Do We Live In A "Limitless" Society? Has Our Modern World Become a Machine for Destroying Limits? Is this Good or Bad? Have Humans Always Been Expanding Upon Limits? Is there Anyway to Stop the Trend? episode artwork

EPISODE · Jan 8, 2026 · 31 MIN

Do We Live In A "Limitless" Society? Has Our Modern World Become a Machine for Destroying Limits? Is this Good or Bad? Have Humans Always Been Expanding Upon Limits? Is there Anyway to Stop the Trend?

from The Best Paragraph I've Read... · host Zac & Don

The Best Paragraph I've ReadIf civilization is accelerating down a freeway that’s taking us away from our shared humanity—not to mention destroying the ecosystems we depend on—at whatexit do we get off? Artificial intelligence, new medical interventions, and other modern marvels allow us some choice about which natural limits we accept, and which we decide to blow past. According to Kingsnorth, each person must make individual decisions about where to begin “drawing a line, and saying ‘no further.’” Will you watch television shows written by large language models? Will you let the machines craft your emails, your college essays, obituaries for your loved ones? Will you get an AI-enabled virtual girlfriend? Will you let AI into your life knowing that data centers are metastasizing, while already-parched deserts are drained dry to cool them, while contentmoderators in Africa labor in quasi-slave conditions, sorting through images of beheadings and child abuse? Will you draw the line at letting algorithms design your baby? When the time comes, will you get your chip? Your brain-computer interface? Will you upload your consciousness to the cloud?"This paragraph comes from the Atlantic. The article is titled: "What A Cranky New Book About Progress Gets Right." The author is Tyler Austin Harper. You can read the full article here.Zac & Don discuss whether we are living in a limitless society and culture. They wonder if humans without limits is a problem or if it's as it has always been.

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Do We Live In A "Limitless" Society? Has Our Modern World Become a Machine for Destroying Limits? Is this Good or Bad? Have Humans Always Been Expanding Upon Limits? Is there Anyway to Stop the Trend?

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