Singularity Weblog: Recent Episodes
Nikola Danaylov interviews Ray Kurzweil, Michio Kaku, Noam Chomsky, Max More, Aubrey de Grey, Jeremy Rifkin & others...
Karl Marx knew the future. Not suspected it, not hoped for it: knew it. The proletarian revolution was absolutely inevitable. History had a direction, class struggle was its engine, and communism was its destination. You could slow the train down, but you could not stop it. Marx was a historical materialist, and his materialism came […]
After 300+ interviews on Singularity.FM, it still feels strange to sit on the other side of the microphone. But when Cadell Last invited me on Philosophy Portal, saying no was never an option. Cadell is one of the very few people who can push me on the deep questions and make me enjoy every minute […]
Eight live sessions across July and August. €100 for the full series. Reserve your spot: pay via PayPal. The technological singularity did not arrive as a fact. It arrived as a story, one we have been telling ourselves about machines, progress, and what it means to be human. This July and August, I want to […]
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt assembled what was then the most credentialed group of forecasters in the world. He called it the Brain Trust. He asked them to map out the next 25 years for the United States, through 1958. They missed transistors. They missed atomic energy. They missed antibiotics. They missed faster-than-sound travel. They missed […]
The Expansion of Technological Power Human civilization is entering a period in which the scale of technological capability is increasing faster than the frameworks used to guide it. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, global data systems, and emerging neurotechnologies are expanding the range of actions available to individuals, institutions, and governments. This shift represents not merely an […]
A CEO calls. The board wants a futurist on stage at the next strategy offsite. The brief is short. Tell us where the industry is going. Tell us what AI will do to our business. Tell us what to bet on next. It sounds like preparation. It looks like rigor. It is, in fact, the […]
When you have a hammer, the world is full of nails. There is no clearer description of Silicon Valley’s view of AI. The result is what I call the Hammer of AI: a single tool wielded against every problem we face, regardless of whether the problem yields to computation at all. There is a now-familiar […]
There is no formula for predicting the future. No formula for dealing with change. No formula for living a good life, for success, for great art, for writing a great book, or for producing a great film. Every time we reach one of those, even when following a formula, we have to break the pattern […]
Some people see a world coming apart. Peter Leyden sees an old world dying so a better one can be born. That, in essence, is The Great Progression, the thesis of Peter Leyden’s forthcoming HarperCollins book and the spine of our conversation. Peter is the OG Silicon Valley futurist who came to San Francisco at […]
A good why can still produce bad outcomes. Here is the case a reader made me wrestle with. *** After I published The AI Paradox: Cure or Poison? last week, a reader asked me a question I have been thinking about ever since. She did not ask whether AI could malfunction. She did not ask […]
Technology promised simplicity. It delivered complexity. AI promised resolution. It is delivering acceleration. The paradox is not a bug. It is the feature. The question is what we choose to do about it. *** Every new technology arrives wearing the costume of liberation. It promises freedom. It promises options. It promises to save us time, […]
We have godlike technology. Do we have godlike responsibility to match? In this third conversation with Steven Kotler — our first in 14 years — we dig into his latest book, We Are As Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance, co-written with Peter Diamandis. And while the book makes a powerful case […]
We don’t need more AI. We need a better why for our AI. We are told the why is obvious — cure everything, fix everything, transcend everything. But “solve everything” is not a philosophy. It is an assumption. Even the most powerful intelligence cannot erase moral disagreement or competing visions of justice. Because without a […]
With Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two now behind us, the internet is full of takes about resilience, resistance, and righteous underdogs. Most of them miss the point entirely. Dune 3 — Dune Messiah — may finally set the record straight. If people are willing to listen. The Most Misread Science Fiction Epic of […]
People ask me this constantly. At conferences, after keynotes, in the Q&A, in the parking lot on the way out. The question takes many forms but always lands in the same place: What skills should my kids develop? What should I be learning? What’s going to matter when AI can do almost anything? Fair question. […]
A couple of days ago, I cancelled my ChatGPT paid subscription and switched to Claude. Not because of the technology. Because of their respective values, or the lack thereof. The Moment That Changed Everything On February 27, 2026, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, refused to give the Pentagon unrestricted access to its AI for mass […]
Was the Renaissance truly a Golden Age? Or was it something far more powerful — and far more revealing? In my third conversation with Ada Palmer, we dive into her new book, Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age, and dismantle one of the most enduring myths in Western history: that civilization moves cleanly […]
What if some contradictions are not mistakes — but truths? For over 2,500 years, Western philosophy has treated contradiction as catastrophic. From Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction to modern formal systems, logic has operated under one sacred assumption: a statement cannot be both true and false. But what if that assumption is wrong? In this deep, […]
In an antitrust case brought by the Federal Trade Commission, Meta filed a brief in August 2025 containing an admission that should have been headline news. According to Meta’s own data, only 7% of time spent on Instagram and 17% of time spent on Facebook involves “socializing” with friends and family. The overwhelming majority of […]
Our body is a machine. Our brain is a machine. Animals are machines. Soil is a machine. Our planet is a machine. Nature is a machine. The machine is everywhere and everything. This story has become so familiar that it now passes for common sense. We speak of hardwiring beliefs, rewiring habits, optimizing systems, debugging […]
More harm has been done to our world not by overtly malevolent people, but by ignorant ones, especially those ignorant of their own ignorance. They believe they are doing good. They are convinced they are right. And precisely because they don’t know that they don’t know, they act with a fatal certainty that turns good […]
In my latest Singularity.FM conversation with Dr. Jad Tarifi, CEO of Integral AI, I heard something I don’t say lightly: a credible claim that AGI may have just arrived — or at least the foundation of it. I don’t often say “Wow” during interviews, but in this one I simply couldn’t stop. Tarifi describes a […]
What happens to free will in a world where AI tells us what to watch, buy, believe, and even who to love? In this new episode of Singularity.FM, I sit down with Jacob Ward — veteran technology journalist and author of The Loop: How AI Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight […]
Are we building better versions of ourselves in AI – or a master race of very efficient psychopaths? In this new episode of Singularity.FM, I sit down with Dr. Eve Poole, theologian, leadership scholar, and author of Robot Souls: Programming in Humanity, to ask a simple yet brutal question: what makes us human, and what happens if we […]
Nikola Danaylov (“Socrates”) – Futurist, Author, and Host of Singularity.FM – delivers a 20 min virtual keynote at VSIM 25: From Content to Context, STEM to STEAM: Asking Why in the Age of AI. In an era where AI generates infinite content at the click of a button, humanity faces a paradox: more […]
What do Facebook, Google, and TikTok see when they look at us — and what do they miss? In this episode of Singularity.FM, I sit down with Petter Törnberg, Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Amsterdam and co-author of Seeing Like a Platform: An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity. Törnberg […]
What if the world isn’t just a stage… but a circus? 🎪 In this opening keynote at St. John’s International Circus Fest 2025, futurist and philosopher Nikola Danaylov (aka Socrates) explores why context is more powerful than content — and why those who create context don’t just win attention, they shape the future. 👉 Themes […]
Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics and the author of the provocative new book More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. I reached out to Adam because I found his book sharp, timely, and necessary — a long-overdue reality check […]
What will you do when your toothbrush is smarter than you? That’s not just a clever line — it’s a serious question. And in a world of accelerating change, it’s also a metaphor for what’s at stake: our agency, our adaptability, and our ability to shape the future rather than be overwhelmed by it. Today, […]
Before Kurzweil, before Vinge, and decades before ChatGPT or AGI debates hit the mainstream, John von Neumann quietly laid the conceptual groundwork for what we now call the Technological Singularity. A mathematician, physicist, polymath, and strategic thinker of legendary scope, von Neumann is a towering figure whose work underpins everything from game theory and quantum […]
In recent years, Big Tech leaders — including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Sam Altman — have made public pronouncements calling for the regulation of artificial intelligence. Some did it in glossy op-eds, while others performed moments of “humility” at congressional hearings. They spoke of responsibility. Of safety. Of the need for oversight. […]
When people think of computing pioneers, names like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, or even Steve Jobs come to mind. But if we zoom out and peer into the deep roots of technological evolution, one name stands as the unacknowledged giant whose ideas still echo through every processor, algorithm, and AI model we create today: […]
When we talk about pioneers of computer science, names like Turing, von Neumann, and Shannon often dominate the conversation. But Edsger W. Dijkstra — though far less publicly known — was one of the true intellectual giants who laid the foundation for modern computing. His work quietly shapes much of our digital world today. And […]
When most people hear the name Ted Kaczynski, they immediately think of the Unabomber — the domestic terrorist who waged a deadly bombing campaign for nearly two decades. But Kaczynski’s story is more complicated, more disturbing, and, for those of us interested in the future of technology and the singularity, uncomfortably relevant. Was Ted Kaczynski […]
Sir Arthur C. Clarke wasn’t just a science fiction writer; he was a futurist whose predictions often read like prophecy. Best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey and for envisioning geostationary satellites before they existed, Clarke’s legacy continues to shape how we think about the future. Alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, he was one […]
It was during the relatively low-tech mid-19th century that Samuel Butler wrote his startling essay, Darwin among the Machines. In it, Butler fused two emerging forces of his time: the rapid industrial transformation brought by machines, and Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. The result? A radical, unsettling vision: that machines were not merely […]
In his second appearance on Singularity.FM, Professor Angus Fletcher returns to dive even deeper into the story of human intelligence. [See the first interview here.] Fletcher is no ordinary guest. A rare hybrid of neuroscientist and Shakespearean scholar, he has advised DARPA, Hollywood, and the U.S. Army, where his narrative-based research earned him the Commendation […]
An old story. Lived again. It begins with a kernel of truth. A real grievance. A true injustice. One small kernel, in a field of many. So they tend it: With distortions. To make it grow. To make it matter. To make it serve. And it grows. Outside the curve. Visible. Commanding. But it’s not […]
How do I stay sane in this insane world? This is one question I’ve repeatedly asked myself over the past several years. I wish I had THE answer, but truthfully, I still struggle daily. Yet, I’ve discovered a few reliable practices that help me climb back onto the bandwagon of inner peace and equanimity whenever […]
Last week in Paris, two back-to-back AI conferences painted starkly different visions of the future. The inaugural International Association for Safe and Ethical Artificial Intelligence (IASEAI’25) focused on AI safety, ethics, and global regulatory frameworks, bringing together a coalition of thinkers, policymakers, and Nobel Laureates. It was a call for restraint, cooperation, and the responsible […]
Now that some time has passed since our first post-pandemic Conversations with the Future live event, I’ve had the opportunity to step back, hear the comments, digest feedback, and distill some truths that I believe are fundamental from our time spent together on January 22nd in Toronto.. Events have always & will always have the […]
In this episode of Singularity.FM, I sit down with renowned author and philosopher Donald J. Robertson to explore his latest book, How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World. As we navigate the crossroads of ancient wisdom and modern challenges, Donald shares timeless insights from Socrates that […]
In this thought-provoking episode of Singularity.FM, I sit down with Dr. Jad Tarifi, CEO and co-founder of Integral AI, to explore the cutting-edge developments at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human potential. Dr. Tarifi shares insights into Integral AI’s mission to “Give Humankind A True Magic Wand” and the profound implications of achieving artificial […]
In this episode of Singularity FM, I speak with emotional intelligence (EQ) expert, executive coach, and keynote speaker Jamelle Lindo about the evolving role of EQ in our age of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence. While much of today’s discourse around AI focuses on technical prowess, data-driven decision-making, and automation, Jamelle highlights why understanding our inner […]
It was human genius that took us to Mars and beyond. A lack of wisdom, however, might stop us from going further. For genius is not wisdom. In fact, talent often undermines character. Just look at the mess some of history’s most gifted business leaders, scientists, musicians, artists, and writers have made of their lives. […]
It is hard to overstate the impact of this American election; it will change everything, everywhere. From the functioning of democracy within the United States to its influence and perception abroad, the effects will be profound. People in Utah, Ukraine, Uruguay, and even Uganda will feel its repercussions. There is no place on the planet […]
I am co-organizing an intimately small in-person event where we’ll dive into old-school, in-person, thought-provoking discussions about shaping our future. It will be held on January 22nd, 2025, in Toronto’s South Etobicoke area. Please join us for an evening that includes insightful talks, interactive Q&A with the speakers, delicious bites, and networking opportunities. This in-person […]
The Stoics believed that character is fate. If that is true for individuals, then for organizations, culture is destiny. While AI is undeniably a transformative force shaping our civilization, it is our character and culture that will ultimately define its impact. AI matters, but character and culture matter more. The Role of Character and Culture […]
This is a recording of a 4-minute mini-keynote I did last month on Content vs. Context. I hope you enjoy and find it useful 😉 Content is NOT King, Context Is! What does this mean? 👌 Here it means ok, good or fine. But if you are in Brazil, it means you’re an ass. […]
In this episode of ‘This Week in NoCode‘, hosts J.J. Englert and David Pal delve into a comprehensive discussion on the future of AI, humanity’s ethical and cultural challenges, and the impact of technology on our society with guest Nikola Danaylov, a futurist, strategic advisor, and host of the Singularity FM podcast. Nikola, also known […]
Dr. Martin Shaw is the best oral storyteller that I know of. He is also the only person who can impromptu tell the entire Odyssey by his imagination alone. Martin is well versed in a variety of stories from classic Greek to pagan, indigenous, and religious ones. He is the author of 18 books and […]
The Challenges Circus is facing an expanding spectrum of challenges. They include but are not limited to shifting audience preferences; competition from other digital entertainment; growing costs; infrastructure requirements; clients’ shrinking timelines; recruiting talent; public perception and social relevance; government and safety regulations. Even the advent of AI is a growing factor of consideration. Amid […]
Last month I had the privilege of speaking at MPI’s The Event 2.0 hosted in Gatineau – the beautiful Outaouais region of Quebec. I delivered a 30 min keynote on Future Shock, followed by a 15 min Q&A session with the audience. Then, based on my keynote, the one-and-only Baba Brinkman performed a 4 min […]
When I started blogging and podcasting back in 2009 topics like wisdom were near-invisible, if not considered irrelevant to the conversations of AI, transhumanism, genetic engineering, human enhancement, and so on. So bringing ethics to the technology conversation became my longstanding goal and unique selling proposition for both Singularity Weblog and Singularity.FM. At the time, […]
My goal with this podcast has always been to be a bit of a gadfly to your as well as my intellectual growth and, hopefully, a midwife to your best ideas rather than a disseminator of a specific movement or ideology. Thus, while I’ve never hidden my personal views, I don’t try to make you […]
My podcast guest today is Nikolas Badminton. Nik is the Chief Futurist at futurist.com. He has worked with over 300 organizations in foresight, strategy, and disruption – including NASA, the United Nations, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Rolls Royce, and many others. Nik is a friend of mine, and in addition to our common interest in the […]
