Popular Media Articles (Selection):
Key publications are indicated by "⬅️⬅️⬅️"
The TESCREAL Bundle
June 2024. AI Doomers have Warned of the Tech-Pocalypse—While Doing Their Best to Accelerate It. Salon. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
June 2024. A Response to Ozy Brennan's Article About TESCREALism in Asterisk Magazine. Substack. HERE.
June 2024. What Is the "TESCREAL Bundle"? Answering Some Frequently Asked Questions. Substack. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
April 2024. Team Human vs. Team Posthuman—Which Side Are You On? Truthdig. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
December 2023. "Effective Accelerationism" and the Pursuit of Cosmic Utopia. Truthdig. HERE.
November 2023. Fraud, Lies, Exploitation and Eugenic Fantasies. Truthdig. HERE.
September 2023. Radical Longtermism and the Seduction of Endless Growth. Perspectiva (Substack). Coauthored with Dr. Rupert Read. HERE.
August 2023. This Is What Happens When You Spend Two Years Unmasking a Well-Funded Silicon Valley "Apocalypse Cult." Truthdig. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
August 2023. Longtermism Poses a Real Threat to Humanity. New Statesman. HERE.
June 2023. The Acronym Behind Our Wildest AI Dreams and Nightmares. Truthdig. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
May 2023. A Short History of Eugenics. Truthdig. HERE.
March 2023. Giving Altruism a Bad Name. Truthdig. HERE.
February 2023. Longtermism and Eugenics: A Primer. Truthdig. HERE.
January 2023. Nick Bostrom, Longtermism, and the Eternal Return of Eugenics. Truthdig. HERE.
December 2022. The Grift Brothers Sam Bankman-Fried, William MacAskill and the Moral Fraud of Effective Altruism. Truthdig. HERE.
November 2022. What “Longtermism” Gets Wrong about Climate Change. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. HERE.
September 2022. Selling "Longtermism": How PR and Marketing Drive a Controversial New Movement. Salon. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
August 2022: Understanding "Longtermism": Why this Suddenly Influential Philosophy is so Toxic. Salon HERE.
July 2022: How Elon Musk Sees the Future. Salon. HERE.
April 2022: Elon Musk, Twitter and the Future. Salon. HERE.
October 2021. Against longtermism. Aeon. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
July 2021. The Dangerous Ideas of "Longtermism" and "Existential Risk." Current Affairs. HERE.
Artificial Intelligence
March 2024. The Madness of the Race to Build Artificial General Intelligence. Truthdig. HERE.
August 2023. Will "Godlike AI" Kill Us All—Or Unlock the Secrets of the Universe? Probably not. Salon. HERE.
June 2023. Does AGI Really Threaten the Survival of the Species? Truthdig. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
June 2023. AI and the Threat of "Human Extinction." Salon. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
August 2022: One Potential Side Effect of AI? Human Extinction. Washington Post. HERE.
August 2022: Would "Artificial Superintelligence" Lead to the End of Life on Earth? Salon. HERE.
Climate Change
September 2023. Think This Summer Was Bad? It Might Be the Best One You and I Will Ever See. Salon. HERE.
December 2022. Climate Reparations: It's the Right Thing to Do—And Will Create a Better World for Everyone. Salon. HERE.
October 2022. Soup on the Van Gogh: The Painting's Fine, and the Kids Are All Right. Salon. HERE.
May 2021. "Our Planet, Our Future"—Another Desperate Plea for Humanity to Wake Up. Common Dreams. HERE.
June 2019. It’s Time to Rebel Against the Existential Threat of Climate Change. OneZero. HERE.
April 2016. We're Speeding Toward a Climate Change Catastrophe—and that Makes 2016 the Most Important Election in a Generation. Salon. HERE. Reposted by AlterNet, HERE.
February 2016. Biodiversity Loss and the Doomsday Clock: An Invisible Disaster Almost No One is Talking About. Common Dreams. HERE.
Human Extinction (Possible Causes, History, Ethical Implications)
June 2024. The New Optimist Movement Has a Numbers Problem. Truthdig. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
October 2023. How the Idea of Human Extinction has Reshaped Our World. Salon. HERE.
September 2023. A Fireball in the Marshall Islands: How a Nuclear Test Changed the World. Los Angeles Review of Books. HERE.
July 2023. The Guardian Published an Article About My Work. Here's What Missed the Mark. Substack. HERE.
July 2023. Human Extinction: A Brief Guided Tour of the Book. Medium. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
July 2023. How an H.G. Wells Sci-Fi Novel Predicted Oppenheimer and Atomic Bombs. Big Think. HERE.
April 2023. The Bright Side of Extinction. Truthdig. HERE.
February 2023. The Ethics of Human Extinction. Aeon. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
March 2022. Why It’s So Hard to Face the Threat Posed by Nuclear Weapons. Current Affairs. HERE.
September 2021. Can We Clean Up the Mess We've Created? Salon. HERE.
