Archive (Page 2 of 3)

Futures Podcast #16: Explaining Humans, with Dr. Camilla Pang

Science has been my mother tongue when people weren’t, in that it moved with me and my thoughts no matter what place I was. No matter how happy or sad or lost I was, I knew that at least where I stood, it was there around me.

Futures Podcast #15: Hacktivism, with Maureen Webb & Lauri Love

Hacking, originally, is a technical practice. It’s an ethos of technologists, but it’s increasingly becoming a metaphor for a new kind of social activism, which is all about distributed democracy, distributed power, distributed decision making.

Futures Podcast #14: Machine Creativity, with Arthur I. Miller

We should not judge the work of AI on the basis of whether it can be distinguished from work done by us, because what’s the point. We want AI to produce work that we presently cannot even imagine. That may seem to us meaningless—and even nonsensical—but it may be better than what we can produce.

Futures Podcast #13: Cyborg or Virtual Utopia?, with John Danaher

When I said that humans are obsolescing, that doesn’t mean that they’re going to become extinct or irrelevant to the future. It just means that their activities will be less significant.

Futures Podcast #12: History of Transhumanism, with Max More & Natasha Vita-More

I think people are asking the question, “What are we going to become? What does it mean to be human?”

Futures Podcast #11: Think Like a Futurist, with Amy Webb

I would like to see a future in which we all still have agency, and my concern is that we are getting further and further away from a future in which each one of us has the ability to make decisions.

Futures Podcast #10: iSlavery, with Jack Qiu

iSlavery is more about workers and consumers losing their autonomy, losing their freedom. They become enslaved in different ways. One looks more pleasant than the other, but in the end it’s about reducing our options; reducing our freedom.

Futures Podcast #9: Calm Technology, with Amber Case

Calm technology is the idea that the scarce resource in the 21st century is not technology, it’s our attention. And how technology takes advantage—or not—of our attention, is something that we can change.

Futures Podcast #8: Immersive Virtual Experiences, with Jeremy Bailenson

The cool thing about VR is you can do things that you can’t do in the physical world. Leveraging this paradox, which is that the brain treats it as real, but you can do the impossible—you can do anything—is a really neat way to use VR.

Futures Podcast #7: Trust Shift, with Rachel Botsman

We rarely think about the link between trust and progress and innovation, and how societies move forward. But when you start to think of it like that, you realize that trust is actually the key component not just for companies but any organization that wants human beings to try new things.