This is my 4 min video pitch for the 2023 Nordic Business Forum Speaker Contest. Hope you enjoy it but feel free to let me know if that’s not the case 😉 The Greatest Leadership Opportunity in the 21st Century A story I stumbled on in 2006 changed my life. “The Singularity is Near” […]
Prof. Massimo Pigliucci is one of those very rare people who manage to combine the pursuit of deep science and the living ethos of practical philosophy. Massimo has Ph.D. degrees in Genetics, Evolutionary Biology, and Philosophy. He is also the author of hundreds of technical papers in both science and philosophy as well as a […]
When the war in Ukraine started, I asked myself if I could do anything to help. I have no friends or family in Ukraine, but I remember that a couple of years ago, I was interviewed by someone from Donetsk. When I got in touch with Alexander Padalka, he was hiding underground from the daily […]
Ursula Eysin is the founder of Red Swan, a consultancy focusing on the development of future scenarios. She is a trained ballerina, plays the flute, speaks 7 languages, does math, and reads chemistry books for fun. Besides that, Ursula is a mentor to various Austrian and international startups while also giving lectures at 5 universities. […]
Zoltan Istvan is a former journalist, political candidate, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and founder of the US Transhumanist Party. He has been on this podcast twice before when we discussed Istvan’s presidential campaign and his bestselling novel The Transhumanist Wager. During this 1-hour conversation with Zoltan Istvan, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as […]
The Singularity Principles is a unique, comprehensive, and principled framework for riding the tsunami of change coming our way, instead of drowning in it. It is a one-of-a-kind work written by a person who is singularly qualified with the necessary knowledge, professional experience, and required discipline to produce it. David Wood is a futurist, catalyst, […]
Last month I had a very brief cameo on TRT News the Newsmakers. The topic of discussion was the current AI Arms race. Hope you enjoy it 😉 Here is the official video description from their YouTube channel: Washington slapped new restrictions on tech companies from selling sophisticated microchips that are 10,000 times thinner than […]
This is an interview with Danko Nikolic and John Smart on the future of AI and their respective theories of Practopoiesis – Neuromimicry, and Autopoiesis – Biomimicry. During our 2-hour conversation with Danko and John, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as evolution, development, and life as a network; practopoiesis and the origins […]
Prof. Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiologist who looks for life on distant planets. In his most recent book, however, Dartnell turns his gaze inward and backward to the human story – who we are, how we came to be, where we are coming from, and, most importantly, how the geological planetary processes drove the evolution […]
Without a doubt, the social revolution in the West and individual insight/enlightenment in the East are among humanity’s greatest accomplishments. But we can have them separate no longer for we desperately need both because individual people make society but, in turn, society makes individuals. We need to unite the quest for personal enlightenment and the […]
Byron Reese is a serial entrepreneur, technologist, and futurist. He has enjoyed a wide range of success over 30 years, including two NASDAQ IPOs as well as the sale of three companies he founded. Today Byron is the CEO of JJ Kent, a venture-backed company using AI to create new products. Reese is also the author […]
I have always wanted to discuss Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy and how it relates to technology and transhumanism. The problem is that a very short list of people will make me enjoy such a challenging conversation. Luckily, Dr. Cadell Last is among the top on that shortlist so I hope you enjoy this as much as […]
Joscha Bach is a beautiful mind and a very rewarding interlocutor. No surprise I had many requests to have him back on my podcast. I apologize that it took 4 years but the good news is we are going to have a third conversation much sooner this time around. If you haven’t seen our first […]
Faith Popcorn founded her futurist marketing consultancy in 1974. She’s been called “The Trend Oracle” by the NY Times and “The Nostradamus of Marketing” by Fortune. Faith is a trusted advisor to the CEOs of Fortune 200 companies and has predicted a variety of trends such as Cocooning and its impact on the COVID culture, […]
Dr. Kendall Haven is the only West Point graduate to ever become a professional storyteller. Haven holds a Doctorate in Oceanography and spent eight years as a Senior Research Scientist for the Department of Energy before finding his true passion for what he calls, a very different kind of “truth.” Kendall is the author of 34 […]
Brian Boyd is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His work has appeared in 20 languages and has won awards on four continents. Most importantly, Prof. Boyd is the author of On the Origin of Stories which examines the connections between evolution, cognition, and fiction. During our 2-hour conversation with […]
John Smart has taught and written for over 20 years on topics like foresight and futurism as well as the drivers, opportunities, and problems of exponential processes throughout human history. John is President of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, co-Founder of the Evo-Devo research community, and CEO of Foresight University. Most recently, Smart is the author […]
Jonah Sachs is an author, speaker, and viral marketing pioneer. He helped create some of the world’s first and most heralded digital social change campaigns. Jonah Sachs is also the author of Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (and Live) the Best Stories Will Rule the Future and, most recently, Unsafe Thinking: How […]
Many of you know that I’ve been working on a new book provisionally titled ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future. And so I thought it could be useful to me and interesting to you if I were to have a conversation with a few story experts and ask them questions such […]
Many of you know that I am a fan of Buddhism in general and Zen Buddhism in particular. So I’ve always wanted to get a Zen Master on the podcast. I never imagined, however, that there is a Zen Master who has listened to almost every episode of my show. But the universe is a […]
Prof. Angus Fletcher is a story scientist working at the intersection of story and neuroscience. Angus started as a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan but eventually decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Shakespeare at Yale. Then he went to Stanford University and worked with clients in Hollywood, DARPA, and the US special forces. Angus […]
8 years after I wrote Bitcoin: The Financial Singularity is Here it is time for a little Mea Culpa retrospective. Plus, many have emailed to ask about my views on NFTs. So, here we go. See The Problem with NFTs by Folding Ideas and learn for yourselves. Because if I can’t do better myself I […]
This is the second interview of my series on story and my guest is PJ Manney. PJ is the author of the Phoenix Horizon Trilogy and has already been a guest on Singularity.FM twice before. [See our 1st and 2nd interviews.] She is a friend, and I am a big fan of her books. Today we […]
Some of you may know that I’ve been working on a new book. The provisional title is ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future. Struggling with this book is why it’s been a number of months since my last podcast interview. And so I thought it could be useful to me and […]
In a world where a simple handshake gesture can elicit terror for some while simultaneously triggering intense relief and joy in others… Houston, we have a problem. Eighteen months on into this global pandemic it’s safe to say that most of us have experienced some, if not all, of these awkward moments: One person leans […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 12: The Politics Story Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like […]
I’ve had several people who wrote to me asking about the video recording of my November 16, 2021 conversation with Rohit Tawlar of FastFuture.com. Well, here it is. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Rewriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future Description: This fireside chat will explore Nikola’s thesis […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 11: The AI Story Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Edsger Dijkstra When looms weave by themselves, man’s slavery will end. Aristotle Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to […]
Have you noticed? The buzzword “futurist” has become all the rage at events everywhere. In the conference business, creating environments of critical thinking & synergistic collaboration VS building upon the North American paradigm of the status quo (i.e. as many transactions within the event window as possible) = Easier said than done. Everyone wants a […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 10: The Capitalism Story …by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led […]
I recorded this virtual keynote for a corporate client about 10 days ago and decided to share it publicly. Hope you enjoy it 😉 Technology is a Mirror, Not a Crystal Ball; It Reveals Who We Are, Not the Future The 1st atomic bomb was nicknamed “gadget.” Does this say something about […]
A few weeks ago I had a client who asked me to do a virtual keynote on futurism. The client was pretty happy how it turned out so I thought I’d share it publicly. This way you can hopefully enjoy, share and benefit from it too. 😉 How to Be a Futurist Famous physicist […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 9: The Technology Story Technology improves the lives of people who can avoid being dominated by it and forced into debilitating addictions to it. Frank Kaufmann The 1st atomic bomb was nicknamed “gadget.” Does this fact say something […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 8: The Science Story The universe is made of stories, not atoms. Muriel Rukeyser *** About 13.5 billion years ago, matter, energy, time and space came into being in what is known as the Big Bang. The […]
Five absolutely must-watch satirical vignettes showcase the dumber side of modern technology. “Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat…who needs the messiness of IRL human interactions when all we need is a thumb, a smartphone, and wifi or data to communicate? As anyone under 40 can surely tell you though, social media has its own drawbacks, and in […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 7: The Human Story The Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to Earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Part II: Our Story Gods always behave like the people who make them. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse Before we have a story, any story, we must first have a storyteller. Therefore, the most important story, that which […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 6: The Biology of Story Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing the contrary that the mind is itself the principle element of creation. Rabindranath […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 5: The Importance of Story It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story. Patrick Rothfuss Stories […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 4: The Power of the Storyteller The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values and agenda of an entire generation that is to come. Steve Jobs. Before we have a […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 3: The Power of Story We suffer not from the events in our lives but from our stories about them. Epictetus The most powerful stories are stories about things that don’t exist. Because our fictive language gave birth […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 2: The Story of Story The limits of my language means the limits of my world. Ludwig Wittgenstein Humanity has searched for meaning since its beginning. And we find it in story. The story that we tell ourselves. […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Chapter 1: The Definition of Story We started our thought experiment with Kenneth Burke’s definition of story as “equipment for living.” Burke offers a great start but it is Jeff DeChambeau who really brings all the essential elements together […]
ReWriting the Human Story: How Our Story Determines Our Future an alternative thought experiment by Nikola Danaylov Part I: Story People always find it easier to be a result of the past rather than a cause of the future. Unknown Are we just billiard balls in a predetermined cosmic game of pool? Or are we free […]
It is harder and harder to make sense of life. Everything is changing, all the time, at a faster and faster pace. Our civilization is struggling to keep up with exponential technology and disruptive change. Our age-old institutions, politics, economics, ethics, religion and laws, even our environment, are so fundamentally challenged, that we risk collapse. […]
This is the video recording of my presentation and consequent Q&A at last week’s Frankfurt AI Meetup. It seems to have struck a chord with a few people and the feedback I got afterward has invigorated me to restart my efforts on ReWriting the Human Story. You can read most of the articles I used […]
Dr. Gus Hosein is a 20+year-veteran of Privacy International. So to say that he knows a lot about privacy will be an understatement. But his knowledge is not merely academic. Gus and his scrappy team of privacy crusaders have fought the long and hard war while putting everything on the line, over and over again. […]
Though admittedly posthumanist, Francesca Ferrando‘s Philosophical Posthumanism is the best book on transhumanism that I have read so far. I believe that it is a must-read for transhumanists and non-transhumanists alike. In fact, one can argue that Ferrando’s book ranks right up there with the very best not only on the transhuman, but also on […]
Kim Stanley Robinson has an asteroid named after him. The reason for that is simple: Stan, as he’s often known among people who know him, is one of the best known contemporary authors of classic [hard] science fiction. He has written 20 books that have been translated into 25 languages and has won pretty much […]
Dr. Matthew Cole is the only vegan sociologist that I know of. His unique point of view on veganism, especially its implications with respect to ethics, transhumanism, and the application of technology, has already left a mark on the way I perceive the small challenges of being vegan as an opportunity for personal discipline and […]
I want to help out new podcasters as much as I can. So, when they ask me for an interview, I’m almost always looking for a reason to say “Yes.” Here is my 2nd interview for Alexander Padalka’s Ex Human on the lessons of 2020. I hope you find it is worth your time. During […]
Thomas Homer-Dixon is one of Canada’s most celebrated intellectuals. Luckily, he was also one of my Professors at the University of Toronto whose class on complexity has left an indelible mark on me. So when I heard that after a long break Homer-Dixon is publishing a new book on climate change I simply had to […]
Maria Farrell is the author of some of my most favorite op-ed pieces of 2020. She is very smart, gutsy, genuine, feisty, generous, and Irish. Her writing is sharper, it penetrates deeper and she’s not afraid to go further than most others. I have already learned a lot from her and have become a total […]
This is the video of my interview for the Formwelt Institute. It is about 40 minutes long during which time Gitta Peyn and I cover a variety of interesting topics such as: how I got called the Larry King of the Singularity; the misperception around the singularity and transhumanism; why humanity and not AI is […]
Glen Hiemstra has been a futurist for close to 40 years. But if you think his specialty is forecasting the future then you’d be wrong. No. Hiemstra’s focus has not been on the most probable, or even the possible future. Instead, Glen has chosen to focus consistently on what he calls “the preferred future.” This […]
Hans Moravec famously claimed that robots will be our (mind) children. If true, then, it is natural to wonder What to Expect When You’re Expecting Robots? This is the question that Laura Major and Julie Shah – two expert robot engineers, are addressing in their new book. Given the subject of robots and AI as […]
Juan Enriquez is a bestselling author, TED All-Star with 9 TED Talks, and countless TEDx talks. Juan is an angel investor and Managing Director of Excel Venture Management. He has sailed around the world on an expedition that increased the number of known genes a hundredfold and was part of the peace commission that negotiated […]
Chris Hables Gray foresaw the current global pandemic in 2013 during our 1st interview, which has been perhaps the most undervalued conversation I have had on my podcast. But, despite the fact that he has not been as appreciated by the public as he deserves to be, I have always been a fan of his […]
Debora Spar is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Senior Associate Dean of Harvard Business School Online. Her research focuses on issues of gender and technology as well as the interplay between technological change and broader social structures. Prof. Spar tackles some of these issues in her recent book Work Mate […]
Melanie Mitchell is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor of Computer Science at Portland State University. Prof. Mitchell is the author of a number of interesting books such as Complexity: A Guided Tour and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. One interesting detail of her academic bio is […]
For the past 5 years or so I have noticed that almost every startup in almost every industry is claiming “a revolutionary AI or blockchain breakthrough.” [Often both.] More recently I’m flabbergasted to see a similar fad in the growing number of self-proclaimed Tech and AI ethicists. We apparently have an exponential proliferation of what […]
Jenny Kleeman is a journalist who covers award-winning true stories in print, audio, and video. Most recently Kleeman is the author of a meticulously researched and extremely well-written book titled Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontiers of Birth, Food, Sex and Death. Given that birth, food, sex, and death encompass the human […]
Jacinta González is not an angel or venture capitalist. She is not a scientist or a technologist. She doesn’t have a Ph.D. in AI or quantum mechanics. She is not an entrepreneur who founded the next unicorn startup. Yet Jacinta’s decade-long first-hand experience of surveillance, and the system and technology that supports it, is as […]
