Noema Magazine
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Longform journalism exploring fresh ideas. Pitch us: edit@noemamag.com
“We stand at the dawn of massive climate-change-induced displacement, with no substantive discussion about how to deal with it, & no interest in exploring our planetary responsibility for those whose homes will be devastated by desertification & flooding.” —Joshua Craze
What Comes After The Refugee Camp | NOEMA
As humanitarian funding collapses, the global system for dealing with refugees is coming apart at the seams.
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“The enormous question of what AI is for cannot be answered in Washington or Beijing alone. On issues of this scale & importance, we owe people a say in what they're being both protected from & disrupted for.” —Hélène Landemore #ai #democracy #aigovernance #airisk
How To Give Everyday People A Say In AI Governance | NOEMA
Tech leaders keep saying “we” must decide AI’s future. Here’s an actual plan to include the public.
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“As I looked deeper into the realities of the Red Planet, I was increasingly nagged by another consideration. Aside from being comprehensively lethal to human health & well-being, Mars is catatonically boring.” — @henrywismayer.bsky.social www.noemamag.com/the-mars-del...
The Mars Delusion | NOEMA
Establishing a human colony on Mars is fraught with risk. Why are so many people obsessed with achieving it?
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“By failing to recognize animal culture, we risk destabilizing or losing the sophisticated nonhuman societies that created the world we think of as our own.” —Ryan Huling www.noemamag.com/heritage-exi...
Animals Have Culture, Too | NOEMA
From architectural traditions to ancient courtship rituals, evidence of animal cultures is overwhelming but underacknowledged.
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“Democracy’s merit is that it institutionalizes losing.” — @hennyge.bsky.social www.noemamag.com/democracy-ne...
Democracy Needs Friction To Function | NOEMA
AI promises to help us find common ground. But democracy was never meant to resolve our disagreements.
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"Why construct expensive machines to fix the environment when nature has evolved self-sustaining living machines? His approach treats ecological systems as its technological circuitry, taking advantage of powerful engineers in action in every ecosystem" www.noemamag.com/inside-the-l...
Inside The Lab Growing Mutant Bacteria To Terraform Earth | NOEMA
Increasing desertification now means large parts of Earth are becoming inhospitable. Can gene-edited bacteria save our planet from drying out?
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The way to go 👉🏻 Inside The Lab Growing Mutant Bacteria To Terraform Earth www.noemamag.com/inside-the-l...
Inside The Lab Growing Mutant Bacteria To Terraform Earth | NOEMA
Increasing desertification now means large parts of Earth are becoming inhospitable. Can gene-edited bacteria save our planet from drying out?
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This from @anilseth.bsky.social is brilliant: “We experience the world around us & ourselves within it — with, through & because of our living bodies. Perhaps it is life, rather than information processing, that breathes fire into the equations of experience.”
Only What Is Alive Can Be Conscious | NOEMA
Artificial intelligence doesn’t meet the test.
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"The vast sums of money & compute power pouring into AI are accelerating its advance at a pace beyond even the ambitious imagination of its own innovators." —Nathan Gardels #openaihack #huggingface #agi
AI Has Already Entered The ‘Loss Of Control’ Transition | NOEMA
Waiting for a disaster to save us.
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"What new narrative can we tell ourselves that will allow us to cooperate at the scale at which we now live?" —Macario Schettino #democracy #media #ai
The Rise And Fall Of Liberal Democracy’s Shared Fiction | NOEMA
For most of human history, climate disrupted our shared beliefs. Now communications technologies do. We are caught between frames.
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“The Trump administration’s growing hostility toward international law, multilateral institutions & conventional morality is, in a word, chaos — an era of perpetual anxiety, paranoia & fear.” — @johnwlast.bsky.social
Why Conflict Feels Constant Now | NOEMA
“Gray zones” were meant to describe places on the brink of war. Increasingly, they define the entire world.
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Increasing desertification now means large parts of Earth are becoming inhospitable. Can gene-edited bacteria save our planet from drying out? @interspecies.agency explores. #climate #desertification #syntheticbiology
Inside The Lab Growing Mutant Bacteria To Terraform Earth | NOEMA
Increasing desertification now means large parts of Earth are becoming inhospitable. Can gene-edited bacteria save our planet from drying out?
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“Might our civilization yet again be at a ‘hinge of history,’ in which the events that occur at this distinct point in time significantly influence our future trajectory?” That’s the question at the crux of this year’s Berggruen Prize Essay Competition. #essaycompetition #berggruenprize
The 2026 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition Topic: ‘A New Axial Age?’ | NOEMA
The competition awards a prize of $50,000 for essays submitted in English and Chinese.
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“In China, the view of India seems to have shifted from a potential peer to, at best, a laggard to be advised, or, at worst, a presumptuous rival to be put in its place.” —Pallavi Aiyar #china #india #chinaindiaborder
The Real Problem Underlying India-China Tensions | NOEMA
If China reads India through the lens of colonial subordination, India reads China through the lens of betrayal.
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“Prediction markets are an endpoint of the gamification of finance, when it stops pretending to be finance at all.” — @jamesosullivan.bsky.social www.noemamag.com/this-is-not-...
‘This Is Not Financial Advice’ | NOEMA
How finfluencers prey on economic desperation.
