G. GibsonWhy Safer Futures Are Still Possible & What You Can Do to Help with Tristan Harris | TGS 214
PeerTube
Darker KnightHow Rethinking Our Place in the Web of Life Could Change Our Global Crises Nate Hagens with Christine Webb
About Christine Webb:
Dr. Christine Webb is a primatologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University as a part of the Animal Studies program. Prior to joining NYU, she was a Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
Her research follows two intersecting lines of inquiry: understanding the complex dynamics of social life in animals, especially other primates, and examining how the dominant narrative of human exceptionalism has shaped scientific knowledge of the more-than-human world. These two lines of research have cumulated into her 2025 book, The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters, which argues that human exceptionalism is an ideology that relies more on human culture than our biology, and more on delusion and faith than on evidence.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ArHrLzkJm_k&pp=4gcKEghzdWJzdGFjaw%3D%3D
How Rethinking Our Place in the Web of Life Could Change Our Global Crises with Christine Webb
Steve Moore 
#NateHagens on agency & staying human. Explains the despair I often feel.
"I increasingly think that many of us now live in a kind of soft feudalism. We have comfort & convenience & entertainment & abundance of choice in the narrow consumer sense. At the same time there are walls and gates around us built out of institutions & incentives, ownership patterns, & the hard physics of a globally interconnected carbon smorgasbord, energy intensive way of life.”
27min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao2MJeiPiL4
"I increasingly think that many of us now live in a kind of soft feudalism. We have comfort & convenience & entertainment & abundance of choice in the narrow consumer sense. At the same time there are walls and gates around us built out of institutions & incentives, ownership patterns, & the hard physics of a globally interconnected carbon smorgasbord, energy intensive way of life.”
27min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao2MJeiPiL4
Desperately Seeking Agency | Frankly 129
Sometimes I feel like a pingpong ball between a Convergence of Catastrophes & “Don’t Look Up” syndrome. This may become a thread, digest responsibly.
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” E.O. Wilson
From #NateHagens piece about #AI & how we might prevent it from running amuk. #Anthropic #CarlSagan
https://natehagens.substack.com/p/essay-a-country-of-geniuses?publication_id=672668&post_id=188271667&isFreemail=true&r=jhgz4&triedRedirect=true
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” - Wendell Berry - from #NateHagens Frankly on reconnecting with the physical, #Tolkien, & Cultural Fragmentation. https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/120-the-creature-in-the-machine
The Creature in the Machine - The Great Simplification
In this week’s episode, Nate reflects on his experience with knee surgery and being a “creature in the machine” (the Superorganism). He touches on the often-forgotten nature of our physical existence in a world dominated by cognitive labor and abstractions, exploring the tension between gratitude for the gains of modern medicine and knowledge of the hidden energetic cost of these technologies.
"Attention Shoppers!” How often do you see/hear that?
Marketing has sub-humanized us into consumer units.
I used to work as an instructor for Outward Bound & Denver Public Schools taking kids out of their comfort zone & helping them strengthen their resilience, adaptivity, & cooperative skills. I sometimes wonder how much of it stuck. Judging by what I see these days, we could use more of that.
#NateHagens dives into The Consumption Pyramid for 23 minutes.
Worth a watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOmG0B2q9aI
The Consumption Pyramid | Frankly 123
kalidaily reminder that nate hagens is a #russian #troll #accelerationst #tankie who wants the US to #collapse, invited #jillstein #grifters to his #podcast before the 2025 #election and told people it doesn't matter who they #vote for.
and the #edgelords in the #climatechange #climateCrisis #climate #climateaction movement who still hang out with these people are so low IQ that it should be illegal for them to be on the internet.
"The technosphere, all the cement and buildings and plastics and asphalt and everything now outweighs all living things on earth. Not just animals, but grasses, trees, everything alive is outweighed by the things that humans have built. How much of what we call technological progress is really just borrowing from the future and labeling it innovation, and how would we know the difference?"
#NateHagens #Environment #Climate https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/119-technology-and-wealth
#NateHagens #Environment #Climate https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/119-technology-and-wealth
Technology and Wealth: The Straw, the Siphon, and the Sieve - The Great Simplification
In this week’s Frankly, Nate explores the relationship between technology and wealth when viewed through a global biophysical lens. He uses the visualization of a straw, siphon, and sieve to describe how technology enables the acceleration of physical resource extraction and the concentration and filtering of resulting ‘wealth’ towards the human species.
#NateHagens & Dopamine Nation author Anna Lembke discuss digital addiction & what to do about it.