May 2021. Scared Straight: How Prophets of Doom Might Save the World. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. HERE.
October 2019. Omniviolence Is Coming and the World Isn't Ready. Nautilus. HERE.
June 2019. Should Humans Colonize Space? Filling Space. HERE.
July 2018. Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space. Nautilus. HERE.
May 2017. Today’s Kids Could Live Through Machine Superintelligence, Martian Colonies, and a Nuclear Attack. Motherboard. HERE.
Ghosting, Loneliness, Trans Issues, Etc.
June 2024. What I Learned from Being Ghosted. Medium. HERE.
December 2023. Why I Won't Have Children. Medium. HERE.
December 2023. Reflections on Ghosting. Medium. HERE.
September 2023. What Ghosting Says About Society (And Why it Hurts So Much). Truthdig. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
May 2023. The COVID Pandemic May Be "Over"—But the Pandemic of Loneliness Is Getting Worse. Salon. HERE.
May 2023. Are Conservatives at the Daily Wire Really Calling for Trans “Genocide”? Truthdig. HERE. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
Culture, Politics, Terrorism, New Atheism, Futurology, Etc.
April 2023. Simulated Worlds and Rotating Spacecraft. Ambasz Essays, published by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). HERE.
September 2022. "White Psychodrama" and the Culture Wars: A Self-Reinforcing Cycle, Going Nowhere. Salon. HERE.
June 2021. Godless grifters: How the New Atheists Merged with the Far Right. Salon. HERE. (One of the most-viewed articles of the year.)
November 2020. The Future of Philosophy is CYBORG. Philosophy Now. HERE.
August 2020. Sam Harris and Donald Trump: They're Completely Different ... Yet Very Much Alike. Salon. HERE.
October 2019. Steven Pinker, Sam Harris and the Epidemic of Annoying White Male Intellectuals. Salon. HERE.
January 2019. Steven Pinker's Fake Enlightenment: His Book is Full of Misleading Claims and False Assertions. Salon. HERE.
November 2018. If 2016 Was the Most Important Election in History, This Is Our Chance to Begin Undoing It. Salon. HERE.
September 2017. Is This the Best Possible Time to Be Alive? Sounds Ludicrous, Right? Salon. HERE.
August 2017. Beyond "New Atheism": Where do People Alienated by the Movement’s Obnoxious Tendencies Go from Here? Salon. HERE.
July 2017. From the Enlightenment to the Dark Ages: How "New Atheism" Slid into the Alt-Right. Salon. HERE.
July 2017. "New Atheist" Sam Harris—Still Deeply Wrong on Islamic Extremism and Terrorism. Salon. HERE.
June 2017. Trump’s Scandals are Dangerous: Because They’re Distracting Us from the Grave Threats to Human Civilization. Salon. HERE.
May 2017. Why the “Conceptual Penis” Hoax was a Bust: It Only Reveals the Lack of Skepticism Among Skeptics. Salon. HERE.
May 2017. Yet Another Reason Donald Trump is Bad News: He’s Utterly Lacking in “Integrative Complexity” — and That’s Dangerous. Salon. HERE.
April 2017. It's the End of the World and We Know it: Scientists in Many Disciplines See Apocalypse, Soon. Salon. HERE.
February 2017. "All Political Leaders Would Rather Be Dictators": Authors of "The Dictator's Handbook" on Whether Trump Can Pull it Off (Interview) Salon. HERE.
January 2017. From Startling Insight to Random Insult: A Guide to the Uses and Misuses of "Fake News." Salon. HERE.
October 2016. Faith in Ignorance: Politicians Who Quote the Bible Often Don’t Know Anything About the Bible (Interview). Salon. HERE.
August 2016. It's Not Alarmist: Trump and the Republican Party Could Destroy the World. Truthout. HERE.
May 2016. "The Evidence is Pretty Incontrovertible that He Doesn't Exist": Stephen Colbert's Favorite Scientist on the Universe, Naturalism and Finding Meaning without God (Interview with Sean Carroll). Salon. HERE.
April 2016. Donald Trump Thinks He’s a God. Even Worse, His Supporters Agree. Salon. HERE.
March 2016. Donald Trump Would be Scarier than George W. Bush. Salon. HERE.
March 2016. The Islamic State Would not Be with Us Today if the United States Hadn't Invaded Iraq." (Interview with Will McCants). Salon. HERE.
February 2016. This Threat Is Worse than ISIS: Once Again, We Don't Understand the Real Enemy. Salon. HERE.
January 2016. We're No. 16! Why Donald Trump's Boorish American Exceptionalism Is so Wrong. Salon. HERE.
January 2016. Donald Trump Talks at a Fourth-Grade Level. Maybe that's Why the Fox News Audience Loves Him. Salon. HERE.
Reposted by AlterNet, HERE. HRR
December 2015. Is this how World War III begins? Religion, End Times, Terror and the Frightening New Middle East Tinderbox. Salon. HERE.
December 2015, The United States Is Scarier than the Islamic State. Salon. HERE.