The founder of Google DeepMind wrote a book projecting 20 years into the future. The Coming Wave (2023) by Mustafa Suleyman. He identifies AI and synthetic biology as the two big technological trends to watch. They push from two sides at the same end of creating intelligent life or very near imitations of it. Humans become less special, less homogenous, and more powerful. The book is convincing that AI and synthetic biology will change a lot.

Restoration of consciously European Christian tradition in America is fundamentally self contradictory. America has millions of the world’s poor and strangers knocking at its door. The reasons why are complex, but they boil down to the economic success of our society and the history of colonialism. Immigrants bring their own culture when they arrive. Solutions to preserve the power of European culture within America—or communities within America, more realistically—require a combination of exclusion and cultural “Euro-washing” of non-Western newcomers.

I’m reading a book about post-secondary unschooling, Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will by Dale Stephens. As an education researcher, I see an academic degree as an institution’s stamp of approval. The school is willing to tell the world that you know something or are capable of something. If they are wrong about you, it’ll hurt their reputation. To curate a group of students who know that thing (whatever it is), schools usually need to teach.