The raid to destroy Ragnaros started after dark. It was 10 p.m. on the East Coast, and behind his keyboard, Drakenwulf knew his role. He was a warlock, one of four in the raiding party. The group had been planning all week. If they failed, they’d have to wait another week to try again; it wasn’t easy to get 40 players online at once to make a run at the Molten Core. The entire group had to work as a unit. Hunters — masters of beast and bow — used mighty wolves and boars to lure fearsome enemies into traps…

In the science fiction short story “Folding Beijing,” author Hao Jingfang conjures a future in which China’s capital is a miracle of postmodern origami engineering. The city is its own mighty Transformer robot, endlessly reconfiguring itself in an alternating cycle between the luxury accommodations of the one percent and slums inhabited by the poor, waste-picking masses.

Computer scientist Kaifu Lee cites “Folding Beijing” as an example of how advances in artificial intelligence will almost certainly exacerbate income inequality. In his 2018 book. AI Superpowers, Lee makes a convincing case that China is poised to lead the world in the commercial…

It’s easy to imagine we’re coming to an end.

We are, after all, facing a warming planet, ocean acidification, impending mass extinction, and immense resource depletion. It’s not such a leap to suggest that humanity has hit its peak and is now poised for a great unraveling.

But in taking that apocalyptic view, you’d miss something important. There’s a path leading out of the despair. Amid the Sturm and the Drang is another, very different kind of future. To find it, all you have to do is look up. …

In September 2017, from an auditorium stage in Adelaide, Australia, Elon Musk offered a dramatic vision of humanity’s kinetic destiny. The occasion was the annual International Astronautical Congress. Musk was there to give a presentation on the BFR, the massive rocket vehicle his aerospace startup, SpaceX, is developing to power the first manned missions to Mars. (BFR officially stood for Big Falcon Rocket, but Musk, with his adolescent geek’s sense of humor, had long hinted it really meant Big Fucking Rocket. He has since renamed it Starship.)

At the end of the 40-minute talk, Musk played a concept video showing…

The first thing you learn, working with virtual reality (VR), is that your eyes aren’t much like cameras and your ears aren’t much like microphones. You don’t perceive the world pristinely; instead, you perceive how your personal history, philosophy, culture, and cognitive habits mix with the world out there beyond your head. When people in VR social experiments respond to avatars, for instance, you can measure their racism. But you can also use VR to become more aware of how you perceive anything in the world.

When I put on a VR headset, I don’t just see a glowing digital…

Dear Reader,

If I tell you that I’m writing this letter from 2069, what do you imagine? Am I curled over a gleaming white desk in a hypermodern cube that’s lofted some impressive stack of stories into a sky filled with floating cars? Am I painted like a rainbow by a tapestry of neon lights, the electric dreams of future men still in the form of those noble gasses of the past? …

The future — our present — is not what we were promised.

Man has not been to Mars (Wired, 1997), food has not become obsolete (Ray Kurzweil, 2005), and robots have failed to make the entire country’s population independently wealthy (Time Magazine, 1966). The human foot has not morphed into one giant toe (Dr. Richard Lucas, 1911), dental transplants have not become common (Mechanix Illustrated, 1947), and no one has “a live-in ape to do the cleaning and gardening chores” (RAND Corporation, 1967).

We also don’t have flying cars (Popular Science, 1924; The Saturday Evening Post, 1942; Back to the…

In July 2018, the air temperature in Woodland Hills, a Los Angeles neighborhood some 20 miles north of the Pacific Ocean, peaked at 117 degrees Fahrenheit. For 63-year old U.S. Post Office carrier Peggy Frank, that Friday marked her first day back at work after recovering from a broken ankle. At 3:35 p.m., Frank was pronounced dead after paramedics found her unresponsive in her non-air-conditioned truck. In September, the Los Angeles County coroner’s office confirmed what seemed a forgone conclusion: Frank died of hyperthermia — she overheated.

A few months later, in November, the Woolsey Fire swept through Malibu and…