I’m on a deadline that is approaching fast to finish writing my next book, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. Luckily, my use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has dramatically increased my productivity, so I should hit that deadline. But the increase in my own productivity has gotten me thinking a lot more about what happens when all knowledge workers get a lot more productive with AI.
I have written two comparable books in the era before AI, and each time I had a human research assistant to help me. They transcribed my interviews and verbal notes, located material I needed to read, researched areas I did not have time to explore myself, and helped fact-check my writing.
My AI research assistants have made me at least twice as productive as I was when I wrote my previous books with human assistants. There are obvious examples of how — AI needs mere seconds to transcribe interviews that would take my human assistants all day, and it can pull up any fact or concept in context, across virtually any field, almost instantly.
But there ... Continue Reading »
What is the shape of the Universe? If you were born into this world anytime before the 1800s, it likely never would have occurred to you that the Universe itself was even permitted to have a shape. Like everyone else, you would have learned geometry starting from the rules of Euclid, where space can be no more complicated than a three-dimensional grid. After starting with that notion of absolute space, you would have applied Newton’s laws of physics, presuming (like everyone else) that the forces between any two objects would act along the one and only straight line connecting them. But we’ve come a long way in our understanding since then, and not only can space itself be curved by the presence of matter and energy, but we can witness and measure those effects directly.
It didn’t have to be the case that the Universe, as a whole, would have a spatial curvature to it that’s indistinguishable from flat. But that does seem to be the Universe we live in, despite the fact that our intuition might prefer it to be ... Continue Reading »
In the race to build better teams, organizations often turn to the latest productivity frameworks or data-driven performance technologies. Despite this relentless pursuit of efficiency, many workplaces remain creatively stunted, socially fragmented, and psychologically fatigued. What if the breakthrough your team needs isn’t another productivity tool, but a shift in what it sees every day?
Art is frequently relegated to decoration. It’s pleasant to look at but rarely integrated into corporate strategy. Art does more than improve aesthetics, though; it can be a catalyst for cognitive strength, emotional nuance, social intelligence, and mental wellbeing. A growing body of research across neuroscience, organizational psychology, and workplace design shows that art changes how teams think, feel, and interact. When organizations bring it into the workplace, their teams grow more adaptive, insightful, and connected.
Let’s examine five ways exposure to art can enhance your team’s performance.
#1 Art expands cognitive flexibility
Many businesses aim to develop a culture of innovation. Innovation is about adaptability: the ability to think across perspectives and generate new pathways of thought. That core capability is known as cognitive flexibility.
Emerging research in neuroaesthetics ... Continue Reading »
Astrophysicist Sara Seager has redefined how we search for life, shifting the focus from definitive proof to the subtler, messier realm of possibility.
By detecting biosignature gases — molecules that might indicate life in a planet’s atmosphere — her work explores what discovery looks like when certainty isn’t guaranteed. Volcanic gases and unknown chemistry can mimic life’s signals, meaning we may never get a perfect answer.
But Seager sees beauty in that ambiguity. In adapting the famous Drake Equation, she offers a new framework for discovery, one that embraces the “maybes” as part of the scientific process. For the first time in human history, she says, we’re finally in a position to try. And that alone is extraordinary.
This video The biggest obstacle to discovering life beyond Earth is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
The closest supermassive black hole pair, in NGC 7727, was discovered in 2021.
The galaxy NGC 7727 shows extended spiral arms: likely the aftermath of a recent major merger between two comparably massive galaxies. The presence of two supermassive black holes inside this galaxy, as well as the extended streams of gas and stars, show one possible outcome of a major merger of two similar-mass, initially gas-rich galaxies.
Credit: ESO/VST ATLAS team. Acknowledgment: Durham University/CASU/WFAU
Just 89 million light-years away, these 154,000,000- and 6,300,000-solar-mass black holes are just 1,600 light-years apart.
A close-up (left) and wider-field (right) view of the central nucleus of the nearby galaxy NGC 7727. Just 89 million light-years away, it houses the closest pair of binary supermassive black holes known, with a separation of 1,600 light-years. While friction with the environment can lead supermassive black holes to closely approach one another, the final stages of an inspiral and merger should come due to gravitational wave emission. Binary supermassive black holes are fairly common at the centers of galaxies, representing about 1-in-1000 galactic systems.
Credit: ESO/Voggel et al.; ESO/VST ATLAS team. Acknowledgment: ... Continue Reading »
Kay woke before dawn to the sound of rain rattling the windows. She rose, washed her face, and was just getting dressed when she heard a gentle rap on the apartment door. Han Ying had invited a matronly friend — selected because of her happy marriage and large family — to comb Kay’s hair from girlhood braids into a married woman’s bun. It was the first ritual of Kay’s wedding day, November 21, 1910.