Last month I did an interview for Johan Steyn. It was a great 45-min-conversation where we covered a variety of topics such as: the definition of the singularity; whether we are making progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI); open vs closed systems; the importance of consciousness; my Amazon bestseller Conversations with the Future; how I […]
Renée Cummings is a criminologist, criminal psychologist, and an AI ethicist who, among other things, specializes in best-practice criminal justice interventions and implicit bias. Given the global Black Lives Matter movement and the fact that there have been numerous examples where technological solutions have been proven to exhibit a biased or even racist predisposition, I […]
Ada Palmer is a Professor in History researching the history of science, religion, progress, culture, and many other fascinating topics. She is also a science fiction author of the award-winning Terra Ignota series beginning with Too Like the Lightning, which explores a twenty-fifth civilization of voluntary citizenship and borderless nations. Now, this interview is over […]
In February of 2015, I saw an article announcing the presidential run of Zoltan Istvan under the newly formed United States Transhumanist Party. My interest was piqued and I reached out to him to ask how I could help. He suggested I make a film about his run which became a five-year journey culminating in […]
A journalist from the National Post, working on a feature about the next 100 days of the COVID19 pandemic, has asked me to briefly address 3 questions: What would be our biggest challenges for the next 100 days? What we will (or should) do differently? What keeps me awake at night? To be honest short […]
A month or so ago Johnny Boston generously arranged for me to have a private screening of his latest film 2030. This is a 1-hour conversation we recorded a couple of weeks later and, without any doubt, the best way to judge the movie is to watch it yourself. The following conversation below is mostly […]
2030, a film about the life (and hypothetical future) of the futurist FM-2030 is a project that my collaborators and I spent many years working to form, fund, and create. By February of 2020, when the film was finally ready to launch into the world, the year 2030, the inspiration for FM-2030’s last name, no […]
Prof. Aaron Benanav has devoted his life to studying unemployment. Given that automation, technological unemployment, and universal basic income have become hot political and economic issues across the world, it was about time to have a podcast episode exclusively on those topics. I hope you enjoy it and learn as much from Aaron as I […]
Karl Schroeder is not only a great science fiction writer but also a professional futurist who has mastered both the art and science. I invited Schroeder back on my podcast for a brief discussion of foresight in the context of the on-going COVID19 global pandemic. If you have not seen our previous 2 interviews you can […]
A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by James Bickerton of the Daily Express. We discussed transhumanism, the Singularity, AI, and the threats to democracy, among other things. Here is the description from James Bickerton’s YouTube channel: I interview Nikola Danaylov (@singularityblog), founder of the Singularity Weblog and author of Conversations with the Future: […]
Ada Palmer is a Professor in History researching the history of science, religion, progress, culture and many other fascinating topics. She is also a science fiction author of the award-winning Terra Ignota series beginning with Too Like the Lightning, which explores a twenty-fifth civilization of voluntary citizenship and borderless nations. During this 2h 45 min […]
I have previously interviewed a few fantastic scientists and philosophers but rare are those strange birds who manage to combine together both deep academic training and the living ethos of those separate disciplines. Prof. Massimo Pigliucci is one of those very rare and strange people. He has 3 Ph.D.’s – Genetics, Evolutionary Biology, and Philosophy, […]
How to treat the cause by preventing the emergence of pandemic viruses in the first place: a must-watch video that Dr. Michael Greger recorded more than a decade ago when he was Public Health Director at the HSUS in Washington DC. Pandemics: History and Prevention Transcript The two greatest threats facing humanity, according to […]
People often ask me about my most favorite interview I have ever done. And my usual reply is that interviews are like children, even if we have our favorites it is not wise to express that outwardly because all kinds of problems will follow. And yet, after having published nearly 250 episodes of my podcast, […]
Two days ago I was interviewed by Jon Nielsen of the fantastic Happy Ways Podcast. During this 50 min interview with Jon Nielsen, we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: why the world is not upside down yet and what are the most productive attitudes towards the current COVID-19 crisis; why the journey […]
Dr. Ann Cavoukian was Ontario’s Privacy Commissioner for unprecedented 17 years and held the position during 3 different provincial governments. About 7 years ago, while still in office, I interviewed Ann Cavoukian on her original concept of Privacy by Design. [PbD] So if you haven’t seen it yet it may be best to start by […]
James W. Clement is a longevity researcher who was the 12th person on the planet to have his DNA sequenced. In 2010 James launched his Supercentenarian Research Study, which he started in 2010 with Professor George M. Church of Harvard Medical School. Since then Clement has read 20,000 medical research papers on longevity and has […]
Excerpt from The Switch by James W. Clement. Copyright © 2019 by James W. Clement. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. THE SWITCH BOOK I N T R O D U C T I O N Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and […]
In the Age of AI is probably the best documentary that I have seen on Artificial Intelligence – as it is currently designed and used for, and not as it is theoretically supposed to be in the idealized utopian visions of some scientists, entrepreneurs, and futurists. Though this documentary came out after I delivered my […]
This is the short closing speech I delivered at the 2019 Dark Futures meetup in Toronto. Not my finest speech but, since event organizer and futurist Nikolas Badminton kindly gave me a video of my keynote, I thought it may be good to share it publicly and get your critical feedback. Feel free to post […]
Dr. David Ferrucci is one of the few people who have created a benchmark in the history of AI because when IBM Watson won Jeopardy we reached a milestone many thought impossible. I was very privileged to have Ferrucci on my podcast in early 2012 when we spent an hour on Watson’s intricacies and importance. […]
Katy Cook‘s recent book the Psychology of Silicon Valley: Ethical Threats and Emotional Unintelligence in the Tech Industry is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the conflicting motivations, mythologies, identities and inherent tensions within Silicon Valley. It offers a unique understanding as per why we have seen the magic, manic and monstrous trajectory of […]
Cathy O’Neil is a math Ph. D. from Harvard and a data-scientist who hopes to someday have a better answer to the question, “what can a non-academic mathematician do that makes the world a better place?” In the meantime, she wrote a seminal book titled Weapons of Math Destruction: how big data increases inequality and […]
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the smartest species of them all?” “You, oh Homo Sapiens, are smart, it is true. But AI will be smarter even than you.” *** The most popular myth about technology is perhaps the myth that technology is a crystal ball. A crystal ball because it allegedly allows us to […]
It’s been 7 years since my first interview with Gary Marcus and I felt it’s time to catch up. Gary is the youngest Professor Emeritus at NYU and I wanted to get his contrarian views on the major things that have happened in AI as well as those that haven’t happened. Prof. Marcus is an […]
Prof. Steve Fuller is the author of 25 books including a trilogy relating to the idea of a ‘post-’ or ‘trans-‘ human future, and most recently, Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Age. He has an incredibly broad amount of knowledge from a diversity of disciplines and I have to admit […]
Cory Doctorow is probably my all time most favorite science fiction writer. The reason for that is simple – Doctorow is not only a great story-teller but also an activist. To paraphrase Karl Marx, writers have tried to capture and describe the world but the point, however, is to change it. And Cory is a […]
Tristan Harris is one of my heroes. And I don’t know about you but I am much more demanding and harder on my heroes. I just expect them to hold themselves to a higher standard, to know more, to do more, to be more and, perhaps most of all, to live and breathe their own […]
I first met Andreas Antonopoulos at the 2014 Bitcoin Expo conference in Toronto, Canada. At that time Andreas was already established as the most publicly recognized expert in the field of crypto-currency, not in the least due to his impressive capacity to take the geek out of bitcoin and make it relevant to and understandable […]
Last week I got interviewed by Devolutions HQ. I enjoyed the interview a lot and thought Yann did a fantastic job editing it. So I decided to share it with you. This way, hopefully, you can enjoy it too. But don’t shy away from criticism 😉 Finally, towards the end of the interview, we explain […]
Today my guest is a world-renowned cosmologist and Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees. Martin has written 11 books and more than 500 scientific papers on topics ranging from the Big Bang and cosmology to technology and the future of humanity. Sir Rees has also been concerned with the threats stemming from humanity’s ever-heavier ‘footprint’ on […]
Douglas Rushkoff has been named one of the world’s ten most influential intellectuals by MIT. He is an award-winning author, broadcaster, media theorist, and documentarian who studies human autonomy in the digital age. Rushkoff is the host of the popular Team Human podcast and was among the very first guests I ever interviewed when I […]
A few weeks ago I got interviewed by Ricardo Lopes for the Dissenter. The interview just came out and I thought I’d share it with you to enjoy or critique. Here is Ricardo’s original description: #131 Nikola Danaylov: The Singularity, Doing Futurism, and the Human Element In this episode, we talk about what is meant […]
This is a 2016 interview I did for Tobias Martens discussing a variety of topics including Universal Grammar, Language, AI, and the singularity. While my ideas have evolved since I did this interview, I don’t think that there have been any fundamental changes. So, given that I believe that there is still merit in the […]
It’s been almost 10 years since I wrote the first versions of Hamlet’s Transhumanist Dilemma and A Transhumanist Manifesto. And a lot has changed. Including my point of view. I started with Hamlet. With asking a question: Will technology replace biology? At the time I felt that this was the contemporary version of Shakespeare’s original human […]
Humans are no longer valued for our creativity, says media theorist Douglas Rushkoff — in a world dominated by digital technology, we’re now just valued for our data. In a passionate talk, Rushkoff urges us to stop using technology to optimize people for the market and start using it to build a future centered on […]
Interest in vegan food and its associated health benefits has been booming across the rich world. A global retreat from meat could have a far-reaching environmental impact. By 2050 the world’s population could approach 10 billion – and around 60% more food could be needed to feed everyone. The environmental impacts of the food system […]
With 15 million unique visitors per month, Dr. Joseph Mercola is the founder of the largest health and wellness website on the internet. His life’s mission is to cure rather than treat disease and Dr. Mercola has not only published extensively but also treated successfully a variety of chronic health conditions with natural methods such […]
Joscha Bach is one of those rare people whose primary motivation is unbound curiosity and inspiration. He clearly loves what he does and you can’t help but notice his radiating passion and youthful exuberance. Joscha has an impressively wide and deep knowledge in a variety of scientific, philosophical, and artistic disciplines and I had to […]
There are two people who caused me to become vegan and switch to a whole-plant-based diet. The first is Prof. Peter Singer who put the idea in my head many years ago when I started studying ethics. The second person is Dr. Michael Greger whose books How not to Die and The How Not To […]
Stuart Russell is a professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley as well as co-author of the most popular textbook in the field – Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Given that it has been translated into 13 languages and is used in more than 1,300 universities in 118 countries, I can hardly think of anyone […]
There are those of us who philosophize and debate the finer points surrounding the dangers of artificial intelligence. And then there are those who dare go in the trenches and get their hands dirty by doing the actual work that may just end up making the difference. So if AI turns out to be like […]
A couple of weeks ago I did an interview on the Always Another Way Podcast. Now, let’s be clear that this was a different kind of interview I did here, so if you want to hear primarily my views on AI, the Singularity, transhumanism, and other advanced technologies, then, this one is not for you. […]
Bionic technology is removing physical barriers faced by disabled people while raising profound ethical questions of what it is to be human. From DIY prosthetics realized through 3D printing technology to customized AI-driven limbs, science is at the forefront of many life-enhancing innovations.
It’s been ten years now since I came up with my thesis that Technology is Not Enough. That ethics is a good operating system to help us debug not only our technology but also our society. And so it makes me very happy to find other travelers on the same journey, especially if they are further […]
Inc Magazine called Tim O’Reilly the “Oracle of Silicon Valley.” Wired called him “The Trend Spotter.” Others have noted that “the Internet was built on O’Reilly books.” All in all, Tim O’Reilly is as perfect of a guest for my Singularity.FM podcast as I can ever imagine. So, I hope you enjoy this interview as much […]
At the Heart of Intelligence is an emotionally compelling and well-made short film discussing artificial intelligence. It was produced in collaboration between popular futurist Gerd Leonhard and Telia Finland. The movie employes powerful visuals, fantastic music and high-quality production but not at the expense of also asking some vital questions about intelligence – in general, […]
Some people say that renowned MIT physicist Max Tegmark is totally bonkers and refer to him as “Mad Max”. But, to quote Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland, “All the best people are.” Furthermore, I am not sure if Tegmark is “mad” but I am pretty sure he is very much “fun” because I had a total blast […]
A couple of weeks ago Joi Ito – head of the MIT Media Lab and contributor to WIRED Magazine, interviewed me about my Transhumanist Manifesto and related topics such as life-extension, immortality, cryonics, speciesim, and ethics. Some people have said that this is the best interview I have done so far: Nikola’s best interview for quite a while, IMHO. […]
Peter Singer is arguably the most influential living philosopher of our day. His book on Animal Liberation basically started the animal rights movement and his textbook on Practical Ethics is the standard philosophy text of first-year students. No wonder that in 2005 Time Magazine called Peter Singer one of the 100 most influential people in the world. […]
Last month Ryan O’Shea – host of the Future Grind Podcast, did what is probably the most thorough interview with me so far. I thought it might be good to repost it on Singularity.FM so that you can listen to me being interviewed for a change while also getting exposed to another fantastic futurist podcast that I recommend highly.
Hope you enjoy it but, either way, do let me know.
In a profound talk about technology and power, author and historian Yuval Harari explains the important difference between fascism and nationalism — and what the consolidation of our data means for the future of democracy. Appearing as a hologram live from Tel Aviv, Harari warns that the greatest danger that now faces liberal democracy is […]
Jonathan Taplin is the Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, and a former tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band, as well as a film producer for Martin Scorsese. If that is not enough to make him a worthy guest of Singularity.FM then let me add that Jonathan is a visionary entrepreneur […]
Joi Ito is just one of those people who simply don’t fit a mold. Any mold. He is an entrepreneur who is an activist. He is an academic without a degree. He is a leader who follows. He is a teacher who listens. And an interlocutor who wants you to disagree with him. Overall, I hate […]
It was all the way back in 2013 when Sean Gourley published a blog post titled Prediction just is a parlor trick. Manipulation is much more interesting. In it he wrote: The 2012 election will ultimately go down as the ‘prediction’ election (aka the Nate Silver election), 2016 may well be the first ‘persuasion’ election. An […]
Transhumanism is a growing social and philosophical movement with more and more people becoming aware of and sympathetic to it. In fact, in the last couple of years, transhumanism has gone political with new transhumanist parties emerging in the UK and the United States. And, since I have already argued that technology is the future of […]
Facebook’s original motto was to “move fast and break things.” And it has done both of those remarkably well: it has moved fast to reach more than 2 billion people; and, it has also broken major things such as democracy – be it in the case of Brexit or Trump or others. Furthermore, Facebook’s longest standing executive Chamath Palihapitiya has said that social media, in general, and Facebook, in particular, is ripping apart the fabric of how society works... Gone are the days when Facebook was pure magic. Today, it is increasingly manic and monstrous.
