I recently finished reading Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, the first book in a sci-fi trilogy written by a Chinese author. It is very much a Chinese story that takes place against the history of the Cultural Revolution with distinctly Chinese backdrops. It was constantly brought up as one of the top books to read in recent times, and I thought I’d finally give it a try. I was glad I did. Typically I don’t read a lot of genre fiction. Something about the language and the types of storylines don’t seem to appeal to me. …

Simulation theory has gained a lot of traction lately thanks to the spread of more conspiratorial thinking, and a rich billionaire with a wide audience and a wild imagination. Statistically given a few possible trajectories of humankind, the most likely outcome is that computation has advanced so far that we are a result of that advancement. We are simulated beings in a wider simulation. At least, that’s how the general argument goes.

A lot of the anecdotal arguments come from the advancements in video game technology. The way Musk puts it is that we’ve come from the square ball of…

Everything we do is about building bridges, making connections that weren’t previously there. These bridges allow people to cross over to places that would have been nearly impossible otherwise. It allows people to explore new territory, expand their views, and let separate worlds meet. There are bridges we build every day in small and large ways. Like when we say hi to a stranger, or ask our friends how they’re doing. Or when we go to work to keep the machinery of the world running. …

The crackdown against hate speech and hate groups have finally begun, including silencing the former president himself. The amount of fury built up over the last few years culminated in revolt against the very ideals the United States stands for. It required literal destruction and death at the doorstep of their own federal government for the big tech to finally respond in kind. Yet, even then, their motivations seem less about altruism — to reign in the unsettling chaos — and more about self-preservation. The reason that bans have finally been implemented, accounts lifted, databases withdrawn is because it is…

It is part of the human condition to fret over and regret things we have done. Our minds often seem like it is tormenting us with memories from a past long ago, as if it’s reminding us that there is no escape. This is who you are. These are the mistakes you’ve made. These are the consequences. These are your failures. And often the events we would most like to forget, the ones that caused the greatest amount of pain, are the ones that hang on the longest — a quiet alarm in the underpinnings of our conscious selves trying…

As 2020 draws to an end, there is mounting evidence and pressure on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to face the rise of fake news, hate speech, and conspiracy, amplifying the divide between online communities. The propagation of individualized content in feeds and advertisements fuels the continual fragmentation of information on the web. Aside from the massive amounts of users numbering in the billions and the amount of political and commercial power that entails, these tech companies hold within them the power to shape the subjective realities of entire civilizations. Their detailed profiling and predictive algorithms have been…

The realm of anime was first introduced to me through the humble video rental store. Back then, my dad would take us to rent stuff every Tuesday when they had specials. I remember being able to grab four tapes for just a couple of bucks, as long as it wasn’t in the new releases. I went through a few different phases. Sci-fi. Horror. Academy award winners. Then there was the anime phase.

During the 90s, anime didn’t really have the same massive outreach it does now. A bunch of the boys at school were hardcore fans of Dragon Ball Z…

Two of the crowning achievements in artificial intelligence’s rise to world dominance involved the elegant games of chess and go. The first step in the ladder was IBM’s Deep Blue victory over the legendary chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. The next moment of triumph didn’t come for nearly another 10 years, when Google’s AlphaGo dominated over the world champion, Lee Sedol, 4 to 1.

Both of these games have somehow become a valuable marker of human capability, while simultaneously seen as a fringe marker of human awkwardness. Obsessing over little black and white pieces on a square board is…