Technology, nature and the future

How television turned public discourse from argument into entertainment.

How humanity and technology together keep widening the opportunities open to people.

The struggle to make machine learning systems do what people actually intend.

Brand's book is the founding document of institutional long-term thinking. It proposes a 10,000-year clock as a forcing function for civilizational patience, and along the way develops the concept of pace layers — the idea that different structures (fashion, commerce, governance, culture, nature) change at radically different speeds, and that confusing these speeds is the root of most short-termism.

Wallace-Wells's inventory of worst-case climate projections is included here not as a climate book but as a case study in what happens when institutions consistently discount long-term risk. The scenarios he describes are already visible in the data; they were predictable decades ago. This is what the failure of long-term thinking looks like from inside it.

MacAskill's longtermist argument, grounded in effective altruism, is the most rigorous philosophical case for prioritizing future people. His core claim — that if the future contains vast numbers of people, influencing its trajectory matters more than almost anything we might do for the present — is informed by Derek Parfit's work on personal identity and is the most demanding version of the long-term thinking argument.

Six ways of thinking that help people plan for generations ahead.

The forces that have shaped technology since prehistory and now shape modern people.

How a culture hands its judgement to machines, statistics and technical experts.

A writer's fifty-year path from Trappist monk to a forgotten universal religion.

How to make sense of the daily torrent of news, and what it does to our minds.

The rationalists around LessWrong and their fear of artificial intelligence risk.

Standalone edition of the 2023 a16z essay; Andreessen has written no conventional book