Category: ideas

We have been engineering our environments to more productively serve human needs for tens of millennia. We cleared forests for grasslands and agriculture. We selected and bred plants and animals that were more nutritious, fertile and abundant. It took six times as much farmland to feed a single person 9,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Neolithic revolution, than it does today, even as almost all of us eat much richer diets. What the palaeoarcheological record strongly suggests is that carrying capacity is not fixed. It is many orders of magnitude greater than it was when we began our journey on this planet.

While Plato and Aristotle were concerned with character-centred virtue ethics, the Aztec approach is perhaps better described as socially-centred virtue ethics. If the Aztecs were right, then ‘Western’ philosophers have been too focused on individuals, too reliant on assessments of character, and too optimistic about the individual’s ability to correct her own vices. Instead, according to the Aztecs, we should look around to our family and friends, as well as our ordinary rituals or routines, if we hope to lead a better, more worthwhile existence.

In many ways, the really improbable event of recent decades was the manner in which so much of the world experienced stability and predictability. What was the probability that we could, collectively, have created such an unprecedented quantity of wealth, health, and prosperity?

This gap between the imagined and actual boundaries around our private lives has been the leitmotif of modern privacy debates. Indeed, the most consistent thread in that history has been the concept’s fundamental instability in the face of social and technological change.

“From the tables of European royalty to a bag of 10 Hoodsies for $2.98 at Market Basket, the story of ice cream echoes that of the American experiment — democratization, fueled by technology, ingenuity, and mass marketing.” Ice cream figured in the assimilation of immigrants, and it was even tied up with Prohibition.

“I had been here for just a couple of months, and I was getting used to [Chef Bottura’s] style,” Canadian-born chef de partie Jessica Rosval told me when I visited the restaurant. “He burst into the kitchen one day and said, ‘Okay, everybody, new project for today: Lou Reed, Take a Walk on the Wild Side. Everybody make a dish.’ And I was just like, ‘Oh my gosh, where do I even start?’” But Rosval’s initial panic soon turned to excitement. “We created a wide variety of dishes,” she said. “Some people focused on the bass line of the song. Some people focused on the lyrics. Some people focused on the era in which the song was written. We had this diverse array of different plates that were created from this one moment of inspiration when Massimo had been listening to the song in his car.”

Last year, Hanson Robotics released its first consumer robot, Professor Einstein, a $199, 16-inch animatronic companion for kids that can answer questions, play brain games and discuss science and math. This year the company, which has about 50 employees, plans to release updates for Professor Einstein and to produce about 100 copies of Sophia and other human-sized robots. The androids function as programmable machines that can be used to train doctors, deliver therapies for depression, care for the elderly and interact with customers. Most importantly, Hanson is excited about all the functions people have yet to dream up. Imagine your iPhone without the apps.

Seriously, Gen-Z: Why? Why do you love this tweet about a Gatsby-style party? (Come for the generation gap question; stay for the teens’ long takes on the tweet that somehow still don’t explain it, at all.)