The Predictions of Asimov's "I, Robot": Part 3 of 3

(Continuation of Part 1 and Part 2)

Considering the impressive accuracy of some of his predictions, some of Asimov’s other predictions are funny in fairly simple ways: It’s strange to imagine that someone so prescient could make some mistakes that are so obvious in retrospect. For example, Asimov estimates the global population in the mid 21st century to be just over 3 billion, which is wildly less than even the population as of 2025, …

The Predictions of Asimov's "I, Robot": Part 2 of 3

(Continuation of Part 1)

Asimov’s stories and the other stories of robot super-intelligence are especially salient now at the height of the LLM AI boom. He was surprisingly accurate in some ways about how AI would really come to the forefront, but less so in others—at their core, I think his predictions may have been too optimistic.

Let’s start with the two of his predictions that were correct I find most interesting (though there …

The Predictions of Asimov's "I, Robot": Part 1 of 3

Over the last week, I read Isaac Asimov’s 1950s sci-fi anthology, I, Robot. The stories are pretty fun to read, and there’s a lot of great humor sprinkled about. The stories are impressively prescient in some regards, but I believe were sadly over-optimistic in others. I’ll be making this post in three parts, of which this is the first: In the first part, I will provide an overview of the stories and their ultimate …

CoS Modifications: Traveling Brides

Continuing my previous post, here is another one of my favorite original modifications to running the "Curse of Strahd" Dungeons and Dragons campaign: traveling brides.

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The original Curse of Strahd module doesn't have much information on Strahd's three brides—they're seemingly just three run-of-the-mill vampire spawn, one of numerous monsters that haunt Castle Ravenloft. Plenty of others have worked on fleshing them out further, giving them individual statblocks, motivations, and personalities. Here's my take on …

CoS Modifications: The Tome of Osybus

Recently, I committed to revive my dead blog as it's been a while since my last post. Despite all that's happened since my last post (graduating college, working my first full-time job post-graduation, reading numerous books, etc), I've struggled to decide what to post about first. So, in the name of at least getting started, which is said to be the hardest step, I've chosen to write about something easy: Some of my favorite original …

Analysis of Iran’s Kidney Market

In the face of a global shortage for kidneys available for transplant, most countries around the world have stuck to their stringent prohibitions against buying or selling organs. Iran stands uniquely as the only country in the world to have what essentially amounts to a legal, but regulated, market for kidneys where patients in need of a transplant can pay sellers for a kidney “donation.” In this policy brief, we detail the history of Iran’s …

On Immigration

Below, I use four ethical frameworks I learned about in my Princeton "Ethics and Public Policy" course to answer the following question:

Should the US government substantially increase the number of poor economic migrants it admits, even if it risks imposing downward pressure on the wages of American citizens without a college degree?

Explain which of the following frameworks ought to guide US policymakers here and what decision it would support: (1) Carens’s Rawlsian liberalism; …