful and having a sense of belonging is more crucial.

Furthermore, research on happy places suggests that they are beautiful. It should not come as a surprise that the happiest places in the world are also drop-dead gorgeous, such as the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mauritius, which is the happiest country in Africa, according to the 2025 World Happiness Report from the University of Oxford and others.

Happy places often provide access to nature and promote active lifestyles, which can help relieve stress. The residents of the island of Ikaria in Greece, for example, one of the original Blue Zones, demonstrate high levels of physical activity and social interaction.

Philly Happiness Map

I asked my undergraduate psychology students at Drexel, many of whom come from other cities, states and countries, to pick one place in Philadelphia where they feel happy.

From the 243 student responses, the Happiness Lab curated 28 Philly happy places, based on how frequently the places were endorsed and their accessibility.

Philadelphia’s founder, William Penn, would likely approve that Rittenhouse Square Park and three other public squares – Logan, Franklin and Washington – were included. These squares were vital to Penn’s vision of landscaped public parks to promote the health of the mind and body by providing “salubrious spaces similar to the private garden.” They are beautiful and approachable, serving as “places to rest, take a pause, work, or read a book,” one student told us.

Places such as the Philadelphia Zoo, Penn’s Landing and the Philadelphia Museum of Art are “joyful spots that are fun to explore, and one can also take your parents along if need be,” as another student described.

The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, a historic library with eclectic programming, feels to one student like “coming home, a perfect third place.”

Some students mentioned happy places that are less known. These include tucked-away gardens such as the John F. Collings Park at 1707 Chestnut St., the rooftop Cira Green at 129 S. 30th St. and the James G. Kaskey Memorial Park and BioPond at 433 S. University Ave.

My students said these are small, unexpected spots that provide an excellent opportunity for a quiet, peaceful break, to be present, whether enjoyed alone or with a friend. I checked them out and I agree.

The students also mentioned places I had never heard of even though I’ve lived in the city for over 30 years.

The “cat park” at 526 N. Natrona St. in Mantua is a quiet little park with an eclectic personality and lots of friendly cats.

Mango Mango Dessert at 1013 Cherry St. in Chinatown, which is a frequently endorsed happiness spot among the students because of its “bustling streets, lively atmosphere and delicious food,” is a perfect pit stop for mango lovers. And Maison Sweet, at 2930 Chestnut St. in University City, is a casual bakery and cafe “where you may end up staying longer than planned,” one student shared.

I find that Philly’s happy places, as seen through the eyes of college students, tend to offer a space for residents to take time out from their day to pause, reset, relax and feel more connected and in touch with the city.

Happiness principals are universal, yet our own journeys are very personal. Philadelphians across the city may have their own list of happy places. There are really no right or wrong answers. If you don’t have a personal happy space, just start exploring and you may be surprised what you will find, including a new sense of happiness.

See the full Philly Happiness Map list here, and visit the exhibit at the W.W. Hagerty Library at Drexel University to learn more.

Mounting evidence from genome studies indicates that, contrary to received wisdom, our species has undergone profound biological adaptation in its recent evolutionary past

New research raises the possibility that recent human history involved far more dynamic evolution than previously thought.
In Darwinian biology, the classic conception of natural selection is a “hard sweep,” in which a beneficial mutation allows some individuals to survive longer or produce more offspring such that eventually that variant becomes fixed in the population. In the early 2000s, when researchers were starting to look for signs of hard sweeps in the genomes of contemporary peoples, the clearest examples came from populations that had adapted to unique circumstances. For instance, around 42,000 years ago a selective sweep changed a protein on the surface of red blood cells in Africans to boost their resistance to malaria. People in the Tibetan Highlands underwent selective sweeps for genes that helped them tolerate low oxygen (intriguingly, populations of the Himalayas, Andes and Ethiopian highlands adapted to high altitude with different assortments of genes, taking different evolutionary paths to solve similar problems).

Every semester in New York City, a quiet experiment unfolds: 19-year-olds gather in a classroom at NYU to explore what it means to live a good life. The course is called “Flourishing.”

The premise of the course is simple: Your personal and professional flourishing is directly related to your ability to control your attention.

The course is taught by Professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation. When his students begin to reclaim their focus, Haidt sees transformational results: They excel academically, experience fewer distractions, and form deeper, more meaningful connections with their peers.

The Flourishing course taps into an idea that social media—and the constant stimuli of algorithmically engineered digital spaces—has fractured our capacity for sustained focus and presence:

• Haidt told Ezra Klein on a podcast earlier this year that TikTok is “the greatest demolisher of attention in human history.”
• A recent article in The Atlantic cited widespread lamentations by professors that today’s college students don’t have the attention span to read books, let alone a brief sonnet.
• A 2023 study by Common Sense Media found that a typical adolescent now receives 237 notifications a day, or about 15 for every waking hour.

The international conversation on AI is often terribly confusing, since different kinds of AI become fused under the one overarching term. There are three kinds of AI: narrow, general, and super AI, with some grey areas in between. It is very important to clarify these distinctions because each type has very different impacts and vastly different national and international regulatory requirements.

Without national and international regulation, it is inevitable that humanity will lose control of what will become a non-biological intelligence beyond our understanding, awareness, and control. Half of AI researchers surveyed by the Center for Human Technology believe there is a 10 percent or greater chance that humans will go extinct from their inability to control AI. But, if managed well, artificial general intelligence could usher in great advances in the human condition—from medicine, education, longevity, and turning around global warming to advances in scientific understanding of reality and creating a more peaceful world. So, what should policymakers know and do now to achieve the extraordinary benefits while avoiding catastrophic, if not existential, risks?

