The Rundown February 26, 2020

• Something I should have posted when the new decade started: Memes that defined the 2010’s.

• I am afraid that my imagination (and the rest of my mind) will be taken over by Orion’s Arm,  a “multi-authored online science fiction world-building project” with hard science (relativity holds, causality holds, FTL travel is impossible) and artificial intelligence.

• The Institute for the Ethics and Emerging Technologies would be a good source of thought experiments. Also note - sometimes speculative/exploratory ethics is best carried out through a short story, not an article (what would be your citable sources, anyway?)

• Hack the planet: “A Planetary Computer to Avert Environmental Disaster”:

We currently lack the data, compute power and scalability to do so. Only when we have a massive amount of planetary data and compute at a similar scale can we begin to answer one of the most complex questions ever posed—how do we manage the earth's natural resources equitably and sustainably to ensure a prosperous and climate-stable future?

• Why didn’t they have Dungeons and Dragons in Ancient Rome?