Earlier that year, Moy Sing and Han Ying had decided to find their oldest daughter a husband. They waited until Kay turned seventeen but saw no reason for further delay. After all, Kay was already three years older than Han Ying had been at the time of her own marriage. So Moy Sing asked local merchant Lee Weenom, an amateur matchmaker, to find Kay a suitable mate. The task was formidable, but not because of Moy Sing’s lack of wealth or social prominence. In 1910, fewer than forty single or widowed adult Chinese women lived in New York City, compared to about fifteen hundred single or widowed ... Continue Reading »
When it comes to the Universe and everything in it, only one thing is absolutely certain: everything that’s now living will someday die. This doesn’t just extend to living beings, but to all sources that use some sort of fuel and emit energy: eventually, as demanded by the laws of thermodynamics, all of that energy-liberating activity will cease. Stars will go dark, stellar remnants will fade away, and even black holes will evaporate. In the far future, our Universe will become something that’s virtually unrecognizable to us today, as our bright, star-and-galaxy-rich cosmos will transform into a sparse, dark landscape from which precious few signals could ever be detected.
But there’s a whole lot that’s going to happen before we reach that funerary late-stage state. Given what we know today, can we say anything important about the path to that end state, and how dark the Universe, as well as our galaxy, will become over time? That’s what our regular reader James D wants to know, writing in to ask:
“I was wondering if it’s possible to estimate using star formation rates, ... Continue Reading »
Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced, spanning Egypt, Greece, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and beyond, came apart within a single generation.
Historian Eric Cline argues this collapse wasn’t the work of one invading force or one bad harvest, but something far harder to stop: An overly interdependent system that had no way to absorb multiple shocks at once.
This video The late Bronze Age was the last time our world was this connected is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
This is what no one tells you, in the songs sung about Jason and the Argo. When he spoke like this — so proper and persuasive — his voice was filled with laughter. The amusement was never unkind, it always seemed generous. So the idea that my nephews — scarcely more than children — might be capable of protecting me was not risible, exactly, but somehow enjoyable to him. The way he bestowed his affection was almost regal, as though he were the princess and I were the adventurer. And every word felt like a gift, even as he acknowledged his promises to me.
I didn’t know this at the time, of course. I just thought it was one of those vocal mannerisms that foreigners sometimes have. It was only later, when I had seen him under different circumstances, that I knew he found delight in these moments. He loved to be asked for help, he loved to feel that he was granting wonderful favors. He believed his own generosity was the cause of anything he did at another’s request: He ... Continue Reading »
From your own experiential perspective, the laws of physics are stacked against you if you ever hope to achieve immortality. From a thermodynamic perspective, every system tends toward increasing entropy-and-disorder, and the only way you can combat that is by constantly inputting an external source of energy. In other words, everything about you, including your body and mind, is destined to eventually break down. Although you might try to leverage the power of relativity to dilate time and slow its passage, that will never work from your individual perspective; time only dilates or slows relative to an observer in a different reference frame from your own. No matter how quickly you move or how deep of a gravitational field you enter, you’ll still experience the passage of time as normal: at the rate of one second per second.
While this may confine a human’s dream of immortality to solutions that rely on technological enhancements, bio-hacking your body, or science-fiction level technology that relies on novel physical laws and/or phenomena, there’s still plenty that relativity has to say about living forever. There’s ... Continue Reading »
I’m on a deadline that is approaching fast to finish writing my next book, The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050. Luckily, my use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools has dramatically increased my productivity, so I should hit that deadline. But the increase in my own productivity has gotten me thinking a lot more about what happens when all knowledge workers get a lot more productive with AI.
I have written two comparable books in the era before AI, and each time I had a human research assistant to help me. They transcribed my interviews and verbal notes, located material I needed to read, researched areas I did not have time to explore myself, and helped fact-check my writing.
My AI research assistants have made me at least twice as productive as I was when I wrote my previous books with human assistants. There are obvious examples of how — AI needs mere seconds to transcribe interviews that would take my human assistants all day, and it can pull up any fact or concept in context, across virtually any field, almost instantly.
But there ... 
What is the shape of the Universe? If you were born into this world anytime before the 1800s, it likely never would have occurred to you that the Universe itself was even permitted to have a shape. Like everyone else, you would have learned geometry starting from the rules of Euclid, where space can be no more complicated than a three-dimensional grid. After starting with that notion of absolute space, you would have applied Newton’s laws of physics, presuming (like everyone else) that the forces between any two objects would act along the one and only straight line connecting them. But we’ve come a long way in our understanding since then, and not only can space itself be curved by the presence of matter and energy, but we can witness and measure those effects directly.
It didn’t have to be the case that the Universe, as a whole, would have a spatial curvature to it that’s indistinguishable from flat. But that does seem to be the Universe we live in, despite the fact that our intuition might prefer it to be ... 
In the race to build better teams, organizations often turn to the latest productivity frameworks or data-driven performance technologies. Despite this relentless pursuit of efficiency, many workplaces remain creatively stunted, socially fragmented, and psychologically fatigued. What if the breakthrough your team needs isn’t another productivity tool, but a shift in what it sees every day?
