The World as You'll Know It
Newsletter / Issue No. 46
Is the Future an Endless Loop of Fake Content?
A new social media platform from OpenAI promises a world in which any thought can be turned into a wholly realistic 10-second video. What will this do to our sense of reality? How will it change our relationship to art and creativity? What will the company do next? Substackers weigh in with reactions ranging from anger to cautious hope.
Plus
More Substack highlights: OpenAI is hiring former junior market analysts to train AI models in the art of investment banking. Reports from The Curve, an AI conference in which attendees debated AI's chances of destroying humanity. And an ode to the power of reading, with a lament about its demise.
Technology / Feature
How healthy am I? My immunome knows the score.
Groundbreaking new tests reveal patterns in our immune systems that can signal underlying disease and tell us how well we might recover from our next cold. I got my results in a text message.
By David Ewing Duncan
Technology / Feature
A $10-Billion Plan to Sell Africa's Wind and Sun to Countries 7,000 Miles Away
A deep look at how green hydrogen could capitalize on remote areas of renewable resources and redraw the world's energy map.
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Podcast / Podcast
A Podcast Series about the Future of Aging
Podcast / Podcast
A Podcast Series about the Future of Aging
Robotics / Feature
Small, Flexible and Sometimes Weird. The Next Generation of Robots is Here.
By Clive Thompson
Robotics / Feature
Small, Flexible and Sometimes Weird. The Next Generation of Robots is Here.
By Clive Thompson
Artificial Intelligence / Feature
One Company's Decision to Put AI Into the Ground
What does it mean to adopt AI? For John Deere it meant hundreds of millions of dollars, a new corporate culture and forever changing the relationship between a farmer and the land.
By Gideon Lewis-Kraus
Robotics / Feature
Robots' final frontier? Taking care of us.
To understand how far robots are from replacing humans, just look at the everyday task of using a fork.
By Clive Thompson