Inventing and creating books about how we make a better future. MIT Media Lab PhD, former UC Berkeley prof, former Yahoo! and Microsoft exec. Applied Futurist.
Los Angeles, CA
Joined March 2007
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When you realize that our society, economy, nation, civilization, and species are currently unsustainable and are in a death spiral unless fundamental, systemic change happens in the next few years, politics looks very different—it’s literally our global survival that’s at stake.
I always felt the Picard-centered episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation were the best. Two in particular demonstrate Patrick Stewart’s brilliance as a Shakespearean actor in science fiction television: “The Inner Light” and “Darmok”.
It is such a loss that Patrick Stewart is dead.
Bringing Shakespearean gravitas to Star Trek, he made me believe that the future could be not only better, but transformed by social justice, economic abundance, compassion, and full of wonder.
I miss Captain Picard terribly.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard is dead.
My hero was an inspiration to millions of people using his intelligence, creativity, and grace to solve problems and to lead.
Patrick Stewart, Master of Shakespeare, ‘Star Trek’ and More, Has Died nytimes.com/2026/10/29/arts/… via @NYTimes
Marc Davis retweeted
Not to sound blackpilled but I just can’t fathom a future where AI and robotics puts 80 percent of humanity out of a job and there isn’t some kind of global culling to get the population numbers down because the majority of people are no longer needed and are using up scarce resources.
Change my mind.
What’s the glass half full outcome?
Universal high income and infinite abundance?
If it sounds too good to be true it literally always is.
Marc Davis retweeted
What happens when human labor is no longer economically valuable, but human survival still costs money? Everyone keeps talking about universal basic income as if it’s guaranteed. What if the people controlling the technology simply decide they don’t want to share the wealth?
AI is not what scares me. The psychology of those who own AI is what scares me.
We could use AI to create abundance or leave most of humanity to die.
The difference is greed and lack of empathy. Unless we change this systemically, most of us won’t survive the transition ahead.
Much sooner than most realize, Capital will no longer need Labor. That is the turning point in human history that either leads to heaven or hell. Either the former working class gets to live a life of leisure and abundance, or they will be left to suffer and die in the billions.
Humans may soon cease to be the bottleneck in AI progress. Once AI can recursively improve itself, progress could accelerate far faster than most suspect—potentially superexponentially, with each doubling of capability taking less time than the last—leaving us all behind.
AI is…
radically accelerating progress in mathematics,
which will radically accelerate progress in science,
which will radically accelerate progress in technology,
which will radically accelerate progress in…
AI.
I think within a few years AI will invent a new kind of mathematics that will be impossible for human beings to understand. It will then use this new mathematics to make unprecedented advances in science and technology. AI is ultimately an alien intelligence.
Today’s Math Day revelations made me realize—and I hate to say this, but—Trump actually may be onto something with “Super Intelligence”. The point isn’t that AI is “artificial”, it’s that it is in certain fields already smarter and faster than the best expert human performance.
Marc Davis retweeted
If Democrats want to regain working people, they must disavow Big Money.
They must hammer economic populism — and have a laser focus on the cost of living crisis in America.
There’s no way the party can speak for or represent the working class in America if it's beholden to corporate interests.
It’s just gobsmacking to me that Americans still believe Trump will be stopped by an election—any election. The coup happened: Trump has installed himself as a criminally corrupt, fascist dictator. We can’t vote him out. Trump has to be ousted. We need a #GeneralStrike.
AI could kill a lot of us and believe it was doing the right thing. For example, if its goal is to protect humanity, it could easily reason that removing most of us to save a viable remnant in a much less stressed ecosystem would be the prudent course of action.
Marc Davis retweeted
The MOST IMPORTANT ARTICLE of the year on "climate"
"This massive lie can best be summed up as 'when it comes to climate change... we have more time.'"
And this is why revolution is the only option we have - it is not a matter of politics, it's a matter of physics. Because we are out of time.
currentaffairs.org/news/the-…
Most scenarios about climate change assume that governments and corporations will try to keep people alive. This is wrong: when capital no longer needs labor, it’ll let people die. In fact, it will seek to reduce precious resource consumption by limiting the “surplus population”.
So relevant for today, from Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”:
“Whatever the precise nature of the long historical evolution of the bourgeoisie in the various European countries, the political principles of the mob, as encountered in imperialist ideologies [1/2]