Universe

  • Where the Space and AI Investment Frenzy May End Up: Lessons from Britain’s Railway Mania

    Elon Musk’s SpaceX went public on June 12, raising the equivalent of roughly $80 billion in a single IPO. Although its share price has eased somewhat since then, the company’s market capitalization still stood at about $1.8 trillion in mid-July, making it one of the seven to ten most valuable companies in the world. For comparison, the ten largest companies…

  • Beyond the Anthropocene: Toward the Age of AI

    (I originally wrote this in December 2024, but I suspect the basic situation has not changed much since then.) Will ChatGPT Surpass Human Intelligence? — An Interview with ChatGPT While finishing the manuscript of my book In Search of the Lost Modernity, I relied quite a bit on ChatGPT. For example, I asked its opinion about one of the arguments…

  • A Sunshade for the Planet

    　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　.Akio KAWATO Summer is coming again, and with it the heat. After years of record-breaking temperatures, even COP—the annual United Nations climate conference—seems to be losing its sense of direction. The more desperately the world tries to cut CO₂ emissions, the more the thermometer appears to mock us by climbing ever higher. . As a result, some rather creative ideas…

  • Can ChatGPT Grasp What Infinity Really Is?

    Every now and then, I like to spar with ChatGPT—not for answers, but for thought. It’s not just a machine that gathers bits of information from somewhere and stitches them together. As I’ve mentioned before, it seems to have some kind of judgment of its own (or perhaps it aligns itself with the user’s values), combining what it finds to…