Jan Bosch
Many people implicitly believe that anything natural is better than anything created by humans, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Cooking on wood is much worse than cooking on an electric stove. Walking long distances is much worse than taking a car, train or plane. Sending an email is much better than having a courier … Read more
One of the main complaints people have about the age we live in is that we were promised flying cars in the 1950s and 1960s and we got Twitter/X and 140 characters instead. The good news is that there are quite a few companies out there that are developing really compelling prototypes of flying vehicles … Read more
Earlier in this series, I already discussed that we’re likely to go interplanetary during this century. Humans getting off this rock and spreading through the solar system is probably the best insurance we have against extinction due to a threat that wipes out Earth, such as an asteroid or all-out nuclear war. Of course, even … Read more
One of the historical facts that many do not know is that when computers were first developed in the 1940s, several computer architectures were explored that were quite different from the Von Neumann architecture that we ended up with. One of these was the dataflow architecture, where execution takes place based on the availability of … Read more
One of the most interesting learnings from recent years is that it turns out that what we call “white-collar jobs” proved to be much easier to automate with AI than so-called “blue-collar jobs.” White-collar jobs require that thing that we think makes us so special as humans, intelligence, and most of the tasks involved are … Read more
According to archeologists, Earth met with a major asteroid around 65 million years ago. That asteroid and the effects of its impact on our planet killed off the dinosaurs, the only descendants of these magnificent animals being the birds. The asteroid brought about an extensive winter due to the amount of material thrown into the … Read more
In his book “Outlive”, Peter Atia outlines the history of medicine. According to him, we’re currently in medicine 2.0, which is concerned with addressing many of the diseases that put children and adults in an early grave. Typically, these are infectious diseases such as polio and smallpox and more recently HIV, AIDS and Hepatitis C. … Read more
Many worry about us destroying the planet and changing the climate. I think there’s little doubt that humans are an important factor. The rate at which the temperature is increasing seems to be much faster than during earlier periods. Also, it will cause migration of people as some parts of the world have simply become … Read more
One of the reasons I feel that we need a revival of techno-optimism is the way the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in the last years has been met by society. Rather than celebrating the enormous technological breakthroughs that were made and the immeasurable benefits this will provide to all of us, everyone seems to … Read more
As Marc Andreesen claims, we are being lied to. The media, politicians, left-wing woke culture types and many others claim that technology is the root of all evil. They claim it takes away our jobs, ruins the environment, threatens our health, degrades society, destroys our future and is at the root of everything that is … Read more
