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"Tradition?? The only good traditions are food traditions. The rest are repressive."

"There are two ways to think. The first is to trust to your ancestors, your religious leaders, or your charismatic professors. The second is to question, to challenge, to explore history for meanings, and to analyze issues. This latter is called Critical Thinking, and it is this that is the mission of my web site. "

Dr. Laina Farhat-Holzman  

August 2023

Technology Consequences

Human beings are the only species not fully governed by natural instinct. Because we are designed with brains and many choices, we have evolved civilizations, ways of living very different from our first emergence as humans. In our beginnings, we looked much like our related ape species: we hunted and gathered and migrated.

But over the millennia, we devised technologies that made our lives far more complex, and in many ways, better. Over each technological leap, however, the bene more...

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Historic Work Changes


There is growing concern that Artificial Intelligence (robots) may make human beings obsolete. If robots can perform all work better than humans, what is the value of human labor?

If we look at how human beings labored from the beginning of their emergence as a unique species, we will see great transformations in what we do as humans, and we are not only still here, but living much better than ever before.

Our first ancestors were small clans of hunter-gathe more...

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January 2022

Space Aliens Among Us

I watched a fascinating CNN documentary (they seem to air one every Sunday evening) and I cannot get it out of my mind. It was called "The Hunt for Planet B." Young environmentalists remind us that we have just one planet, and there is no Planet B. But this documentary is about the astronomers who are looking for exactly that: another planet like ours that can sustain life.

Nathaniel Kahn, the film?s producer, tells us: The Hunt for Planet B captures the human drama behind NASA's more...

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January 2021

Can Biden Produce another "New Deal?"


Our country is designed to move slowly, a protection that our Founders envisioned to protect us from dictatorship or anarchy. Moving with deliberate care, however, is not the same as gridlock in which emergencies go untreated.

It took almost a century for the blight on our republic, slavery, to become so dire that it threatened to destroy us one country. A devastating civil war and the presidency of a remarkable leader, Abraham Lincoln, saved us and ended chattel slavery. more...

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The Future of Work (Part 2)

Economists and sociologists worry about the future of work. Robotics are replacing many human workers, endangering jobs in the future for people who had formerly enjoyed middle class status.

Toll takers on the San Francisco bridges are gone, replaced by cameras and iPads. Less visible were the changes in manufacturing (humans no longer needed for assembly lines) and mining. Despite former President Trump?s lie that he would revive dirty energy industries, most were already closin more...

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