In the mid-1960s, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created the world’s first chatbot. It was a relatively simple program modeled on the techniques of Rogerian psychotherapy, in which the therapist mirrors the patient’s statements often in the form of a question. Weizenbaum was absolutely clear that ELIZA was not a…

Too much rain, but not enough water. That’s the title of a recent article about the massive rainstorms that hit California last December. The US state got a lot of badly needed rain, but, as pointed out in the article, this was nowhere near enough to save it from the…

Greta Thunberg made international headlines this week when she and other climate activists were briefly detained by police at a protest against the expansion of a coal mine in Germany. Thunberg was among the thousands of protesters who arrived to denounce the expansion of the huge Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine…

I might be wrong about this, but it seems that over the last couple of years more and more people have been working their way to the conclusion that modern society is fundamentally broken — not just broken in a way that can be fixed with a little tinkering here…

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of spending a couple of days with an Indigenous hillside tribe here in Thailand called Hin Lad Nai, and I wanted to share some of that story with you today. It’s the story of a small community who, when faced with a…

Herman Daly, who died in October of this year, was for 60 years a powerful and articulate critic of mainstream economic thinking. Along with an early stint working at the World Bank, Daly had a distinguished career in academia, authored numerous books, and was the 1996 recipient of the Right…

Transnational corporations have been spectacularly successful in their profit-driven quest to hook the world on junk food. The global sale of packaged foods swelled to US$2.8 trillion by 2020, and is estimated to balloon to $3.4 trillion by 2027. Soda (soft drink) sales have exploded globally, reaching $995 billion by…

Most mainstream responses to climate chaos today rely heavily on high technology and big business. We rarely hear about solutions — often rooted in the past — that are localized, low-tech, and don’t advance the interests of large corporations. These are precisely the kind of technologies explored in depth on…

On 11 October 2022, the International Monetary Fund’s head of research, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, warned that today’s high energy prices were not going away any time soon. The “energy crisis”, he cautioned, “is not a transitory shock”. The same could be said for what he called the “food crisis”. As Gourinchas…