Natural Disasters & the Humanist Response

LAST FALL THE UNITED STATES and the Caribbean were battered by three devastating, record-breaking hurricanes—Harvey in Texas and Louisiana, Irma in the Caribbean and Florida, and Maria in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean islands. The destructive power of these hurricanes was extreme, but their impacts were exacerbated by human decisions...

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Features

Up Front

Artificial Stupidity

Computers aren’t bigoted—they’re just based on cold calculations, right? The past two years have featured a steady drumbeat of problems with various artificial intelligence (AI) procedures, centered around a common theme: they produce the same kind...

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Reviews

Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Dangers of Artificial Intelligence

Editor’s note: OpenAI’s now famous ChatGPT bot was used by the Humanist to generate this article as an experiment to discover what today’s AI knows 
and will tell about the dangers posed by AI technology. IN RECENT YEARS, the rapid advancements in...

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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

The Fragility of Truth in the Existential Crisis

Dr. Michael E. Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. He is director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and...

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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

More Light Than Heat

The Climate Book, a massive anthology compiled by Greta Thunberg—the young Swedish environmental activist who won global fame after she launched her School Strike for Climate in 2018—offers a compendious treatment of climate change. Its five parts offer to explain how climate...

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Elsewhere in the Humanist:

Is It Time to Talk About Reparations?

FROM TIME TO TIME, I’ll receive emails and calls from humanists and atheists thanking me for my work—and in those short exchanges I’m often told that I am an important new voice advancing humanism. While I appreciate these comments, I can’t help...

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