It seems easier to talk about the end of humanity than about giving up the internet or giving up driving. It is argued that in our developed "first" world, we now need development aid ourselves. We are “blind” at the mercy of technological “progress”, which we continue to see against our better judgement, …

It is argued that if we decide to keep a technology or practice if we get at least one positive result from it, we do not have to change anything at all. Even factory farming, and wars, have some positive results... Due to the complexity and all the "smart" devices and apps, we may have started to feel, …

Green energy is just one of the two types of energy humanity needs, the energy for our man-made world, including cities, road networks, industries and technological systems (energy for the systems that drive out the ecology). However, a second type of energy is needed to meet our biological needs, energy …

Psychologist and computerscientist Geoffrey Hinton, called the godfather of AI, argued that we should stop with A(G)I. In this column it is argued that Artificial General Intelligence like ChatGPT works very differently than organic intelligence. An organic complexity works like a chain reaction. Unlike …

It is argued that in our world there are many "pessimists", who do not believe that climate, environmental and natural disasters can still be averted, and therefore want to live today as if there was no tomorrow. And if you have nothing more to expect, why should you also let the pleasures of today be …

Even journalists and academics sometimes employ dichotomies that fall short almost immediately. An example is the prophets and wizards dichotomy. Populism with a scientific twist, which apparently makes sense and appeals to our gut feeling. A golden formula, with an implicit logical appeal to dialectics, …

In this article it is argued that we will no longer be able to spare the elephant in the room, technology, which has gradually evolved into technocracy, governing our day-to-day behaviour without being consciously or politically chosen. We do this on a large scale and meanwhile worldwide. For example, …

Our planetary footprint has become so incredibly large, precisely because we have been doing less and less ourselves. Our entire culture revolves around outsourcing. First to slaves, then to wage slaves, machines and now also to AI. We let others produce (often industrially) all sorts of things, in clean-looking …

A tenet of behavioural change that almost every academic adheres to, is to do not name the bad behaviour but indicate how to perform the good behaviour. Three quartersto the left is one quarter to the right. However, being allowed to give instructions only in left (or, conversely, only in right) often …

Human beings are, above all, narrative creatures, extremely sensitive to good stories. The (implicit) stories of futurologists have their own characteristic structure, when they outline what our future full of technology will look like. One element of their narrative structure is often that the speaker, …