Art is frequently relegated to decoration. It’s pleasant to look at but rarely integrated into corporate strategy. Art does more than improve aesthetics, though; it can be a catalyst for cognitive strength, emotional nuance, social intelligence, and mental wellbeing. A growing body of research across neuroscience, organizational psychology, and workplace design shows that art changes how teams think, feel, and interact. When organizations bring it into the workplace, their teams grow more adaptive, insightful, and connected.
Let’s examine five ways exposure to art can enhance your team’s performance.
#1 Art expands cognitive flexibility
Many businesses aim to develop a culture of innovation. Innovation is about adaptability: the ability to think across perspectives and generate new pathways of thought. That core capability is known as cognitive flexibility.
Emerging research in neuroaesthetics ... 
The closest supermassive black hole pair, in NGC 7727, was discovered in 2021.
The galaxy NGC 7727 shows extended spiral arms: likely the aftermath of a recent major merger between two comparably massive galaxies. The presence of two supermassive black holes inside this galaxy, as well as the extended streams of gas and stars, show one possible outcome of a major merger of two similar-mass, initially gas-rich galaxies.
Credit: ESO/VST ATLAS team. Acknowledgment: Durham University/CASU/WFAU
Just 89 million light-years away, these 154,000,000- and 6,300,000-solar-mass black holes are just 1,600 light-years apart.
A close-up (left) and wider-field (right) view of the central nucleus of the nearby galaxy NGC 7727. Just 89 million light-years away, it houses the closest pair of binary supermassive black holes known, with a separation of 1,600 light-years. While friction with the environment can lead supermassive black holes to closely approach one another, the final stages of an inspiral and merger should come due to gravitational wave emission. Binary supermassive black holes are fairly common at the centers of galaxies, representing about 1-in-1000 galactic systems.
Credit: ESO/Voggel et al.; ESO/VST ATLAS team. Acknowledgment: ... 
Kay woke before dawn to the sound of rain rattling the windows. She rose, washed her face, and was just getting dressed when she heard a gentle rap on the apartment door. Han Ying had invited a matronly friend — selected because of her happy marriage and large family — to comb Kay’s hair from girlhood braids into a married woman’s bun. It was the first ritual of Kay’s wedding day, November 21, 1910.
Earlier that year, Moy Sing and Han Ying had decided to find their oldest daughter a husband. They waited until Kay turned seventeen but saw no reason for further delay. After all, Kay was already three years older than Han Ying had been at the time of her own marriage. So Moy Sing asked local merchant Lee Weenom, an amateur matchmaker, to find Kay a suitable mate. The task was formidable, but not because of Moy Sing’s lack of wealth or social prominence. In 1910, fewer than forty single or widowed adult Chinese women lived in New York City, compared to about fifteen hundred single or widowed ... 
When it comes to the Universe and everything in it, only one thing is absolutely certain: everything that’s now living will someday die. This doesn’t just extend to living beings, but to all sources that use some sort of fuel and emit energy: eventually, as demanded by the laws of thermodynamics, all of that energy-liberating activity will cease. Stars will go dark, stellar remnants will fade away, and even black holes will evaporate. In the far future, our Universe will become something that’s virtually unrecognizable to us today, as our bright, star-and-galaxy-rich cosmos will transform into a sparse, dark landscape from which precious few signals could ever be detected.
But there’s a whole lot that’s going to happen before we reach that funerary late-stage state. Given what we know today, can we say anything important about the path to that end state, and how dark the Universe, as well as our galaxy, will become over time? That’s what our regular reader James D wants to know, writing in to ask:
“I was wondering if it’s possible to estimate using star formation rates, ... 
This is what no one tells you, in the songs sung about Jason and the Argo. When he spoke like this — so proper and persuasive — his voice was filled with laughter. The amusement was never unkind, it always seemed generous. So the idea that my nephews — scarcely more than children — might be capable of protecting me was not risible, exactly, but somehow enjoyable to him. The way he bestowed his affection was almost regal, as though he were the princess and I were the adventurer. And every word felt like a gift, even as he acknowledged his promises to me.
I didn’t know this at the time, of course. I just thought it was one of those vocal mannerisms that foreigners sometimes have. It was only later, when I had seen him under different circumstances, that I knew he found delight in these moments. He loved to be asked for help, he loved to feel that he was granting wonderful favors. He believed his own generosity was the cause of anything he did at another’s request: He ... 
From your own experiential perspective, the laws of physics are stacked against you if you ever hope to achieve immortality. From a thermodynamic perspective, every system tends toward increasing entropy-and-disorder, and the only way you can combat that is by constantly inputting an external source of energy. In other words, everything about you, including your body and mind, is destined to eventually break down. Although you might try to leverage the power of relativity to dilate time and slow its passage, that will never work from your individual perspective; time only dilates or slows relative to an observer in a different reference frame from your own. No matter how quickly you move or how deep of a gravitational field you enter, you’ll still experience the passage of time as normal: at the rate of one second per second.
While this may confine a human’s dream of immortality to solutions that rely on technological enhancements, bio-hacking your body, or science-fiction level technology that relies on novel physical laws and/or phenomena, there’s still plenty that relativity has to say about living forever. There’s ...