EARLY AUTUMN is one of those tricky times when the weather is still quite unpredictable. Early autumn in England is a time of transition, as the weather shifts from warm summer days to cooler, wetter conditions. This changeover period is notoriously difficult to predict, as weather systems become more variable—one day may be mild and sunny...
AT THE TIG Substack, we circle quantum manifestation. An intriguing notion: "Similarly, we exist in a superposition of probable realities until we consciously choose to observe or energise one into being." Observing my thoughts, I find negative ones often appear unbidden and work to banish these from consciousness, trying instead to envision desired outcomes.
Increasingly, we’re surrounded by fake people. Sometimes we know it and sometimes we don’t. They offer us customer service on Web sites, target us in video games, and fill our social-media feeds; they trade stocks and, with the help of systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can write essays, articles, and e-mails. By no means are these A.I. systems up to all the tasks expected of a full-fledged person. But they excel in certain domains, and they’re branching out.
Ever since founding Beyond Meat Inc. in 2009 with the then fantastical idea of making meat without animals, Ethan Brown has been giving the equivalent of one extremely long TED Talk. In 2013 he took the stage at the Wired Business conference, explaining that the world had a very real greenhouse gas-emitting meat problem and that venture capitalists could make a bigger impact investing in fake meat than in solar energy.
P HAS BEEN teasing me about writing my New Year’s Resolutions in mid-February, but that was before I’d told him about all the messages I’d received from you asking after them. It’s so nice how much you love these yearly lists, and to be honest, wasn’t sure I was even going to do it this year, as so far, this new year has been particularly difficult to define...
Philosophy seems to be on a hiding to nothing. It has a 2,500-year history in the West and an extensive back-catalogue – of problems. There are questions about what exists, and what we know about it, such as: Do we have free will? Is there an external world? Does God exist? and so on. There are also questions of analysis and definition such as: What makes a sentence true? What makes an act just? What is causation? What is a person? This is a tiny sample.