"social media companies are hijacking our attention. But now AI is hijacking our attachment, especially with chatbots etc.
We are titillating ourselves, increasingly getting all of our needs met through these machines, as a result, we are not turning toward other people to meet those needs, and that is the crucial divide. That is what will kill us in the end."
#socialmedia
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/206-anna-lembke
"social media companies are hijacking our attention. But now AI is hijacking our attachment, especially with chatbots etc.
We are titillating ourselves, increasingly getting all of our needs met through these machines, as a result, we are not turning toward other people to meet those needs, and that is the crucial divide. That is what will kill us in the end."
#socialmedia
https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/206-anna-lembke
How We’ve ‘Drugified’ Our Entire Existence: Dopamine & Addiction In the Digital Age - The Great Simplification
Dopamine: the most famous neurotransmitter that regulates pleasure, motivation, and (perhaps most importantly) addiction. When examining why our society is hooked on consuming more and more of everything – food, clothes, videos, news, vacations – it’s imperative to look at how our modern environments hijack our brain’s dopamine, sending it into overdrive at nearly every turn. Could taking a closer look at how our societal norms make us more vulnerable to addiction help us transition to more balanced and mindful lifestyles?
Eudaimon ꙮ"How Artificial Superintelligence Might Wipe Out Our Entire Species with Nate Soares" | TGS 203
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tjOzQne1LY
The presentation for this episode follows. And I love the metaphor of we being forcefully onboarded on a plane with no landing gear, and being promised that the engineers will find out a way to build one while on flight. Also, we're being told that there's a 10%-20% chance that they'll fail the attempt. But hey, we get the opportunity to fly!
> Technological development has always been a double-edged sword for humanity: the printing press increased the spread of misinformation, cars disrupted the fabric of our cities, and social media has made us increasingly polarized and lonely. But it has not been since the invention of the nuclear bomb that technology has presented such a severe existential risk to humanity – until now, with the possibility of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) on the horizon. Were ASI to come to fruition, it would be so powerful that it would outcompete human beings in everything – from scientific discovery to strategic warfare. What might happen to our species if we reach this point of singularity, and how can we steer away from the worst outcomes?
> In this episode, I’m joined by Nate Soares, an AI safety researcher and co-author of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. Together, we discuss many aspects of AI and ASI, including the dangerous unpredictability of continued ASI development, the “alignment problem,” and the newest safety studies uncovering increasingly deceptive AI behavior. Soares also explores the need for global cooperation and oversight in AI development and the importance of public awareness and political action in addressing these existential risks.
> How does ASI present an entirely different level of risk than the conventional artificial intelligence models that the public has already become accustomed to? Why do the leaders of the AI industry persist in their pursuits, despite acknowledging the extinction-level risks presented by continued ASI development? And will we be able to join together to create global guardrails against this shared threat, taking one small step toward a better future for humanity?
#AI #ASI #ArtificialSuperIntelligence #AISafety #AIDangers #TGS #NateSoares #NateHagens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tjOzQne1LY
The presentation for this episode follows. And I love the metaphor of we being forcefully onboarded on a plane with no landing gear, and being promised that the engineers will find out a way to build one while on flight. Also, we're being told that there's a 10%-20% chance that they'll fail the attempt. But hey, we get the opportunity to fly!
> Technological development has always been a double-edged sword for humanity: the printing press increased the spread of misinformation, cars disrupted the fabric of our cities, and social media has made us increasingly polarized and lonely. But it has not been since the invention of the nuclear bomb that technology has presented such a severe existential risk to humanity – until now, with the possibility of Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) on the horizon. Were ASI to come to fruition, it would be so powerful that it would outcompete human beings in everything – from scientific discovery to strategic warfare. What might happen to our species if we reach this point of singularity, and how can we steer away from the worst outcomes?
> In this episode, I’m joined by Nate Soares, an AI safety researcher and co-author of the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. Together, we discuss many aspects of AI and ASI, including the dangerous unpredictability of continued ASI development, the “alignment problem,” and the newest safety studies uncovering increasingly deceptive AI behavior. Soares also explores the need for global cooperation and oversight in AI development and the importance of public awareness and political action in addressing these existential risks.
> How does ASI present an entirely different level of risk than the conventional artificial intelligence models that the public has already become accustomed to? Why do the leaders of the AI industry persist in their pursuits, despite acknowledging the extinction-level risks presented by continued ASI development? And will we be able to join together to create global guardrails against this shared threat, taking one small step toward a better future for humanity?
#AI #ASI #ArtificialSuperIntelligence #AISafety #AIDangers #TGS #NateSoares #NateHagens
