Innovative Extinction

Matt Wood is an illustrator and the co-founder of the cooperative animation team Bad Idea Motion Studios.   

Wood’s Zócalo Sketchbook imagines “what nature might look like if it insisted on innovating itself to extinction.” The series was inspired by OpenAI’s release of Sora, a way to generate photorealistic video sequences based on text prompts, earlier this year. 

“As a creative, it chilled me to my core,” Wood says. “When I saw where we are headed, I thought, Why are we so addicted to relentless innovation? Why are we absolutely determined to ‘improve’ …

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This Gene-Editing Technology Promises to Revolutionize Medicine, Spark Ethical Debate, and Might Even Bring Woolly Mammoths Back to Earth

Bringing extinct species back to life may sound like science fiction, but it’s a real thing—perhaps the most important to occur during the past 4.5 billion years. Called “de-extinction,” the …