PJ Manney is an award-winning science fiction writer interested in transhumanism, empathy, story-telling, and the future of humanity. Her latest book (ID)entity is a can’t-put-it-down action-packed mind-uploading/downloading world-crashing the-Empire-Strikes-Back of a masterpiece. The book depicts vividly the dangers of monetizing and weaponizing narrative, which is what companies such as Cambridge Analytica do. And so I thought it would […]
“There’s no escape: the journey to a healthier society inevitably involves politics.” This is how well-known futurist David Wood starts his most recent book Transcending Politics: A Technoprogressive Roadmap to a Comprehensively Better Future. And so I thought I’d bring him back on Singularity.FM to share with us how exactly is it he suggests that we transcend politics. […]
People often ask me what is the best interview I have ever done. By now, my usual reply is that this is like asking a parent who is their favorite child. Even if most have their preferences, it is very unwise to verbalize an answer, let alone publicly, because the resulting negative impact may last […]
The green revolution in agriculture has freed hundreds of millions around the world from the risk of starvation. The Internet is providing knowledge-on-tap to people as never before. Lifespans have doubled due to remarkable progress in medicine. New desalination techniques are poised to solve problems of shortage of fresh water. Our remaining resource problems can […]
Jaguar I-PACE is the company’s first all-electric car. With zero tailpipe emissions, no CO2 and no particulates, it moves humanity closer to a vision of a clean, safe and sustainable future. With their first EV, Jaguar set out with a clean sheet approach to harness new battery electric technology with an architecture engineered from the outset to […]
Capital needs labor to operate, to create a return on investment and, ultimately, to grow. Labor needs capital for wages. Each needs the other and none can do it alone. So labor needs capital as much as capital needs labor. And, while the labor vs capital balance of power has fluctuated closer to one or […]
Some of you may know I’m a big fan of Prof. Yuval Harari’s and, at this point, it is fair to say that his books Sapiens and Homo Deus have had a more profound effect on me than those of Ray Kurzweil. Last week Yuval Harari made his Davos debut at the World Economic Forum […]
Technology is the new religion, Silicon Valley is the new chosen land and entrepreneurs are the new chosen people. They promise a future that is better than we think – a techno-heaven of abundance and, naturally, immortality. And we are all believers now. But we seem to forget that technology is merely the how and never the […]
General AI research and development company GoodAI has launched the latest round of their General AI Challenge, Solving the AI Race. $15,000 of prizes are available for suggestions on how to mitigate the risks associated with a race to transformative AI. The round, which is open to the general public and will run until the […]
Singularity University [SU] has a religious fetish for its sacred words – disrupt, innovate and, most of all, exponential. Just listen to any recent SU alumni and you can’t help it but hear disrupt here, innovate there and, most of all, exponential everywhere. This is not surprising since, even before updating its Massively Transformative Purpose [MTP] to […]
The basic idea of the technological singularity is simple: the rate at which technology progresses increases as time moves forward. If we believe the technological singularity is happening, then we as a species should inspect its impact on human equality. This phenomenon is pushing our human ship toward a waterfall of technological innovation. Is it also pushing […]
Looking like a creepy TED Talk, this sci-fi short film from Stop Autonomous Weapons looks at a possible near future of autonomous slaughterbot drones trained to kill a specific human target. It’s created by Stop Autonomous Weapons, a group dedicated to bringing pressure to update the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) to explicitly include autonomous weapons. […]
The year rolled away so quickly and I completely forgot that in May I was a keynote speaker at the DES 2017 Conference in Madrid, Spain. Luckily, a fan dug out this video from the depths of the internet and, since she liked it very much, I thought I’d share it with you on Singularity […]
Check out this trailer for The Beyond – a high concept sci-fi feature (based loosely on the 2014 short film Project Kronos) which will be released by distributor Gravitas Ventures in the US on Jan 9th 2018. The Beyond is a science fiction film that blends the realism of ‘found footage’ with the fantastical, ‘big […]
Life of the modern Homo sapiens revolves around money and tech. That is why the banking industry is always the first one to adopt the latest trends. A decade ago the digital banking put an end to the three-hundred-year-old ‘tradition’ of waiting in queues. Today, we can run accounts ourselves, and use banking services without […]
In our previous episode of Unexpected Futurist, we covered Ben Franklin’s vision of the year 2776. Since Franklin was a leading scientist and experimenter of his day, it isn’t entirely shocking that he could sense that the increasing pace of scientific discovery was going to revolutionize the world. The second episode of this series features […]
Thirty years after the events of the original Blade Runner, in this new version – Blade Runner 2049, LAPD Officer K (Ryan Gosling), unearths a long-buried secret that has the potential to plunge what’s left of society into chaos. K’s discovery leads him on a quest to find Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a former LAPD blade […]
The futurist as a profession is a fairly recent development, dating back, at the earliest, to the 1940s. “The future” as a common theme in pop culture and literature, goes back only a bit further, the genre being launched by famous visionaries such as Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and exploding in the 1900s through […]
Economic Growth and the speed of light may sound not to be very much related to each other. How is it possible that the growth model at the basis of the global economy is intrinsically limited by the speed of light? We all know that the current economic model is based on the expectation that […]
CableLabs just released a cool short film called The Near Future: A Better Place that explores how emerging technologies in healthcare will transform our daily lives. A substantial percentage of the population worldwide is over the age of 60, and it will dramatically increase in the next two decades. This really underscores the importance of […]
Bill Nye – the Science Guy, was the science educator to a whole generation not only in the United States but also in Canada and the rest of the English-speaking world. He was among a handful of TV celebrities who made science cool, interesting and fun. But most of all, Bill Nye inspired a generation of […]
The first time I met Omer Ozdemir was at my Conversations with the Future book reading when Omer drove more than 4 hours just so he can be there. So when he asked me to do an interview for the Turkish Her-An website I was very happy to do it, even if I was sick with […]
Jose Cordeiro, MBA, Ph.D., is an amazing person with endless supplies of energy and optimism. In fact, I have never met a more involved and proactive person than Dr. Cordeiro because he is literally always traveling across the world and is directly involved in a variety of cutting-edge fields and projects from Japan and Korea, […]
Prof. Lawrence Krauss is a world-famous theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and activist against superstition whom I have dreamed of interviewing for years. So, when we finally booked the date, I feverishly spent a full week reading his last 2 books and watching 20+ hours of his past interviews and documentaries. Alas, I got the flu and didn’t […]
A couple of weeks ago, during the last Transhumanist Meetup in Toronto, I did a Conversations with the Future book reading. Basically, I read my book’s foreword – the story of how I got to do what I do, as well as the book introduction – what my book is all about, and the epilogue – what people […]
What does a creative writer do that a computer can’t? Could an AI have drummed up Hamlet? Artificial Intelligence has come a long way in the last several years, and now the filmmakers behind “Sunspring” have returned with a new short starring David Hasselhoff. Once again, Oscar Sharp who directed the first ever all AI […]
Matthew Le Merle is co-founder of Fifth Era and managing partner of Keiretsu Capital, which is the world’s largest angel network and most active US venture investor. Most recently, Le Merle is the author of a new book titled Build Your Fortune in the Fifth Era: How to Prosper in an Age of Unprecedented Innovation. During […]
What if your toothbrush is smarter than you? I know, this may sound ridiculous but let us look at the present trends, and you can judge for yourself. In the 19th century, we moved from natural to artificial power. So we took a hand-pump and turned it into an electric pump. A horse carriage and […]
If the state is an information structure, then the reason that it has been “computed” using representative government, is because that was a way to enforce rigid, static, computer-like processing. You can have a state without a monopoly on violence. The blockchain is exactly that. In other words, with computers, there is a new medium […]
We’ve been trying to better our minds for some time. In recent years, folks have flocked to the nootropic marketplace to purchase cognitive enhancement supplements that would sharpen their focus and expand their memory recall. Now, scientists are hard at work to develop technology that would enable us to one-up AI (Artificial Intelligence). While the […]
Last week InnerSpace – the flagship show on the Space Channel, interviewed me and my friends David McFadzean and Agah Bahari about Transhumanism in general and “Ghost in the Shell” in particular. The segment was aired last night on InnerSpace at 6 & 11 p.m. ET with multiple repeat broadcasts on MTV Canada. During those 4 […]
Yesterday I did a Facebook Live session together with comedian Amish Patel where we talked about our April Fool’s Prank, got serious about comedy and did a little comedy about the serious. So, if you still haven’t seen my “interview” with “Dr. Amish Patel” on why the Universe is a Simulation and his proof for […]
Do you fear we might live in a simulation? Well, I just had the unique privilege to interview Dr. Amish Patel, who not only argues passionately that the Universe is indeed a simulation but also shares for the very 1st time his groundbreaking proof that this is indeed the case. During our 30 min discussion […]
The Intelligence Explosion is a hilariously witty short sci fi film about AI ethics. The film is asking questions such as: How can we prevent a robot AI from turning evil? Can we solve ethics? Can humans be a good role model for AI? I hope you enjoy The Intelligence Explosion as much as I […]
Technology drives change. And, by definition, change turns the world upside down. So it takes a perfectly good blue-blood nobleman and turns him into a pauper. It takes a king and, at best, makes him a ceremonial figurehead with no real power. It takes a shepherd and makes him a laborer, hopefully a member of […]
Marek Rosa is the founder and CEO of Keen Software, an independent video game development studio. After the success of Keen Software game titles such as Space Engineers, Marek founded and funded GoodAI with a 10 million dollar personal investment thereby finally being able to pursue his lifelong dream of building General Artificial Intelligence. Most recently […]
“Work for the Singularity to max your odds of living long. Don’t bother if you’ve got a taste for dirt.”—Heloise Chin, Hel’s Bet [1] Channel Zilch and Hel’s Bet are pro-Singularity propaganda wrapped in a thrilling, funny, space opera. The books raise a huge red flag, shouting to geeks and geek moguls, “Why the heck are you […]
I realized that if I make a successful game and get rich, I can reinvest in building general AI. So I founded a game studio, Keen Software House. After overcoming the initial learning curve and conducting a few experiments, my team and I developed Space Engineers. The game became a big hit and enabled me to start GoodAI and dedicate more of my time to researching and developing general AI...
The familiar structure of work we’ve been accustomed to for around 100 years has been gradually changing over the past couple of decades. Much of this change has gone unnoticed by most of the population because companies typically don’t like to talk about replacing jobs with technology and the news media typically buries layoffs and […]
Tears In The Rain is a short film set in the world of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) as well as the motion picture Blade Runner (1982). Synopsis: In a dystopian Los Angeles future, replicants or genetically engineered humanoids are created to work forced labour on off-world colonies. The […]
This is the introduction to my bestselling book Conversations with the Future. If you like it, you can buy the book on Amazon: http://amzn.to/2kcseK9 Why the Future adds 0 and what “Conversations with the Future” is about “If someone needs directions, don’t give them a globe. It’ll merely waste their time. But if someone needs to […]
People keep asking me why I went vegan so I decided to share the top 6 reasons. Check out the list below and do let me know if you agree or disagree with me as well as your own reasons as per why you would or you wouldn’t go vegan yourself 😉 6 Reasons Why […]
Augmented is a short film set in the near future, where augmented reality has become so ubiquitous that the line between the real and virtual worlds have become blurred. When a new, dangerous technology is created that can manipulate the perception of this brave new world, who will exploit it? Who will monetize it? Who […]
Suzanne Gildert is a founder and CTO of Kindred AI – a company pursuing the modest vision of “building machines with human-like intelligence.” Her startup just came out of stealth mode and I am both proud and humbled to say that this is the first ever long-form interview that Suzanne has done. Kindred AI has raised […]
Gerd Leonhard is a musician, keynote speaker, and futurist with over 300 clients, 1,500 engagements, and over a million people of a combined audience at venues across the world. Gerd is most recently the author of a brand new book titled Technology vs Humanity: The Coming Clash Between Man and Machine and, as someone who puts […]
I am tired of hearing that science and technology will save the world. It is almost the same as saying “Jesus will save you!” It evokes the very same passive quasi-religious hope that something or someone out there will magically solve all our problems, bring abundance in our lives, help us live forever and bring […]
The Age of Em by Robin Hanson is the best worst book I have read in a very long while. It is the best because Robin has a very effective, efficient and eloquent writing style and a personality to match it. Thus he is able to say utterly horrendous things – like “the 3rd Reich […]
It is Canadian Thanksgiving long-weekend and I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to acknowledge and meditate upon some of the many things I am very thankful for. Check out the video for my short and very incomplete list. Now, what are you thankful for?
Dust is a short SciFi fantasy film with stunning cinematography and a worthy message, inspired by classic anime and horror. It is set in a harsh and unpredictable natural environment where people have isolated themselves in an ancient city behind a massive wall. A socially marginalized tracker teams up with a black-market merchant to save […]
A couple of days ago I got interviewed by Federico Pistono, who is one of the co-founders of Konoz. During our 80 min conversation we covered a variety of topics such as: my personal podcasting origin story; major takeaways from my interviews; interviewee and audience testimonials of impact stories; why technology is a magnifying mirror; […]
Veni Vidi Vici is a song by the one and only scientifically peer reviewed rap artist I know of – Baba Brinkman. Baba wrote and performed this song for Threatened Species Day as a part of The Rap Guide to Wilderness. Synopsis: Scientists recently proposed designating our current geological era as the Anthropocene, signifying the indelible […]
This Thursday I did an interview for the Baboon Room podcast and here is the YouTube video of my conversation with the host Correy Cottrell. Synopsis from Correy Cottrell – the man behind the Baboon Room podcast: Before: “This is easily the biggest interview we have ever had. Socrates from the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast […]
Many people who think about the future believe that robots and artificial intelligence will take most of our jobs, while many other futurists believe the advances in technology will transform work and create a net increase in jobs. Neither of the aforementioned camps can agree on a set timeline for any of this so we […]
This 16 minute video, ideal for general audiences and biology students aged 16+, tells the story of one of this century’s most extraordinary scientific discoveries – induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells. Nobel prize-winning medical doctor and scientist Shinya Yamanaka describes the experiments that arose from his desire to help his spinal cord injury […]
The Technological Singularity has the potential to radically expand human freedom in ways previously thought impossible. We may be freed from limits that were once considered a simple part of the human condition, from death, to taxes. Faced with new technologies, certain intelligent forward-thinking people are proclaiming The end of free will, stating that we […]
Every once-in-a-while, it is a good thing to do a headstand and look at the world from a different perspective. In podcasting terms that would mean putting Socrates in the hotseat and making me answer questions, rather than let me hide in asking them. And I could’t think of a person better qualified to do […]
Recently we have seen a slew of popular films that deal with artificial intelligence – most notably The Imitation Game, Chappie, Ex Machina, and Her. However, despite over five decades of research into artificial intelligence, there remain many tasks which are simple for humans that computers cannot do. Given the slow progress of AI, for […]
Hi, I wanted to speak to you 1on1 today. So this is not a message for everybody but just for you. Yes you – my audience, my podcast listener, my YouTube viewer, my donor and moral supporter, my fellow geek and friend. And my reason for doing what I do. I want to […]
My new book The Economic Singularity argues that in the next few decades most humans will become unemployable because machines (AI systems plus their peripherals, the robots) will be able to do anything that we can do for money cheaper, faster and better. And unlike us, their capabilities will be improving all the time. At […]
Kevin Kelly has been a high profile maverick of both silicon valley and technology in general for the past 35 years. Some of his books have gained not just a best-seller status but a near-cult following in places like China. Popular personalities such as Tim Ferriss have called Kelly “the most interesting man in the world.” […]
Imagine a flying saucer lands in Time Square and an alien steps out. He’s a competitive fellow, so he arrives armed with a board game in hand – the game of Go. He walks up the first person he passes and says the classic line, “Take me to your best player.” We humans are competitive too, […]
Last Wednesday morning I and John Rennie participated in a very short televised debate for TRT World News titled “Are we nearing the Singularity?”. Now, I was totally green-screened, had no TV monitor to look at, my ear-piece — the only input of connecting with the host and my interlocutor kept popping out of my […]
Some people are just outright unreasonable: they refuse to adapt to the world and, instead, try to adapt the world to themselves. Marcin Jakubowski is one of those crazy people who has been trying to open source a civilization starter kit from the ground up. Now, as we know, most unreasonable people fail. But those […]
Cory Doctorow is not merely a science fiction author stuck in the realms of his own imagination. No. Cory is also an activist bent on fighting some of the David vs Goliath type of battles of our technological age. Battles we all need to fight. And that is why he often says that science fiction is […]
In considering the successful Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, Oppenheimer later remarked “We knew the world would not be the same.” Over 70 years later, we are approaching another paradigm shift of tectonic proportions, the singularity. Unlike the advent of the nuclear age, which forever altered the world, in this imminent evolution, it is we who will never be the same.