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Hollywood is really screwing with our heads and our collective mindset.

King Solomon’s wisdom has never been more important: “Without a vision the people will perish” – Proverbs 29:18

If we want a positive future for humanity – for ourselves and our kids – then we need a vision of tomorrow that is hopeful, compelling, and abundant.

Here are four ways we can drive this transformation:

1. Create an XPRIZE for Optimistic Media: Launch a multi-million-dollar competition for filmmakers, writers, and creators who develop compelling, scientifically-grounded visions of an abundant future. Not rose-colored fantasy, but data-driven optimism that acknowledges challenges while showing paths to overcome them.

2. Build a “Media Abundance Index”: What gets measured gets managed. Let’s create a dashboard tracking the ratio of dystopian-to-optimistic content across platforms. Make studios compete for higher scores on the “Abundance Index,” similar to how they now tout diversity metrics.

3. Invest in Exponential Storytelling: Those who want to steer towards a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future for humanity should back productions that showcase how exponential technologies solve humanity’s grand challenges.

4. Leverage AI for Narrative Transformation: Today’s AI systems can analyze story structures and help writers craft compelling narratives around hope, innovation, and human potential. Let’s use these tools to create the next generation of world-building.

For those of you who don’t know me, I teach a class on the history of the digital future. I am finishing a book on the topic as well. So I think I can speak with some authority in saying that there has not been a time in recent memory when the future was quite so unclear as it is right now.

That existential uncertainty comes from two places. (1) We don’t know what generative AI will mean for the types of work you all are setting out to specialize in. And (2) we don’t know what the future of our political system will be.

Piece of advice #2: Find your voice. Never stop finding your voice.

Y’know what most bums me out about generative AI products like ChatGPT? They make everyone sound the same. This is baked into the product itself — it is, at base, a guess-the-next-word engine, a cliche-generator. And whether you think it’s the future or you thinks it’s a hype bubble, it sure seems like we’re going to be awash in the stuff for the next few years.

I consider Harry Law my lead AGI reporter, if such a thing could exist. It’s important we keep debating AGI and ASI because it has ramifications on the global economy and society as a whole. If one day, AI were to become sentient, self-motivated and awaken from the ghost in the machine what would it attempt to do?

The upshot is that the bus is on the road, but its steering is still being worked out. AI firms feel they need to create ever-more capable AI to avoid being left behind by the competition domestically and internationally, while at the same time seeking to understand those systems for safety and policy reasons. This drive is a defining feature of the current moment, as labs must satisfy investors and regulators that AGI is both inevitable and controllable.

Fifteen years ago, Public Benefit Corporations (PBCs) didn’t exist. Today, they have become a popular legal structure for some of the biggest tech companies in the world.

In the 200+ year history of U.S. corporate law, PBCs are a recent legal invention. The first state to pass PBC legislation was Maryland in 2010. Today, 41 states (and the District of Columbia) have laws that enable PBCs.

Unlike traditional corporate structures like C-Corps and S-Corps, which are designed to maximize shareholder value, PBCs promise an alignment between profit and a defined public benefit to society.

PBCs have been making news recently, with OpenAI’s recent decision to convert its for-profit business to a PBC controlled by a nonprofit parent entity.

Becoming a PBC has many benefits:

• Mission alignment: By legally embedding its social mission into its company’s DNA, a PBC structure can help tech firms stay focused on long-term societal impact.
• Public goodwill: A PBC structure can lead to enhanced consumer, employee, and investor trust in the brand. For AI companies responsible for the development of disruptive technologies, becoming a PBC is a step (though a small one) in assuaging the public that those in power have broader societal concerns in mind.
• Greater transparency: PBCs are required to adhere to regular and transparent reporting requirements. However, these requirements do not require AI companies to reveal how their AI algorithms work (a complaint that many have raised). It’s unclear if a shift in legal structure will lead to the type of transparency critics seek.

What happens to a society when intelligence itself becomes a commodity? That is the question posed throughout the National Academy of Sciences 2025 report, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work. The work is not prophecy, nor should it be mistaken for one of Silicon Valley’s breathless manifestos. It is, rather, a sober, meticulous reckoning with the ambiguous, disquieting, and often paradoxical forces unleashed by the rise of AI. Strategic, unvarnished, and disturbingly persuasive.

The authors are not alarmists, but their findings demand our attention. The committee, featuring renowned researchers such as Erik Brynjolfsson, David Autor, Tom Mitchell, and others remind us that AI, as a general-purpose technology, joins the ranks of electricity and the steam engine, tools that did not merely make us faster but rewrote the coordinates of productivity.

The international conversation on AI is often terribly confusing, since different kinds of AI become fused under the one overarching term. There are three kinds of AI: narrow, general, and super AI, with some grey areas in between. It is very important to clarify these distinctions because each type has very different impacts and vastly different national and international regulatory requirements.

Without national and international regulation, it is inevitable that humanity will lose control of what will become a non-biological intelligence beyond our understanding, awareness, and control. Half of AI researchers surveyed by the Center for Human Technology believe there is a 10 percent or greater chance that humans will go extinct from their inability to control AI. But, if managed well, artificial general intelligence could usher in great advances in the human condition—from medicine, education, longevity, and turning around global warming to advances in scientific understanding of reality and creating a more peaceful world. So, what should policymakers know and do now to achieve the extraordinary benefits while avoiding catastrophic, if not existential, risks?

ITDF Center Director Lee Rainie spoke recently at the Northeast Florida Library Information Network about the future of libraries.

His talk covered two studies released by the Center this spring: one about the universe of large language model users like ChatGPT and Claude, and the other covering the report about being human in the next decade.