8 November 2023 Artificial Intelligence for Dummies By Gwynne Dyer I’m sorry that I didn’t get my article on Artificial Intelligence in last week during the ‘AI Safety Summit’ at Bletchley Park, the historic Second World War decoding centre in England. I got distracted by some other stuff that was happening in the Middle East. …
20 September 2023 So Hard to Choose: Canada or the Quad? By Gwynne Dyer First Prize: Two Fabulous Days in Beautiful Delhi! Second Prize: Four Days in Delhi! Having to wait an extra two days in Delhi after the G20 while the Canadian armed forces fixed a plane to bring Prime Minister Justin Trudeau home …
13 August 2023 Moon Race By Gwynne Dyer Don’t say ‘Moon Race’. Perish the thought! But there is a race to land on the Moon, and the Russians are cheating. Well, sort of cheating. It’s the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro), renowned for its ability to do big things on a relatively small budget (ca. …
17 July 2023 Heat Waves and Tipping Points By Gwynne Dyer “What we’re seeing is climate impacts that scientists thought would accompany certain temperatures happening far more rapidly, with far more devastating effects than had been forecast,” said Dr. Simon Nicholson of the Forum for Climate Engineering Assessment at American University. “We didn’t think that …
6 June 2023 Insurance to the Rescue? By Gwynne Dyer California’s fall from grace has been steep and swift, and now even the insurance companies are pulling out. The two biggest American home insurance companies, State Farm and Allstate, announced last week that they will stop selling insurance policies to Californians. Why? Climate change-related wildfires …
2 April 2023 Pakistan: Endless Turmoil By Gwynne Dyer Last year US President Joe Biden called Pakistan “one of the most dangerous countries in the world,” presumably because of its potentially lethal cocktail of nuclear weapons and unstable politics. But somehow it staggers on endlessly, never resolving its permanent political crisis but never quite exploding …
27 March 2023 Precision Fermentation: Catastrophe Lifeline By Gwynne Dyer On Saturday Asteroid 2023 DZ2 flew by our planet at 27,000 km per hour, closer to us than it was to the Moon. It was less than one-hundredth of the diameter of the gigantic asteroid that took down the dinosaurs and most other animals 66 …
Return of the Alliances January 27, 2023 By Gwynne Dyer Alliances are as old as civilisation. Older, actually: almost every hunter-gathererer band that anthropologists have studied, from the New Guinea highlanders to the Yanomamo in the Amazon, made alliances with other groups to try to protect themselves. But they often also ended up fighting people …
11 January 2023 Two Failed Populist Coups: Compare and Contrast By Gwynne Dyer Pundits are making much of the similarities between the attempted coup in Washington by Trump supporters two years ago and the one by Bolsonaro supporters in Brasilia last Sunday, but they are missing the biggest one. These debacles were the most incompetent …
16 November 2022 Eight Billion and Counting By Gwynne Dyer I must have missed the memo, because there was no newborn baby picked out at random last Tuesday to be the designated eight billionth human being. Perhaps they finally realised how tacky that journalistic device was, or maybe they just got tired of nagging us. …