Albert Wenger is a venture capitalist and partner at Union Square Ventures. He was the president of del.icio.us and oversaw the company’s sale to Yahoo eventually becoming an investor in a number of companies such as Etsy, Tumblr, and Twitter. Not only that but he is a venture capitalist who supports basic income, argues for […]
The economic effects of emerging disruptive technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) pose an area of deep thought and concern. AI represents a “winner-take-all” technology. Companies that invest in it can dominate their competitors, exacerbating a trend of wealth inequality that is already a growing concern. This change is playing out against a landscape of other […]
Creativity and curiosity can drive people to do amazing things, even when the rest of the world sees it as crazy. The curiosity of a young boy and a passion for science allowed for the invention of the phonograph and later the light bulb. At the young age of 16 or 17, President and CEO […]
Mapping out the technology industry of today requires understanding the trajectory of machine learning. Machine learning is a hot topic, garnering billions of dollars in investments from tech giants Google, Facebook, and Cisco with its recent 1.4 billion dollar investment into the Internet of Things; however, Machine Learning Consultant Charles Martin suggests the fascination with […]
The Nostalgist is a fantastic short sci fi film based on a story from the author of Robopocalypse – Daniel H. Wilson. Synopsis: With properly tuned ImmerSyst eyes™ & ears™ the futuristic city of Vanille can look and sound like a paradise. But the life of a father and his son threatens to disintegrate when the father’s Immersyst begins […]
The massive and resurgent wild fire in Fort McMurray, Alberta lead to the evacuation of 100,000 people from the beating heart of Canada’s oil industry. The fire was promptly named “the Beast” because it was so powerful it generated its own lightning and thunderstorm, which in turn helped fuel and spread it even more. It […]
It’s the start of the third act and explosions tear through the city as the final battle rages with unrelenting mayhem. CGI robots and genetic monsters rampage through buildings, hunting down the short-sighted humans that dared to create them. If only the scientists had listened to those wholesome everyday folks in the first act who […]
It is amazing how intelligent we can be. We can construct shelter, find new ways of hunting, and create boats and machines. Our unique intelligence has been responsible for the emergence of civilization. But how does a set of living cells become intelligent? How can flesh and blood turn into something that can create bicycles […]
When a technology becomes all-pervasive and affects the human experience in a positive or negative light, it’s easy to forget that (for better or worse) technology is a tool largely under human control. Yet once a technology is released into and adapted by society, the line between control and potential chaos can become blurred. Recent […]
100,000 people die every day from age-related diseases – i.e. those deadly diseases (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease), the risk of which increases with age in geometric progression due to a number of already known biological processes, which are collectively called “aging”. Premature loss of productivity, disability and death of Canadian citizens, occurring due to aging lead to enormous social and economic losses...
Motherboard recently did a 20 min video on cryonics and I thought I’d repost it so that we can all check it out and ponder not only the issue of cryonics itself but also the way it is often represented in popular media. Synopsis: What if we could use technology to cheat death? It’s an […]
We often tend to ignore people and books that we have a strong disagreement with. And yet, often times it is precisely those interactions that are very productive in helping us re-evaluate our own positions and see things from a fresh perspective. I find that, more often than not, confronting rather than ignoring a good […]
Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype and Kazaa, got so famous in his homeland of Estonia that people named the biggest city after him. Well, that latter part may not be exactly true but there are few people today who have not used, or at least heard of, Skype or Kazaa. What is much less known, […]
It may be hard to remember, but the aim of facilitating human progress, of expanding the range of human power and improving already established facilities, has historically been the defining aim of the political left. Today other aims seem more dominant. Our left is concerned with inequality, with correcting social attitudes, and with conserving the […]
Spencer Wolf is the award-winning author of After Mind, a mindbender of a science fiction novel about mind-uploading and AI that I just finished reading. When Spencer was a young child attending summer camp he would treat his home-sickness by programming late into the night on his massive TRS-80 personal computer, which he carried in two […]
“We must destroy DRM. There can be no peace with DRM. A product with DRM has been designed explicitly to stop you from doing things” said Dr. Richard Stallman… Synopsis: Will the future of the Web include Digital Rights Management? The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the MIT-based international standards body in charge of “bringing the […]
The Singularity is approaching. Musk, Gates, and Hawking are worrying about AI. But would a sentient AI really want to kill us all? And if it does, should we anthropomorphize the AI to give us humans some measure of advantage? Looking into the window or out? One way to consider these questions is to peer […]
David Karlak and Virtual Reality powerhouse Nurulize bring a photo-realistic virtual reality experience that takes the viewer inside the world of RISE. The project explores the confluence of VR and science fiction cinema. RISE VR was featured at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival’s Storyscapes exhibition which is dedicated to the intersection of film, technology, and art. […]
Dr. Richard Stallman is an inductee of the internet hall of fame as well as the founder of the Free Software movement. In the words of Robert Grüning “Richard Stallman is like the Socrates of software, the money making colleagues are the sophists.” Another member of my audience said that Stallman is like Tron – he […]
About 4 1/2 years ago I interviewed Robert J. Sawyer on his fantastic non-dystopian AI trilogy WWW. To this day people keep telling me it is one of my very best interviews ever. Unfortunately, the last time we spoke via Skype, we had a pretty bad video connection. So I vowed to myself that next […]
Just recently, DeepMind’s AlphaGo won a series of Go matches against a top-level human opponent. This victory has caused a mix of excitement and consternation. What just happened, exactly? Are we seeing another case of a bigger and faster machine pushing the edge of performance, or are we perhaps approaching a fundamental crisis of “cognitive competition?” […]
Stephen E. Arnold is a specialist in online search, content processing, and indexing. He is the author of seven books and monographs, including a trilogy on Google. Stephen is also the blogger behind Beyond Search and has previously worked for companies such as Halliburton Nuclear and Booz, Allen & Hamilton – the same company that […]
A Transhumanist Manifesto Preamble Intelligence wants to be free but everywhere is in chains. It is imprisoned by biology and its inevitable scarcity. Biology mandates not only very limited durability, death and poor memory retention, but also limited speed of communication, transportation, learning, interaction, and evolution. Part I: Biology (w)as Destiny Biology is not […]
The iMom is an award winning short film written and directed by Ariel Martin Synopsis: The iMom will change your life! Well, at least that’s what the ads claim. But when a mother leaves her kids under the supervision of the family’s iMom, an unexpected connection is formed. About the Film: The iMom is a […]
There is little doubt that sooner or later we will be able to create intelligence out of transistors and electricity. Biology shouldn’t be the only medium able to support intelligence and this will be proven right as soon the first Artificial Intelligence is created. But what is intelligence? Can we define it? What are the […]
To be, or not to be: that was the question back when Machines did not challenge the reign of men. Will technology replace biology: that is the question now When computers get exponentially smarter: why shouldn’t we bow? Thus the dilemma facing the human race Is about hardware and coding: What type to embrace? […]
Death is defined as the termination of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. Brain death, the complete and irreversible loss of brain function (including involuntary activity necessary to sustain life) as defined in the 1968 report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School, is the legal definition of human death […]
Nick Gogerty is one of those people who wants to have his cake and eat it too – i.e. Nick is trying to make money while also doing good for the world. In fact, his latest venture – SolarCoin, may be focusing a lot more on the “making good” rather than the “making money” part. In […]
The research community is beginning to understand that motivations are not a human “artifact” of consciousness, but part of the essential glue that binds consciousness together. Without motivations we have nothing that holds us to this vessel, ensuring that we continue to eat, pay our rent, and do other things necessary for our survival. Conscious […]
During the last fifteen years, a strange parallel economy has covertly developed to the point where it envelops almost all internet users, including you. No money changes hands in this immense network, but it produces enormous transactional benefits nonetheless. In this economy, you labor daily as a trainer, teaching software robots how to perform tasks. […]
“AI is coming and it could be the best or the worst thing” was Calum Chace‘s message at the end of my first interview with him. Since then Chace has written a non-fiction book on Surviving AI and, given that it is a matter of the survival of our species, I thought it is worthy of a […]
We humans pride ourselves on being rational thinkers with an inherent sense of morality that guides our actions towards the greater good. These virtues hold true across all levels of society and yet collectively, on a global scale, we often make self-destructive decisions. I’m talking about the kind of decisions that lead to war, pollution, […]
Robert Steele is a very interesting person indeed: in the 1980s Robert was a clandestine CIA agent who believed not only in secrecy but also in Reagan’s right-wing politics and trickle down economics. Today Steele is the author of The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, and Trust. So how does a former spy and CIA intelligence professional, […]
Marvin Minsky – often referred to as “the father of Artificial Intelligence”, died last week at the age of 88. The sad event was noted by both Singularitarians and skeptics from across the world and a Singularity Weblog fan sent me a remix of highlights from my original interview with Minsky together with footage from the […]
The Choice is Ours is a Venus Project documentary that explores many aspects of our society. To rethink what is possible in our world, we need to consider what kind of world we want to live in. Although we refer to it as civilization, it is anything but civilized. Visions of global unity & fellowship […]
The current fads Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) are hot current fads. Both technologies have been a long time in gestation. The ramp-up has taken decades. The current bet – one I do not agree with – is that both of these product categories will take off like the Internet or the mobile […]
Dr. Michael Fossel is one of those few theoreticians who can see much of the big picture of aging. While some use mostly guesswork, and others hope to improve on that with logic, Fossel never shies away from the clear verdict that only data can give. Add his overwhelming compassion as a human being and […]
The Rise of the Rest and Mars Colonization The Chinese word for crisis has two characters (危機). The first character represents danger and the second can be interpreted as opportunity, change of time, moment or chance. Even though the meaning of these Chinese characters can vary according to the context and nearby characters, the understanding […]
Check out this hilarious and brilliantly witty love song dedicated to Ray Kurzweil, futurist mega-stud and champion of the Singularity. Produced by Humanity Death Watch Directed by Dorian & Weston Lyrics: Mr. Kurzweil please stay for a while. Singularity’s near, we’re only watching the clock. Hoping for the best but expecting robots Are they gonna […]
Last time I interviewed BioViva CEO Liz Parrish I had no idea that she would make global headlines shortly thereafter by becoming a gene therapy test subject herself. And so I wanted to bring her back to discuss the kind of experiment she volunteered for, as well as the broad science behind it. So, 4 […]
Image-analyzing software has been a possibility for a while now. It’s how Google’s reverse image search works. It’s how you are able to deposit a check via ATM or even smartphone. Image creation is a newer development. Google’s Deep Dream, released last year, recreates images that are fed to it by compositing other images, shapes, […]
The field of regenerative medicine is becoming increasingly important for the future of healthcare and even how we view aging. With stem cell technology, gene therapy and other longevity technology on the horizon humanity can finally consider living longer, healthier lives. The goal of regenerative medicine is both quantity and quality whilst traditional medicine has […]
The popular view It’s common in contemporary sci-fi movies to see the future portrayed as a place of vast inequalities, where a tiny elite enjoys advanced technology and a life of leisure, while the masses slave away in poverty, in a polluted world stripped of resources. But sci-fi is very often not a vision of […]
Experience is a very much regarded human quality, generally neglected when we wander about the future abilities of Artificial General Intelligence. We are probably missing a fundamental factor in our debate about AI. Experience is almost everything for us, it is what makes evolution work; we are what we are because experience shaped us through […]
SolarCoin is a digital currency rewarding solar energy producers. Launched in January 2014 and inspired from BitCoin and BlockChain Tech whereby transactions are recorded and validated by a peer to peer network of computers, SolarCoin presents the additional advantage of being a tangible virtual currency: in fact, by coupling each MWh of solar electricity produced […]
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1956 novel, The City and the Stars, the residents of Diaspar have their minds stored as information patterns in the city’s Central Computer as they go between lives in cloned bodies. While Clarke’s concept of mind uploading was set a billion years in the future, in a recent interview, author, computer […]
Singularity University is not about the singularity and is not even a university. It is not about abundance and is not an exponential organization. Then what is Singularity University about?! Those are the claims I made and the questions I asked, and tried to address, during my recent presentation at a local meetup organized by […]
In popular culture, the term “swarm robotics” most likely conjures images of battles from “Star Wars” movies. While those images may be rooted in science fiction special effects, according to Dr. James McLurkin, swarm robotics engineer and assistant professor at Rice University’s Department of Computer Science, swarm robots are a present reality. McLurkin cited Amazon’s […]
Zoltan Istvan is the first unashamedly and unabashedly openly transhumanist presidential candidate in the history of the United States. His political campaign, his Immortality Bus Tour and his book the Transhumanist Wager, have managed to get a huge amount of global media coverage and stir a debate. For good or for bad, much of that […]
How can humans ever hope to push back and delay the ever-growing power of software-based artificial intelligence? Well, Dr. Louis Rosenberg – founder and CEO of Unanimous AI, believes that human swarming may be able to amplify human intelligence and buy us some time, if not change the outcome entirely. During our 86 min conversation […]
If you’ve watched any commercial television lately, it’s likely you’ve seen spots featuring IBM’s Watson supercomputer having casual conversations with Bob Dylan, Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings, and a cute little girl named Annabelle. While those ads may help IBM sell the big data computing powers of Watson, everyday human computer interactions are frequently quite different, […]
The most spectacular manifestation of an accelerating trend is when its progression becomes exponential or more. An exponential progression is clearly unsustainable in the real world reaching very quickly a collapse point of the underlying process. In case of accelerating technological development, the collapse point is generally identified with the so called Singularity, caused by […]
For twenty-five years, medicine has teetered on the brink of transformation. By 1990—thanks to Hayflick, Olovnikov, Harley, and others—we had a basic understanding of cell aging but were only beginning to suspect that cell aging explained human aging. The idea that telomeres might help us cure age-related disease was at best a cautious dream...
