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.