I have now been writing Philosophy Mondays on and off for 18 months with 31 posts total. The next phase of the project will be to go back over everything and make corrections based on what I have lear...

Last week's post provided an explanation of the third principle of the Universal Moral Core, which I will also refer to as the consciousness principle. Today we are looking at its implications. The mo...

Today’s post continues the Universal Moral Core series by explaining the third principle, which states Value the diversity and autonomy of different forms of consciousness. Let’s start, as we have wit...

Today’s post is an interlude to the Universal Moral Core series, which will resume next week. Labor Day originated during the peak of the Industrial Revolution to celebrate workers and their contribut...

Going back to the initial publication of my book The World After Capital in 2021, I had a paragraph in the conclusion discussing the potential for artificial intelligences to become "neohumans." I cho...

First up a quick recap to where we are in this mini-series. A few weeks back, I proposed a Universal Moral Core consisting of three principles. I am now writing posts explaining each principle in grea...

The second principle in my proposed Universal Moral Core (UMC) is as follows: Accept the responsibility that comes from power. This principle is inspired by the great font of philosophical wisdom that...

Gigi and I have signed the Statement on Superintelligence, which calls for a pause on the development of superintelligence. This blog post lays out our rationale for doing so now after having previous...

Today’s post is an interlude in the Universal Moral Core series to discuss human nature. Given how much philosophical and other writing centers on different ideas of human nature, including the endles...

In last week's post I explained the first principle of the Universal Moral Core (UMC) in greater detail. Today I want to investigate some of its implications for how we should behave. As a reminder, e...

A few years back we experienced the infamous vibecession. Kudos to Kyla Scanlon for this terrific term which captures a moment where the public feels bad about the economy at a moment where traditiona...

To truly understand the world, we must bridge the gap between philosophy and physics. Recent breakthroughs in gravity and quantum theory are finally moving us past stagnant paradigms to make this poss...

By confronting China politically while becoming economically dependent, the US violated basic game theory. To reach a stable multipolar world, we must build supply chain resilience.

Before coming to the US for the first time, I attended a long weekend orientation held by the organization that was arranging my stay. We were warned that we would feel homesick, and that we would exp...

We all made AI possible. We all deserve a share of what it makes possible.

Digital version of The World After Capital, Second Edition in ePub format. If you have a Kindle device, you can easily read this version after downloading it.

Claims about AI's energy and water usage are everywhere. But the people raising alarms often have reasons to exaggerate, and the people building AI have every reason to downplay the costs. So how does...

Product teams should read this book to create better tech.

There is a heated debate about what an AGI-level economy might look like. On one side are pessimists who foresee extreme wealth concentration and a permanent precariat: people with no meaningful econo...

Are we in an AI bubble or not? As someone who lived through the dotcom bubble as an investor there are many parallels and also significant differences. By many metrics we are in obvious bubble territo...

I love food and I love drink. Food and drink provide wonderful delights from delicious flavors and through jolly company. To my great fortune I never had any eating or drinking problems. Well all of t...

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I am an immigrant, which has given me a profound appreciation of the interplay between culture and immigration. My first time in the United States was as an exchange student in Rochester, Minnesota. I...

I learned how to code on a Texas Instruments TI-59 programmable calculator and then moved on to an Apple II. The calculator had a kind of assembly language and on the Apple I had access to Basic but s...

If you want inspiration for this moment in time I have two recommendations: watch Babylon Berlin and read the Foundation Trilogy. They are roadmaps for living a moral life in a time of profound regres...

I wrote the following in April of 2025 and sent it to some friends in Europe. But now seems a good time to just publish it here as a provocation. Illustration by Gemini/Nano Banana Pro. European Feder...

I wrote the following in April of 2025 and sent it to some friends in Europe. But now seems a good time to just publish it here as a provocation. Illustration by Gemini/Nano Banana Pro. European Feder...

As introduced in the prior post, studying the interaction between “ought” and “is” permits a scientifically grounded approach to morality. Previously we looked at the importance of avoiding absorbing ...

Invocations of the Lump of Labor Fallacy have recently been superseded by appeals to Jevons paradox in claiming that we shouldn’t worry about what AI progress will do to workers. As with the case of c...

In the Beginning was the Command Line is a famous essay by Neal Stephenson, in which he argues against the Disneyfication of computing represented by Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs). And I do have fo...

One common objection to my program for Philosophy Mondays is an appeal to Hume's famous dictum "you can't get to ought from is." I recently read Science and the Good, an entire book dedicated to debun...

In science, theories eventually get discarded if they lack explanatory power. This mechanism acts quite slowly at times, as we can see in the case of string theory. But over the course of history it h...

The term abundance is being slung around a lot these days. First came the discussion that was kicked off by the recent eponymous book, which fell comically short of its title. Now we are deep into a d...

The Magic Employment Fallacy Invoking the “Lump of Labor Fallacy” to shut down discussion of the labor market impact of AI and robotics is once again popular. Labeling something a fallacy is a powerfu...

I wrote previously about the threat of a Trump dictatorship. That was in 2020 which seems like a long time ago. After I wrote that post we got close to disaster when Trump attempted in various ways to...