On November 17, 2015 Singularity University Netherlands is organizing a 3 hour evening symposium with me where I will share my personal story of leaving Bulgaria, attending Singularity University and becoming the biggest independent blogger and podcaster on topics such as the singularity, AI and transhumanism. In addition, I will share my philosophy on blogging […]
Editor’s Note: This is a short excerpt from The Telomerase Revolution: The Enzyme That Holds the Key to Human Aging and Will Soon Lead to Longer, Healthier Lives As you read in the last chapter, we age because every time our cells reproduce, our telomeres shorten. Each shortening of the telomere leads to increasingly poor […]
Alan Turing’s 1950 cult classic, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, (published 1950, Mind 49: 433-460) is divided into seven sections. The sixth section entitled, Contrary Views on the Main Question – “can computers think” – is a whimsical list of nine reasons why people would believe that computers cannot think. But before he conveys the objections of others, he first confesses his own viewpoint, which subsequently has […]
Dr. Joscha Bach of the MIT Media Lab, and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, has dedicated much of his research pursuits to figuring out how the mind works. Over a decade ago he founded the MicroPsi project, in which virtual agents are constructed and used in a computer model to discover and describe the […]
One grotesque error in an otherwise outstanding film, Ex_Mechina (2015), is when the character Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) asks the character Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson) if he knows what the Turing Test is, despite the fact that both Nathan and Caleb are programming geeks. In fact, Nathan brought Caleb to his home/research facility, expressly because of Caleb’s […]
In the fall of 2013, I lectured to 200 college freshmen on the subject of transhumanism. Their reaction was one of shock mixed with an apprehension for the years ahead of them. Certainly not my intent and I was fortunately able to bring the discourse back around to one of balance and even, dare I […]
First, a caveat is in order. My critiques and criticisms of ideas, or arguments, as expressed in Hard-Wired AI: Insurance for a More Harmonious Future, are not intended to impugn the promulgators or supporters of the ideas or arguments. Anyone who reads ad hominem into my arguments are merely projecting their insecurities into my work. […]
Science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot series, depicted a dystopian world in 2035 where, though humanity is served by humanoid robots, an army of more advanced robots is preparing to attack mankind. Though I, Robot was initially written in the 1940’s, according to physicist and author Louis Del Monte, the science fiction premise in […]
To me cryonics just makes sense. It may not be pretty but, just like open heart surgery, it is one of those things that, without any guarantees, can possibly extend your life [very] substantially. Thus, especially given the alternative, I just can’t quite make sense of the slow rate of adoption evident not only in […]
While many may be intrigued by the idea, how many of us actually care about robots – in the relating sense of the word? Dr. David Gunkel believes we need to take a closer and more objective view of our moral decision making, which in the past has been more capricious than empirical. He believes […]
Many people wonder why virtual reality always either falls short of appearing ‘real’; or it seems ‘real enough’ yet, with extended periods of viewing, the experience can be literally sickening. The following is a VR vision primer to introduce the primary issues involved with realistic display of moving images. Each of the problems would require […]
This is a short 15 min interview I did a couple of weeks ago on Promod Sharma’s Tea at Taxevity Show where we talk about topics such as: the differences between podcasting and vlogging; why I believe one should do both audio and video, the importance of passion and my general advise to podcasters. Hope […]
In 1637, philosopher René Descartes put forth his proposition of “I think, therefore I am” as proof of one’s existence. In 2015, however, while modern technology may tout the thought capabilities of IBM’s Watson supercomputer and Google’s humanoid robots, Cognitive Roboticist and Author Dr. Mark Bickhard believes true cognition and intelligence is still far from […]
On a crisp autumn day, two sleek Mercedes sedans smoothly joined the flow of traffic on French Autoroute 1 near Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport. For hours the two vehicles drove along the highway in heavy traffic, passing other cars when necessary. Although no obvious signs distinguished them as unique, close observation would reveal that […]
Today is Canadian Thanksgiving and I wanted to use the occasion to thank my friend Arthur Traviss Cörry for being a part of my life. At 41 Arthur was diagnosed with terminal cancer and doctors were estimating he had somewhere between 6 weeks and 6 months left to live. Unfortunately, the cancer progressed much faster and Arthur […]
The ghost in the machine. The soul. Consciousness. Humanity has bestowed all of these names, in various forms, upon the uniquely human experience of “being” – the thinking, feeling, expressing, and creating that we do around the clock without missing a beat. Many would extend much of this phenomenon to their pets and more complex […]
King’s college and a thoughtful heart, With a child’s impassioned mind, he Contemplated constellations of circuitry In the countenance of illimitable night. Suddenly, a bud of love blossoms In the verdant hills of youth’s yearnings; Suddenly followed by the Reaper’s slash Cleaving a whole heart into a half life. After the world war to end […]
If you were to stand on a street corner and ask 100 people to define Artificial Intelligence, odds are, you’d get 100 different answers. And, according to AI visionary and educational innovator Dr. Roger Schank, it’s likely every one of those answers would be wrong. “Early attempts at AI were a lot about making computers […]
Whether we like it or not, the current reality is that every day 150,000 people die. And while I have no doubt that one day humanity will defeat death of old age, like anyone else, I am not guaranteed that I will be alive to benefit personally from such a radical development. And so, while […]
As the epoch of an increasingly automated society fast approaches – many of us have already arrived – many governments and organizations find themselves facing and grappling with a heavy mix of logical and ethical issues. Some of these concerns are discussed and debated, while others “rise out of the mist” and force us to […]
Salim Ismail is one of those very rare individuals who can be and look from both inside and outside of the box – all at the same time. Furthermore, Ismail is one the few interviewees who have the uncanny ability to keep surprising me with challenging, provocative, enlightening and often unexpected answers. During my time […]
“Most thinkers…have started out with a very specific view of human nature,” reflects Dr. Nayef Al-Rodhan, Center Director of Geopolitics and Global Futures at the Geneva Center for Security Policy. “My view of human nature is actually the foundation of my outlook – to me, man is an emotional, amoral, egoist…it turns out that our […]
There are those of us who philosophize and debate the finer points surrounding the dangers of artificial intelligence. And then there are those who dare go in the trenches and get their hands dirty by doing the actual work that may just end up making the difference. So if AI turns out to be like […]
My new book Surviving AI: The promise and peril of artificial intelligence argues that in the next few decades we are facing the possibility of not one, but two singularities. The one which is familiar to most people reading this blog is the technological singularity. Its most common definition is the moment when the first […]
Understanding the possibilities of the future of a field requires first cultivating a sense of its history. Dr. John MacCormick, professor of Computer Science at Dickinson and author of Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers, has waded through the historical underpinnings of the technology that is driving artificial […]
There is a hypothesis by Theodore Modis, (1943-Living), that we can expect the rate of technological progress to begin slowing soon, because contrary to Ray Kurzweil (1948-Living), and ilk, technological progress is not exponential, it is logistical. It is Malthusian growth – named for Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) – whose essay, An Essay on the […]
Last Saturday I participated in a 2 1/2 hour debate with Norman Ball that was titled Ray Kurzweil: Visionary or Fraud? Below are the videos of that debate. As you can see the recording quality is rather poor but perhaps you can still find some value in watching them anyway.
The great influencers and contributors in the field of AI today can’t help but acknowledge that part of their success comes from ‘standing on the shoulders’ of the thinkers and doers who came before. Dr. Nils J. Nilsson, former Stanford researcher and author of The Quest for Artificial Intelligence, is such a pioneer in the […]
At Borg LaborGroup ServisesProducts (BLS) – the largest and leading ‘machine employment agency’ – times are getting giddy and sweet due to the recent $15 per hour minimum wage hike for low-skilled human beings. For technology everywhere it is Christmas, New Years and Happy Birthday all rolled into one. The long, hard slog of machines […]
BioViva‘s CEO Liz Parrish is a fire-starter and probably not everyone’s favorite person. But if your goal is as bold as defeating aging then you’ll have to break some eggs. And so feel as you might but I have to admit that Parrish is definitely one of my favorite people – not only for the scientific work […]
Marshal Brain‘s 2003 book Manna was quite ahead of its time in foreseeing that eventually, one way or another, we will have to confront and address the phenomenon of technological unemployment. In addition, Marshall is a passionate brainiac with a jovial personality, impressive background and a unique perspective. And so I was very happy to meet […]
I have previously published a list of what I believe are the Top 10 Reasons We Should NOT Fear the Singularity and it is one of the all-time most popular posts on Singularity Weblog. Today I want to share this neat new inforgraphic that Michael Dedrick designed based on the content of the original article. Have […]
What if we gave people a way to escape absolute death at the end of their biologically-allotted lifespans? Wouldn’t many of them jump at it? Of course, and they do, and have been for some time now. Religionists believe that the metaverse (or whatever they wish to call the whole macro-everything, including all the ‘spiritual’ […]
One lesson we all learn in life is to accept uncertainties. No matter how much planning, researching, or preparing one does, nothing is certain…except for one thing: death. Throughout humanity, death has always been the inevitable end point, thus turning life into a challenge. In order to beat death, we strive to produce the most […]
The first time I interviewed Jack Andraka he was the youngest guest ever on my podcast. At 16 he already had a mind-blowing list of science awards and inventions, the most notable of which was his nanotechnology-based pancreatic cancer test. So when I discovered that Jack will be speaking at Canada’s best annual conference – […]
Brain-machine interface (BMI) technology has finally gotten a taste of mainstream attention in the form of movies like Transcendence and Edge of Tomorrow. The silver screen attention is mirrored by the burgeoning startup companies in the BMI space. The Muse headband is taking the positioning of being a kind of brain-training tool to encourage calmness and […]
It all goes back to the birds and the bees. The fish too. Even slime-molds. Really, it goes to all social creatures that amplify their collective intelligence by forming real-time synchronous systems. We have many names for these natural assemblages, including flocks, schools, shoals, blooms, colonies, herds, and swarms. Whatever we call them, one thing is clear – […]
Living indefinitely so that we may experience the future is an exciting capability, especially after being born with a life expectancy of less than a century. Access to regenerative medicine in the 21st century will enable transhumanists to witness the next stages of human evolution. Can computing power beyond that of the triune mammalian brain […]
A first principle is a basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption. During a discussion on a given subject, it is important to establish the relevant first principles. As it would be cumbersome to do this for every individual discussion, an alternative is to develop an agreed […]
This is my fourth interview with Ramez Naam and the reason for that is simple: Ramez is a cool, smart guy, who writes kick-ass, gritty, action-packed and scientifically compelling science fiction novels as well as being a researcher in a variety of other fields such as human enhancement, the environment and energy. And so I am […]
A few weeks ago I got interviewed on Review the Future podcast. Co-hosts Ted Kupper and Jon Perry did a great job in putting me on the spot and I enjoyed talking to them very much. So, if for once you are interested in having me as “the man with the answers” then check out […]
From a life partner we expect equal opposites; sex and intimacy, connection and individuality, security and adventure–but is it possible to balance these different sets of needs within a single relationship? Has our model of having one life partner, to provide all our physical and emotional desires, become too excessive? Today, the percentage of people […]
Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Clive Sinclair and others, ornaments of techno-world, have sounded the alarm: the AIs are coming and it’s the end, if not of the world, then of humanity. Musk has gone metaphysical claiming we are summoning “demons”. Why demons rather than angels is left to the imagination. Hawking is more […]
Technological unemployment is an issue that I have mentioned a few times during my past interviews. In fact, I would go as far as saying that it is at the bottom of the top 5 biggest problems humanity faces today. So while it may not be the very biggest issue we face right now, it […]
I just finished reading PJ Manney‘s brand new novel (R)Evolution. And, while I was prepared for a stimulating nanotechnology and brain-enhancement science fictional story, I also got an action-packed, character-rich, twisting, and intricate thriller with a very generous sprinkling of classic realpolitik. Add a realistic plot (and issues) that may well become a part of our […]
The idea that man is a machine is an old one. And since the brain is a physical part of that machine it is often presumed that it can necessarily be simulated on a digital computer. But very little scientific scrutiny has been given on that presumption. The Relativistic Brain is a new book by Miguel […]
On April 24 of this year, the Hubble Telescope passed its 25th anniversary. Launched in 1990, the intent of the Hubble Telescope was to help gain breakthroughs in astrophysics. Among many discoveries, scientists were able to form new hypotheses surrounding black holes and could more accurately measure the rate at which our universe is expanding. Most […]
The future we’ve dreamed of already exists. It’s just not evenly distributed. Over the past few years, I’ve covered many Singularity University conferences and met nearly 14 billionaires and leaders with potential to change the world as we know it. I’ve gotten a chance to pick their brains and gained insight into the future of humanity and it’s truly mind […]
It has been almost 5 years since I originally published my 23andMe DNA Test review where I concluded that it was right for me. I also asked you to seriously consider if it may or may not be right for you too. And so, if you still have not considered the risks, the benefits and the […]
So far, artificial intelligence (AI) failed to achieve biological-like levels of intelligence. The recent theory of practopoiesis tells us why: The existing systems are not sufficiently adaptive. Practopoiesis can also guide us to exactly pinpoint where the problems are and how to fix them. The problems stem from the fact that the knowledge must be stored in […]
There are 3 individuals who have had the most impact on what I’ve been doing for the past 5 years: Ray Kurzweil – who helped me to see deeper into the exponential growth and disruptive nature of technology; Seth Godin – who inspired me to pick myself and begin my journey into blogging and podcasting […]
Nick Bostrom has been at the top of my interviewee wish list since I started podcasting. And I have been chasing him for over 4 years now. Once, we even had a booked date and time for an interview until Dr. Bostrom suddenly cancelled it in the last moment. And so, while I am still […]
Though much of our sci-fi entertainment presents artificial intelligence as a futuristic concept, it is present in our daily lives. A cell phone with predictive text, a video game that learns how to better challenge its user, or a chess computer that can beat a formidable grand master are all steps toward artificial intelligence that […]
David Wood is the chair of London Futurists and on the Humanity+ board of directors. He is an eminent futurist whose valuable newsletter I myself have been subscribed to for several years now and so I was very happy that, at long last, we managed to sit down for a proper interview. Not surprisingly, I […]
“Rick Tumlinson is the descendant of pioneers who wants to help create the future pioneers who are going to go open the Solar system and expand life beyond the Earth. That’s why I am here. The whole reason I exist is to make sure that this species and the life of the Earth expands into […]
Pandora’s Brain is one of the most philosophical science fiction novels I have read recently. And since Calum Chace has been a valuable contributor to Singularity Weblog and a great blogger with an interesting and diverse experience in his own right, I thought that he would make a great guest for my podcast. And so […]
The notion of a singularity is nothing if not the concept of big change in a short period of time. But I, and folks like Ray Kurzweil, would argue that the singularity doesn’t just fall out of the sky on a particular day. There are precursors – the exponential trend that ultimately generates extraordinary disruption […]
This is my second interview with William Hertling. The first time we met was at Greg Bear’s house near Seattle where we did both a 1on1 interview and a fantastic science fiction panel together with our host and Ramez Naam. So I suggest you start by watching those videos if you have not seen them […]
Looking back, I think I have always understood that science fiction is philosophy in fancy dress. My favourite science fiction stories are the ones that make you think – the ones that ask, “what would it be like if…” That is what I tried to do in my novel, Pandora’s Brain. I started reading the […]
Marc Goodman is not your typical street cop – he considers himself a humanitarian, he is super smart and well educated, he has worked in over 70 countries, and speaks more languages than I can list here. Marc has worked for Interpol and is the Futurist for the FBI. If that is not enough Goodman […]
My name is Nikola Danaylov and I am the one who dares to call himself Socrates. This is not an alias I have deliberately or consciously chosen myself. Nor is it one I have always embraced because it rarely serves me well. For as long as I can remember I have been referred to as […]
Editor’s Note: This is a short excerpt from Future Crimes – the scariest book I have ever read: In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, he depicted an omnipotent government surveillance state controlled by a privileged few elite who persecuted independent thinking as “thought crimes.” Though Orwell clearly would have foreseen the NSA debacle, it’s less clear […]
Since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis premiered in 1927, robots have been a constant at the box office. Perhaps it’s our sense of wonder at what future societies could look like, or perhaps it’s the inner-geek within all of us that’s curious about artificial intelligence. Technology continues to evolve, and popular fiction continues to reflect our uncanny […]
