Essay: Welcome to the Unknown Unknowns

This week:

What we know — and more importantly, what we don’t — about what AI is capable of, and how much change we’re capable of absorbing.

Plus: the Willow Project, H-1B visas, blueberries, honeybee vaccines, climate disclosure rules, next-gen bed nets, and health insurance in North Carolina

Here's What You Can Do:

• ⚡️ Just a few bucks buys some life-saving bed nets with Against Malaria, maybe the most effective NGO on the planet
• ⚡️ The only thing dumber than cancer is rare cancers. Good news: you can help fund research against them (and work up a sweat at the same time) with our friends at Cycle for Survival
• ⚡️ This is the best electric vehicle you can buy
• ⚡️ Get educated and follow the Black Maternal Health Caucus on Twitter
• ⚡️ Understand your home’s exposure to flooding, fires, heat and wind with Risk Factor

News Roundup

Health & Medicine

• What’s second-hand stress?
• Next-gen bed nets are coming and could save so many lives
• Medicaid expansion might finally be coming to North Carolina

Climate

• Joe Biden approved the Willow Project in Alaska and it sucks, but on the other hand, the US is on track for a major clean energy milestone
• The world’s first honeybee vaccine is like “magic”
• Use this tool to see how early spring came to your neighborhood
• In the future, it might still cost $1 trillion per ppm of CO2 removed, we should pay for it
• The SEC’s climate disclosure rules are coming. 85% of business execs said they’re not ready.
• Why did insurers slash Hurricane Ian payouts?

Food & Water

• The EPA proposed their strongest ever standards for keeping coal plant pollution out of your water (right after they went after forever chemicals)
• Blueberries are packed with pesticides?
• A Supreme Court case could reshape Indigenous water rights in the (parched) southwest

Beep Boop

• Some additional AI reading: Azeem Azhar on “Everything, everywhere, all at once”; Are LLM’s the new CPU’s?
• Amid mass tech layoffs, workers on H-1B visas have 60 days to find a job, or leave the country, and we’re really just doing this all wrong

COVID

• COVID made maternal health outcomes much worse (and especially among Black people)
• There doesn’t seem to be an association between Paxlovid and a COVID rebound, which is great

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