Hey readers,
Future Perfect took over Vox's monthly Highlight issue for March. The title says it all: "Against Doomerism." For all the many challenges humanity faces, we're far better off than we used to be, and with the right mix of sustainable optimism — and a better understanding of history — the future can be everything we hope for. Take a look at some of the standout pieces from the package below, and let us know what you think! —Kelsey Piper, senior writer |
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The doomers are wrong about humanity's future — and its past |
The world hasn't become a better place for nearly everyone who lives in it because we wished it so. The astounding economic and technological progress made over the past 200 years has been the result of deliberate policies and a drive to innovate. The biggest danger we face today isn't that democracy will crumble or that AI will overthrow us all, argues editor Bryan Walsh, it's that we will cease believing in the very idea of progress.
"From the media to scientific journals to prestige TV, it's boom time for doom times," Walsh said. "But you can't see where humanity is unless you understand where it's come from. That's why I took readers through a few hundred years of human history to chart the underappreciated progress we've made on everything from death rates to GDP, and make the case that 2023 isn't the hellscape it might appear." |
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The case for slowing down AI |
The very same researchers who are most worried about unaligned AI are, in some cases, the ones who are developing increasingly advanced AI. They reason that they need to play with more sophisticated AI so they can figure out its failure modes, the better to ultimately prevent them. But there's a much more obvious way to prevent AI doom. We could just not build the doom machine, or even intentionally slow it down, writes senior reporter Sigal Samuel.
"Reporting this piece got me thinking about the parallels between Covid-19 and AI," Samuel said. "Just like we worked to 'flatten the curve' of Covid spread, we could 'flatten the curve' of AI progress. But in AI-land, you still find people making the 'we have to play with the dangerous thing to protect against it' argument. Doesn't that remind you of the argument for gain-of-function research, where labs work on making viruses deadlier?"
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How will we feed Earth's rising population? Ask the Dutch. |
Going back nearly 80 years, anxieties over food security have driven the tiny Netherlands to become a global leader in agriculture despite having just half the land area of South Carolina. But today, the Netherlands produces 6 percent of Europe's food with only 1 percent of the continent's farmland. Reporter Kenny Torrella took a trip to the Netherlands to explore how the small country forged a hyper-efficient food system. "There's an entire genre of journalism wherein foreign writers go to the Netherlands to learn how such a tiny country became so efficient at farming," Torrella said. "The story is pretty straightforward: The government invested a lot of money into innovation and infrastructure. But what the genre has largely left untold is that the efficiency has led to a high degree of pollution and that the Netherlands has had a rather healthy (and rocky) approach to dealing with it." |
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Why the news is so negative — and what we can do about it |
Are we journalists just a miserable lot who insist on spreading our neuroses to the rest of the world? By some measures, the bad news situation is deteriorating; a recent study found that the "proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness" grew markedly in the US between 2000 and 2019. Or are readers, despite their protestations to the contrary, likelier to click on news that's negative or dire? It's, of course, both, explains senior correspondent Dylan Matthews. |
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I love this! Timed with the start of Ramadan, GiveDirectly has launched a fund for zakat — a form of charity that represents one of the pillars of Islam. The fund offers Muslim donors the ability to give zakat directly as cash to people suffering in Yemen, where the civil war has created a huge, yet hugely neglected, humanitarian crisis. The fund is set up so it meets the Islamic requirements for zakat — but of course non-Muslims can donate too! —Sigal Samuel, senior reporter When I was an editor at Time magazine in 2016, I pushed the magazine's leadership to do a kind of anti-endorsement of Donald Trump on the eve of the election. The editor-in-chief disagreed, on the grounds that doing so would burn the trust of some of our readers without really accomplishing anything. As much as I hate to be wrong (and I haaaaate it), I can now see she was right. A study published this week in Nature Human Behavior found that Nature's endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020 did little to change its readership's view of the candidates, but led to substantial damage in Trump supporters' trust in the journal and lowered their demand for vital Covid-related information. —Bryan Walsh, editor This story of 1,000 endangered macaques imported illegally into the US for animal testing contains so many depressing revelations about a practice that the biomedical industry would rather not have scrutinized. The animals now face three possibilities: being exported back to Cambodia, moved to a sanctuary in Texas, or killed. —Marina Bolotnikova, staff editor
I'm not a zoo person. But I am deeply thrilled by the news that the Houston Zoo's oldest resident, a 90-year-old tortoise named Mr. Pickles, is finally a father. He and his partner welcomed three sweet little ones — Dill, Gherkin, and Jalapeño — last week. Congrats! —Izzie Ramirez, deputy editor
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