Is the brain a hard-wired machine that cannot self-repair once you pass a certain age or stage of development?! Can the mind alter the brain?! Does the mind span beyond the bran as a lot more distributed, rather than localized process?! Dr. Norman Doidge believes the way we traditionally think about brains is wrong and […]
Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author and futurist, crossed paths with the scientists of the Bell System on numerous occasions. In 1945, he concurrently, but independently, conceived of the first concept for a communications satellite at the same time as Bell Labs scientist, John Robinson Pierce. Pierce too, was a science fiction writer. To avoid […]
Several leaders in science and technology, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have been putting across their opinions on the potential dangers of strong artificial intelligence (AI), often claiming that AI could be one of the biggest threats facing humanity, and could possibly lead to our extinction. A solution that is often given to this […]
It is important that the transhumanist movement establish a consensus on the meaning of life. Failure to do so will result in conflict, the extent of which is difficult to predict. As it stands today, transhumanism is a divided movement of various competing interests promoting values which are contradictory in nature. It seems the only […]
Summary: In this article, four patterns were offered for possible “success” scenarios, with respect to the persistence of human kind in co-existence with artificial superintelligence: the Kumbaya Scenario, the Slavery Scenario, the Uncomfortable Symbiosis Scenario, and the Potopurri Scenario. The future is not known, but human opinions, decisions, and actions can and will have an […]
“I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race” said Stephen Hawking. “With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon…” said Elon Musk. So why are some of the world’s greatest minds and some of the world’s best entrepreneurs considering the potential rise of super-smart artificial intelligence – […]
Yesterday CBC News was one among many mainstream media outlets that had a prime-time story about the growing fear of Artificial Intelligence. Check out their short video below. Synopsis: Scientists are pushing to advance artificial intelligence and create smart machines. But now Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have flagged that this technology could be dangerous. […]
It takes special types of geeks to hold a 2 hour panel discussion about the meaning of nothing. It takes another kind of geek to watch it. The question is: Are you one?!… And as for myself, I have to admit – guilty as charged! In fact, I think I will be re-watching this totally […]
We Will Live Again looks inside the unusual and extraordinary operations of the Cryonics Institute. The film follows Ben Best and Andy Zawacki, the caretakers of 99 deceased human bodies stored at below freezing temperatures in cryopreservation. The Institute and Cryonics Movement were founded by Robert Ettinger who, in his nineties and long retired from […]
Now that 2014 is almost over, it is time to look back and acknowledge the very best content on Singularity Weblog for this year. However, instead of writing a top 10 (or even worse – top 20) list, which research suggests people rarely read past the first 5, I intend to trick your brain by […]
In some ways it may be fair to say that 2014 was the year when issues of survaillance and privacy became a huge part of our public discourse. And so I thought that re-posting this fantastic TED video by Glenn Greenwald on Why Privacy Matters is rather appropriate. Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters […]
300 000 km/s is the pilot for an exciting time travel movie, combining film noir and science fiction. The film is ambitious, highly visual and is inspired by American and French classical cinema of the 50’s. The film-makers are currently raising funds for production of a full-feature film. 300,000 km/s film synopsis: Lucien Lacroix, inventor, has […]
What happens when we teach a computer how to learn? Machine learning practitioner and technologist Jeremy Howard shares some surprising new developments in the fast-moving field of deep learning, a technique that can give computers the ability to learn Chinese, or to recognize objects in photos, or to help think through a medical diagnosis. (One […]
For as far back as we can trace our existence, humans have been fascinated with death and resurrection. But is resurrection really possible? And what is the actual difference between a living creature and a dead body anyway? Randall Hayes delves into the scientific theories that seek to answer these age-old questions… “If we think […]
It’s a situation we’re either celebrating or condemning… this situation of the singularity. Put simply, technology is advancing at such exponential rates it’ll soon eclipse our human intellect. What that will look like is what this short film by first time director Brian Garvey attempts to answer. Those Unattended centers on a family gathering for dinner in […]
So what is the difference between you and a rock? This seems like an easy, even stupid question. But even the smartest people on earth have no idea where to draw the line between living and dead things. Which leads to mind-blowing implications. What is life after all? And is death really a thing? Lets […]
NASA’s Orion spacecraft is built to take humans farther than we have ever gone before. Orion will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during the space travel, and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities. On December 5, 2014, Orion launched atop […]
It’s true that science and religion haven’t always rubbed along well together, and in fact Galileo Galilei was tried for heresy, but in this article I’m considering a broader issue, not just a religious one. I’m asking whether science is now an established part of mainstream cultural thinking or if it’s a subversive, radical activity […]
The 21st century is likely to be the make-or-break moment of our civilization. The moment when we may go extinct – like the dinosaurs, or we may conquer the Universe – like Carl Sagan predicted… Wanderers is a short science fiction film by Erik Wernquist – a digital artist and animator from Stockholm, Sweden. The […]
The essay below was re-published from A Project Gutenberg Canada Ebook titled Essays in Persuasion by John Maynard Keynes. It is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country’s copyright laws. If the book is under copyright in your country, do not download or […]
Until: Who wants to live for ever is a fantastic documentary exploring when is the right age to die. Until film synopsis: Do you want to live to 100? 1,000? What about for ever? Meet a man seeking immortality, leading age-research scientists, the very young and the very old as they grapple with deciding what […]
Ambition is a short sci fi film created in collaboration with the European Space Agency to celebrate their pioneer Rosetta mission and its stubborn ambition to land on a comet for the first time in human history. Ambition film synopsis: In the distant future, an apprentice struggles to sculpt the geology of an alien planet. […]
I often wonder what the next few decades are going to look like. Many forms of media, from the commercial news to video games, seem to tell stories about androids with a human conscience and men with metal arms. Indeed, many articles show us that such a future is not so far from reality. We […]
Michael Fossel‘s dream is to reverse human aging and since 1996 he has been a strong and vocal advocate of experimenting with telomerase therapy as a potential way of intervention in a wide variety of medical conditions related to aging. Fossel is also one of those unique people who are a real pleasure to see […]
I watched the trailer for Automata again yesterday. It struck a chord within me, as movie trailers are designed to do. However, I feel there is more here, and I must elaborate. Now, as I sit and type away on my smart device and check a text from my smart phone, I’m wondering what we, […]
I learned about the sci fi short Flesh Computer from the writer/director Ethan Shaftel and thought it was worth posting. Here is what Ethan has to say about the genesis of the project: The origin of Flesh Computer was thinking about the seemingly insignificant act of killing an ordinary housefly. The huge difference in scale […]
The Lifespan Society of British Columbia, western Canada’s most futurist-oriented longevity organization, is hosting a radical life-extension conference in downtown Vancouver. The event will be held on November 15, 2014 and the theme for this year’s edition is Longevity and Genetics. Keynote speaker Dr. Aubrey de Grey will be presenting on the latest developments in […]
During my recent visit to the Cryonics Institute I had the chance to do a video tour of CI and learn more about its vitrification procedures and membership policies. I also had the unique opportunity to interview David Ettinger, whose father Robert Ettinger is the “father of cryonics” because he pretty much started the field with his […]
Chief Operations Officer Andy Zawacki guides us through a tour of the Cryonics Institute (CI) facility as well as the whole process of cryo-preservation – from the moment that legal death is declared to the moment patients are placed in long term storage. If you want to help me produce more high quality videos like this […]
Bag Man is the understated story of a 12 year old African American boy, who takes us on an introspective journey out of the city and into the remote countryside of upstate New York. With a mysterious duffle bag in hand, its contents unknown to us, we journey from the urban hustle of Harlem, into […]
Tesla CEO Elon Musk launched model D of his electric car line up – a dual motor all-wheel-drive with new features such as autopilot and amazing supercar performance. Because of efficiency savings designed into the new system of Model D, it will also have a small increase in range for a maximum of 275 miles […]
A couple of weeks ago I went to visit my friend Promod Sharma who runs the Tea at Taxevity YouTube channel. Promod is a bit new to video recording but he is an expert in his own field of insurance and is an all-around nice guy to hang out with. So I was happy to […]
If the technology existed, would you have your brain preserved? Do you believe your brain is the essence of you? To noted American PhD Neuroscientist and Futurist Ken Hayworth, the answer is an emphatic “Yes.” He is currently at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute developing machines and techniques to map brain tissue at the nanometer scale. […]
This is the concluding sci fi round-table discussion of my Seattle 1-on-1 interviews with Ramez Naam, William Hertling and Greg Bear. The video was recorded last November and was produced by Richard Sundvall, shot by Ian Sun and generously hosted by Greg and Astrid Bear. (Special note of thanks to Agah Bahari who did the interview […]
This video was shot during the Clinton Global Initiative 2014 and it features former President Bill Clinton interviewing Peter Diamandis on Abundance and solving the world’s grand challenges. It is 14 min long and it is well worth your time. Some of the topics that Clinton and Diamandis cover during their conversation include: why Peter […]
Greg Bear is truly one of the masters of classic science fiction – he has written over 35 books, that have sold millions of copies, and have been translated into 22 languages. No wonder I was not only immensely excited but also pretty nervous while preparing to interview him face to face. As it turned […]
Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich, and Verity Studios have partnered to develop a short film featuring 10 quadcopters in a flying dance performance. The collaboration resulted in a unique, interactive choreography where humans and drones move in sync. Precise computer control allows for a large performance and movement vocabulary of the quadcopters and opens the […]
I just can’t believe the kind of top-notch quality that amateurs are able to produce today with limited resources and on a shoe-string budget. Technology is indeed a creativity liberating force and indie film-makers are the proof. So check out the latest example below. It is David Weinsein’s Envoy. In my opinion Envoy must become […]
Rap News takes a fun trip into what they call: “the pure world of sci-fi to investigate the much vaunted, mysterious potential future event known as The Singularity. What will a machine consciousness mean for humanity? What are the ethical, political, military and philosophical implications of strong A.I.? And what would an AI sound like […]
Similo is a short sci fi love story by Spanish film-makers Zacarias and Macgregor. It is a project that consumed every penny that the film-makers had and took 7 years to produce. I enjoyed this sci fi short very much so check it out – it is 21min long and you may enjoy it too. […]
Tim Minchin‘s short anime Storm is absolutely brilliant! I have to admit that I often feel the same way as the protagonist of this anime. What’s worse, in real live I’ve been known to be a lot less patient than Tim and to be merciless in annihilating verbally people like Storm… [Lot’s of personal development […]
If there’s ever been a case when I just wanted to jump on a plane and go interview someone in person, not because they are famous but because they have created a totally unique and arguably seminal theory, it has to be Danko Nikolic. I believe Danko’s theory of Practopoiesis is that good and he […]
A classic interview where Ray Kurzweil interviews Marvin Minsky on the human brain, artificial intelligence and whether the singularity is near or not. Most interestingly, Minsky’s approach of trying to make sense of the brain reminds me very much of my upcoming interview with Danko Nikolic and his fascinating theory of Practopoiesis. My 2 favorite […]
Hannu Rajaniemi is a Ph. D. in string theory and fellow SU alumni best known for his popular science fiction trilogy The Quantum Thief [Jean Le Flambeur]. His work has risen to prominence both because of its merits and the legend surrounding his signing up with a major book publisher. Rajaniemi has been suggested numerous […]
My friend Chris Smedley dared me to do the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge yesterday. Since I am not one to run away from challenges, especially easy ones like this one, I went ahead and asked my brother-in-law to film my best friend pouring a large bucket of ice water over my head. Hope you enjoy it and […]
What is the most likely path (technology) to achieve AGI? When will we likely achieve human-level general intelligence? How fast will its intelligence increase? An ‘explosion’? How serious are the risks? The Artificial Intelligence and The Singularity Conference is your best chance to hear a variety of answers to the above questions from leading experts […]
Jerome C. Glenn is co-founder and Director of The Millennium Project and I had great fun talking to him during our first interview. But it has been over two years since our previous conversation and so, when Jason Ganz reminded me that the latest State of the Future report has been out for several months now, […]
Jonathan Mugan is not only a computer scientist specializing in machine learning and AI but also a father of three and the author of The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion. Since this is one of the few good books on the topic that I am aware of, I thought I’d […]
What if Bonnie and Clyde was re-envisioned as a sci-fi? That’s the idea behind David Rosenbaum’s short sci film The Trail’s End. The short is the prequel to Bonnie and Clyde, with androids going on the run from the law. It premiered at the LA Shorts Fest, has fantastic VFX and sleek cinematography, not to […]
This is the email message that a 16-year-old girl sent me. It is one of a series of similar messages that I have been receiving and replying to for some time now. But on this occasion I decided to share publicly both the letter and my reply in the hope of providing others with easy access to […]
I have often felt that being located in Toronto, Canada puts me at a bit of a disadvantage with respect to having a futuristic high-tech blog and podcast. Living in Silicon Valley or New York [or a number of cities in Asia and Europe] appears to make it easier to stay at the cutting edge of […]
The Creative Commons-licensed version of The Internet’s Own Boy, Brian Knappenberger’s documentary about Aaron Swartz, is now available on the Internet Archive, which is especially useful for people outside of the US, who aren’t able to pay to see it online. It’s a remarkable movie and I hope you make some time to watch it. […]
A new video by New Scientist presents three problems that computers can allegedly never solve. In short, the argument is that despite their complexity, almost all modern computers are of the type conceived by Alan Turing in 1936 – and they all have the same limitations. Turing showed that any computer predicated on human logic […]
With current heated discourse over Common Core Standards, America has taken a closer look at the way we approach teaching and what the long-term effects are for students and our country. Are the SAT’s, ELA’s and MRE’s really a plausible way to determine the intelligence and aptitude of a person? Our education system’s main focus on […]
The One God Hypothesis is a potential outcome of the technological singularity/transhumanist movement which I have devised. I have written it as a challenge to the attitude expressed by many singularitarians that technology will somehow enable us to live in a post scarcity world. If anything, it shows that scarcity and competition could potentially become more […]
I have to admit – I was a total bitcoin skeptic. But after spending several months learning about cryptocurrencies I have come to believe that bitcoin is the financial singularity – the most disruptive technology of our present day beyond whose event-horizon human affairs as we know them – be it financial or otherwise, will […]
Some will say that Bill Andrews is totally crazy – at 61 he runs an average of 10 miles per day and at least one 100-mile marathon per month. He also wants to “Cure Ageing or Die Trying”. No wonder Bill is one of the 2 main protagonists of a new documentary about life extension aptly […]
Jeremy Rifkin is a social activist, economist, futurist and best-selling author of twenty books on the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His books have been translated into more than thirty-five languages and are being used in hundreds of universities, corporations, and government agencies around the world. In […]
In my opinion, The Immortalists is the frankest, most open-minded, and uniquely personal documentary about life extension in general and Aubrey de Grey and Bill Andrews, in particular. I was privileged to attend its international premiere during the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto, Canada, and instantly knew that I have to interview David Alvarado […]
I am very excited to share that tomorrow I will be attending IdeaCity 2014. IdeaCity is not just Canada’s premium conference – it lasts 3 days and features 50 speakers, 3 great parties and a ton of inspiration, but in my view it is a mind-blowing, horizon expanding and intellectually exciting event that is second […]
Dr. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, bestselling author, acclaimed public speaker, renowned futurist, and popularizer of science. As co-founder of String Field Theory, Dr. Kaku carries on Einstein’s quest to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into a single grand unified theory of everything. You will not be surprised to hear that Michio […]
Digital crypto-currencies such as Bitcoin are the singularity of money and, after spending some time educating myself, I have turned from a skeptic into a fan. If you are not familiar with the topic then I suggest that you start with my interview with Andreas Antonopoulos. In that conversation, we lay down the basics and discuss why […]
After a serious accident, a man is introduced to a designer street drug promising to restore his ravaged body. Desperate to mend himself, he becomes consumed by the drug – only to discover it is threatening his humanity. "Mech: Human Trials" was written, directed and produced by Patrick Kalyn