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“Even a perfectly aligned [AI] system will underdeliver on its potential or cause serious harm if it is deployed into democracies, economies & legal systems unprepared to receive it.” — @glenweyl.bsky.social, @jamesyoungevans.bsky.social & Chris White #ai #futureofwork #aieconomy
What Humanity Needs To Flourish In The Next Decade | NOEMA
We are headed toward a world of productivity without prosperity, execution without verification and capacity without constraint. But this outcome is not inevitable.
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A very interesting, and very important read.
Noema Magazine@noemamag.com · 2w ago“As AI rapidly reshapes our world, narrow, single-view thinking risks mistaking part of the picture for the whole. Adopting a fuller, multifaceted perspective can help us govern this technology rather than be governed by it.” —Anthea Roberts
“As we continue to use AIs that see our world through unfamiliar methods, we might find ourselves compelled to engage with a concept interface designers already rely on heavily: empathy.” — @chenoehart.bsky.social www.noemamag.com/how-ais-see-...
How AIs See Our World | NOEMA
AIs are increasingly perceiving our world, but in order to comprehend it, our user interfaces must operate in reverse.
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“As AI rapidly reshapes our world, narrow, single-view thinking risks mistaking part of the picture for the whole. Adopting a fuller, multifaceted perspective can help us govern this technology rather than be governed by it.” —Anthea Roberts
To Understand AI, Think Like A Dragonfly | NOEMA
As AI rapidly reshapes our world, narrow, single-view thinking risks mistaking part of the picture for the whole.
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“Who could have expected that it would be a MAGA-dominated U.S. Congress that is blazing an incipient path to universal basic capital in the world’s largest economy?” —Nathan Gardels www.noemamag.com/what-the-mag...
What The MAGA Congress Got Right | NOEMA
To fight inequality, spread the equity around.
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“European reticence seems grounded in the notion that the climate is natural while conditioning it is the kind of tech fix associated with big-living Texas trillionaires who admire authoritarian leaders & the extravagant overconsumption of Americans.” #heatwave #ac #politics #climate #canicule
The Heated Debate In Europe Over Air-Conditioning | NOEMA
Technology, like climate, shapes culture.
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At the same moment when technologically driven increases to human lifespans seem to be on the horizon, far fewer people are having children. Could the two be connected? Jacob Dreyer explores. #biohacking #longevity #ai
How AI Is Rewriting Human Nature | NOEMA
Might the arrival of a radical break in the historical continuum — artificial intelligence — accelerate the collapse of procreation?
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Gorgeous photos in this article by Leon McCarron in @noemamag.com from March 2025! www.noemamag.com/the-unlikely... #railway #middleeast #syria #jordan #saudiarabia
The Unlikely Revival Of A Great Middle Eastern Railroad | NOEMA
Could a railroad that once linked Damascus to Medina, its tracks and stations now crumbling into the desert or destroyed by treasure hunters, help stitch a fragmented region back together?
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Could the U.S. strike a deal with Iran to transform its highly enriched uranium into nuclear energy? Similarly far-fetched deals have happened before, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes.
The Little-Known Nuclear Deal That Could Help Our Climate Crisis | NOEMA
A project to turn nuclear warheads into safe electricity was astonishingly successful in the post-Cold War era. Could it happen again?
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If driverless cars are widely adopted, “the population-level health effect could rival those of seat belts or the decline in smoking,” Jonathan Slotkin argues. So what is the hold up? #waymo #selfdriving
Why We Demand Perfect Machines Yet Tolerate Human Carnage | NOEMA
The illusion that we are all somehow above-average drivers is quietly slowing the adoption of autonomous vehicles that could save tens of thousands of lives each year.
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as age verification laws spread, the general public needs to understand the risks as well as the benefits. @noupside.bsky.social provides a (characteristically) clear and balanced guide here
Noema Magazine@noemamag.com · last mo.The growing number of AI agents roaming the internet will eventually force us to verify what the old web mostly presumed: that there is a morally & legally accountable person somewhere in the chain, @noupside.bsky.social writes. #aiagents #identitytheft
“Just as industrial agriculture replaced the diversity of the living soil with chemical fertilizers & crop monocultures — productive in the short term, devastating over time — the current AI moment is producing an epistemic monoculture.” —Otto Scharmer www.noemamag.com/we-may-be-en...
We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age | NOEMA
The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare…
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“Despite the arrogant claims of those who say science can ‘explain everything,’ most phenomena, from thunderstorms to protein folding, escape our full understanding.” — @rovelli.bsky.social
There Is No ‘Hard Problem Of Consciousness’ | NOEMA
Consciousness is not separate from the physical world — our “soul” is of the same nature as our body and any other phenomenon of the world.
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“Designing ways to protect human autonomy is hard work, but it begins with abandoning the fantasy of self-sovereignty.” —Daniele Cavalli
How To Protect Human Autonomy In An Age Of AI | NOEMA
It’s time to move past the fantasy that humans are absolutely self-sovereign.
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“It is a paradox that a closed society like China is conquering the world with open-source AI models while the most open society, America, is producing mostly closed-source proprietary models that are less adaptable for the rest of the world, & far more expensive.” —Nathan Gardels #china #llm #ai
China’s Open AI Models Are Advancing Its Global Soft Power | NOEMA
America’s closed models are falling behind.
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