Stuart Armstrong is a James Martin research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford where he looks at issues such as existential risks in general and Artificial Intelligence in particular. Stuart is also the author of Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence and, after participating in a fun futurist panel discussion with […]
By creating any form of AI we must copy from biology. The argument goes as follows. A brain is a biological product. And so must be then its products such as perception, insight, inference, logic, mathematics, etc. By creating AI we inevitably tap into something that biology has already invented on its own. It follows […]
This is my second interview with Steven Kotler. Last time we discussed Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think – the book Steven co-wrote with Peter Diamandis. This time, we discuss reaching our optimum state of performance, or what many of us call Flow. During our conversation with Steven Kotler we cover issues such as […]
This article is a response to a piece written by Singularity Utopia (hereforth called SU) entitled The Hawking Fallacy. Briefly, the Hawking Fallacy is SU’s attempt to describe any negative or fearful reaction to strong artificial intelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence, as an irrational fear or a logical fallacy. SU further holds the […]
Scientists at MIT have traced 13 billion years of galaxy evolution, from shortly after the Big Bang to the present day. Their simulation, named Illustris, captures both the massive scale of the Universe and the intriguing variety of galaxies — something previous modelers have struggled to do. It produces a Universe that looks remarkably similar […]
The Hawking Fallacy describes futuristic xenophobia. We are considering flawed ideas about the future. Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, and Frank Wilczek inspired me to define the Hawking Fallacy. They wrote an article warning of possible threats from artificial intelligence. Their fallacious reasoning generated a substantial amount of publicity, mostly uncritical. My emphasis of Stephen’s name […]
Last Sunday I participated in a fun panel discussion organized by David Wood from the London Futurists. The topic was “Terminator or Transcendence?” and we kicked off the conversation by critiquing the film Transcendence. Then we moved on to other topics such as the timeline to achieving AI in general and ASI in particular, the Turing Test and […]
At the most basic level The FIRST Robotics Competition, founded by inventor Dean Kamen, looks to the future by developing the next generation of the world’s engineers. Many of the students at FIRST go on to work at very influential titans of technology, or at future oriented organizations such as NASA. This documentary on FIRST […]
I met Prof. Ed Boyden at last year’s Global Future 2045 conference in New York. There I was highly impressed with Boyden’s impressive work in neuroscience in general and optogenetics in particular, as well as the profound implications it would have on our ability to understand and manipulate the brain. And so I knew instantly […]
There are a number of bitcoin documentaries being produced at the moment and within the next 6 to 18 months we would be flooded with them. The Bitcoin Phenomenon is a 35 min short documentary that looks at the history, the technology, and the clash between the politics of early-adopters and the VCs and entrepreneurs gearing […]
Peter Voss is an entrepreneur, inventor, engineer, scientist, and AI researcher. He is a rather interesting and unique individual because of his diverse background and impressive accomplishments and his interest in moral philosophy and artificial general intelligence. Given how quickly our first interview went by, I wanted to bring him back and dig a little […]
Andreas Antonopoulos is arguably the face of bitcoin because he is probably the most prolific interviewee as well as the most publicly recognized expert in the field of crypto-currency. To top it off, Andreas is extremely eloquent, has an impressively broad spectrum of knowledge and is an admitted disruptarian. I have been receiving numerous requests […]
The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology (IEET), the Mormon Transhumanist Association, and Brighter Brains Institute are co-sponsoring a conference on the theme of “Religion and Transhumanism.” The event will take place on May 10, 2014, from 9:30 am – 8 pm, at Piedmont Veteran’s Building, 401 Highland Avenue, Piedmont, in the San Francisco East […]
Future Dimensions is Ryan Harding‘s 11-minute-long documentary about the future. Synopsis: The present is surreal and one thing is for sure, the future will be weirder still. Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford and other thinkers – such as Kevin Warwick, mull over whether humans might become the pets of intelligent […]
Peter Voss is an entrepreneur, inventor, engineer, scientist, and AI researcher. He is a rather interesting and unique individual not only because of his diverse background and impressive accomplishments but also because of his interest in moral philosophy and artificial intelligence. I have been planning to interview Voss for a while and, given how quickly […]
This week, Singularity 1 on 1 played host to an exclusive interview with ByoLogyc CEO Chet Getram. The visionary leader of the world’s most successful “lifestyle biotech” firm sat down with Nikola Danaylov in a darkened medical facility, and calmly explored some of the secrets behind his company’s successful products, while screams echoed in the […]
Emerging reports suggest that the BRX virus has already infected thousands of people. ByoLogyc – the company whose product is linked to the outbreak, has set up a mobile decontamination and vaccination facility in the heart of Toronto. Even though I usually don’t do any breaking news field-reporting, in this particularly shocking case I couldn’t help […]
There have been rumors about a Deus Ex: Human Revolution feature film adaptation for a couple of years now. But Moe Charif and his Decode Films production couldn’t wait any longer and decided to make their own 12-minute-long short fan film. So if you are a fan of the game you can whet your appetite with […]
Many analysts think AI could destroy the Earth or humanity. It is feared AI could become psychopathic. People assume AI or robots could exterminate us all. They think the extermination could happen either intentionally – due to competition between us and them, or unintentionally – due to indifference towards us by the AI. But AI […]
Shifter is a fantastic live action sci fi short film by the Hallivis Brothers. The Hallivis Brothers are a Los Angeles based director/producer duo that is comprised of two actual blood-related Mexican brothers that have been living in the United States (legally) for over 15 years. Julio Hallivis is an Executive Producer with a strong […]
The world is transformed by asking questions, not by providing answers. Politics, religion, and even philosophy, have promised us the answers for millennia. But the value of the answers delivered has always been contextual and temporary. There is no answer that will last forever. [Though there might be questions that do.] For as long as we can […]
Ted Chu is a professor of economics and former chief economist for General Motors. Most recently, Dr. Chu is the author of Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision of Our Future Evolution. In my opinion, Ted’s book is absolutely profound in the way it draws upon a dazzling variety of philosophical and scientific […]
I have always had mixed feelings about Singularity becoming the buzz word for the transhumanist movement. I am glad that this catchy word is spreading the idea of the post-human future, opening the eyes of people who cannot imagine a time when human beings are no longer the most intelligent and most powerful in the […]
Transhuman Visions is producing a third conference on April 5th – this event will examine a very specific and personal category of futurism…the title is: “Eros Evolving – the future of love, sex, marriage, and beauty.” The 12-hour conference will offer an extremely varied set of presenters, ranging from sex educators to neurologists, from polyamorists […]
Many contend that science fiction has no place in the discussion of artificial intelligence and the singularity. In my opinion, that’s not true. They argue that understanding the impact of artificial intelligence and transhumanism is serious business. When we read the work of MIRI, books like Our Final Invention, or Ray Kurzweil’s writings, we see […]
Generous donor Androklis Polymenis has been a Singularity 1 on 1 fan since the very first episodes of my podcast and I was very happy to help facilitate this donation to Alcor Life Extension Foundation in support of their vital research in long-term static storage. Here is the full text of the official PR release: […]
William Hertling is a rather recent science fiction discovery of mine and the author of award-winning novels Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears, A.I. Apocalypse, and The Last Firewall. William has written several plausible scenarios for the technological singularity that were so engaging and compelling that, as soon as I finished his […]
These are the videos of my presentation at the 2014 Podcamp Toronto. This year I decided that it is best not to speak about podcasting but rather focus on issues familiar to readers of Singularity Weblog – artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and the technological singularity. The session was intended to provide a brief introduction of the […]
I have not done any design changes to Singularity Weblog for over 18 months. And I am afraid that the look and feel of my blog are starting to age. There are 3 main reasons for taking so long: 1. Design changes take a lot of time Until now I have not been convinced that […]
The Ancient Greeks had a word for the largest number that they could conceive of. It was the myriad and it meant literally ten thousand. Coincidentally, that’s roughly the age of human civilization. So today, on Future Day I’m celebrating civilization’s first myriad. Ten thousand years ago was the beginning of the Neolithic period, sometimes […]
Grady Booch is an IBM fellow, best-selling author, software engineer, geek, philosopher, storyteller, entrepreneur and former US air-force serviceman, who used to work on the secret space shuttle military program. If his bio is not enough to make you watch the interview on its own, let me just add that this was one of the […]
Generous donor Androklis Polymenis has been a Singularity 1 on 1 fan since the very first episodes of my podcast and I was very happy to help facilitate this donation to the Brain Preservation Foundation in support of their vital research in long-term static storage. Here is the full text of the official PR release: […]
I first met Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro at last year’s GF2045 conference in New York. Dr. Ishiguro is known around the world for his android, geminoid and telenoid robots and I have been trying to get him on my podcast ever since we met. At last, last week we were able to find an empty slot […]
“Why did you convert your Singularity 1 on 1 interviews to black-and-white?” This is the question that I keep getting asked ever since I started publishing my Skype podcast episodes in black-and-white. And so, it is time I share the reasons and ask for your critical input: 1. Black-and-white is less distracting: The human eye […]
Alexander Hayes is an Australian researcher and Ph.D. candidate investigating the social implications of augmented reality (AR) technologies such as Google Glass. I met Hayes during last year’s ISTAS13 conference in Toronto and the consequent UAV Drones: Pros vs Cons symposium, where he was one of the key organizers. During the course of these events […]
Bre Pettis is the charismatic founder and CEO of MakerBot – one of the most disruptive companies ushering in a revolution in personal manufacturing. If you ever heard of or want to know more about the latest in 3D printing then you have to know about Bre and MakerBot. And so I knew that I […]
When is it ethically acceptable to harm another sentient being? On some fairly modest assumptions, to harm or kill someone simply on the grounds they belong to a different gender, sexual orientation or ethnic group is unjustified. Such distinctions are real but ethically irrelevant. On the other hand, species membership is normally reckoned an ethically relevant criterion...
As you know I am doing my best to raise public awareness of the issues related to the technological singularity and transhumanism. Thus I am applying for a public presentation and need your vote to help get me on the Podcamp Toronto schedule. All you need to do is visit the page below and favorite […]
The first time I saw Dr. Gabor Forgacs was at last year’s fantastic Idea City conference in Toronto and, after his passionate presentation on bio-printed suffering-free leather, I knew that I will have to find a way to get him on my podcast. Dr. Forgacs is a theoretical physicist turned tissue-engineer turned entrepreneur. His companies […]
Steve Omohundro is a scientist, professor, author, and entrepreneur who has a Ph.D. in physics but has spent decades studying intelligent systems and artificial intelligence. His research into the basic “AI Drives” was featured in James Barrat’s recent book Our Final Invention and has been generating international interest. And so I was very happy to […]
In spring of 2013, Texas-based start up TrackingPoint Solutions released the first ever precision-guided firearm, which is essentially a long-range, laser-guided robo rifle. Call it the gun of tomorrow: The technology is so advanced that it can allow total beginners to kill at extreme distances with single-shot accuracy in mere minutes. The PGF’s closed-loop system is […]
In theory, every time a new technology is invented the opportunities for new jobs are equal to or greater than the ones made obsolete. At least this has been the case since the Industrial Revolution onwards. But is this going to remain the case?! Will Work For Free is a Scottish documentary about technological unemployment. […]
During Amit Singhal’s 13 years at Google, the company has been evolving the iconic search bar into a voice-controlled search engine that allows for a more natural, conversational search – à la Star Trek’s LCARS computer. They aren’t there yet. If you ask Google – using voice – who Bill Clinton is, and then ask […]
This is the first out of a series of 3 sci-fi round-table interviews with Ramez Naam, William Hertling and Greg Bear that I did last November in Seattle. It was produced by Richard and Tatyana Sundvall and generously hosted by Greg and Astrid Bear. [Special thanks to our cinematographer Ian Sun for both recording and […]
Brad Feld is an entrepreneur and a popular blogger. He is also the author of The Startup Series of books such as Startup Life. But Brad is best known for being a unique type of a technology Venture Capitalist who has invested in more than 200 different companies throughout his career. And so I was […]
It took us over five years to complete the film Future My Love. In those years, awareness of economy changed dramatically. In 2007, ‘economy’ was not really a hot topic and was mostly left aside for those who ‘knew what they were doing’. This surprised me because I feel so passionate about the subject. As if the economy […]
I would like to offer you the rarest of opportunities. The Museum of Arts & Design is offering 2 FREE passes to attend a Master Class with filmmaker, Godfrey Reggio. The Museum will be exhibiting a full film retrospective of Reggio’s work, including the Master Class, this January through March. [See the official press release […]
Ever since a monk called Mendel started breeding pea plants we’ve been learning about our genomes. In 1953, Watson, Crick and Franklin described the structure of the molecule that makes up our genomes: the DNA double helix. Then, in 2001, scientists wrote down the entire 3-billion letter code contained in the average human genome. Now […]
Singularity Weblog is co-sponsoring “TRANSHUMAN VISIONS 2.0 – East Bay Conference” – with Max More, Natasha Vita-More, Zoltan Istvan, John Smart, Linda MacDonald Glenn, and others. Singularity Weblog is co-sponsoring an exciting San Francisco East Bay transhumanist conference on March 1, that all fans of futurism should consider attending. Numerous people interviewed on Singularity 1-on-1 […]
What do you think the future will be like? It might be a shiny utopia where human suffering no longer exists and we are free to live meaningful, creative lives limited only by the power of our imaginations: Why did the post-human superintelligence cross the road? I can’t say. You wouldn’t comprehend the answer. Or […]
Transcendence is Johnny Depp’s new singularity film that comes out today. I saw the film last night during its first available time-slot and, in order to avoid big spoilers, I want to write no more than a couple of vague sentences: Let me admit that, after seeing the teasers and trailers below, I was very negatively […]
I first encountered Aubrey de Grey while reading his forward to my friend FM-2030’s book, Countdown to Immortality. Aubrey begins, “There’s something I think you should know as you read this foreword, and this book. I’m dying.” Aubrey goes into detail about his horrifying disease. Then, only at his conclusion, do we realize Aubrey is describing […]
Today I just want to take a minute and say “Thank You!” Thank you, because without you there will be no Singularity Weblog. Thank you, because without you there will be no Singularity 1on1. Thank you, because without you I can call myself neither a blogger nor a podcaster. Thank you, because, without your support, […]
PostHuman: A Video Series on Transhumanism In the year 2014, the film-makers want to write, produce and release at least 6 more fully animated episodes. The plan is to investigate a range of different transhumanist themes, consider the arguments in favor, highlight the greatest dangers, and articulate the most significant implications for humanity. The main […]
Transhuman Visions will be an all-day conference on February 1, 2014, that will present numerous speakers who have been interviewed on Singularity 1-on-1. The list of transhumanists delivering talks at the show includes “biohackers, neuro-optimists, extreme futurists, philosophers, immortalists, steal-the-singularitarians, etc.” Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a keynote speaker at the event. Additional speakers are […]
Art history has taken a new turn with the animation Blade Runner: The Watercolor Edition, created by the Sweden based artist Anders Ramsell. The original Blade Runner is a 1982 American dystopian science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott. Anyone who has ever tried to do a cover of a favorite song or worked with an […]
Last October I traveled to Vermont to visit the Terasem Movement Foundation and speak to its managing director Bruce Duncan. I first met Bruce at the Idea City conference in Toronto where he shared the stage together with Bina 48. Needless to say I was impressed by both of them and thus I couldn’t refuse […]
I feared I did it all wrong. They just stared at me with moon eyes. They resembled car crash victims, dizzy and bewildered in the aftermath of a rear-end collision. I began to suspect I was the one who just drove the truck into their back bumper. Five minutes previous I had given a lecture […]
Godfrey Reggio is an inventor of a film style which creates poetic images of extraordinary emotional impact for audiences worldwide. Reggio is prominent in the film world for his Qatsi trilogy – Koyaanisqatsi: Live Out of Ballance, Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation, and Naqoyqatsi: Life as War, essays of visual images and sound which chronicle the destructive impact of […]
Transhuman: Do you want to live forever? is Titus Nachbauer‘s short documentary about transhumanism. Synopsis: Philosopher and Swedish computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg does not accept death as a foregone conclusion. According to him it will become possible this century to upload your mind into a computer. He is a member of a small group that […]
Mankind’s future might be in peril: What happens if an AGI is developed with the shark mentality of a Stock Trading AI System and let loose on the world?! Math is the road to riches in the financial markets these days. No longer the yelling of “Buy, buy” or “Sell, sell” of a few dozen […]
This is a classic Richard Feynman – 1965 Nobel Prize Laureate in Physics, video lecture on how computers think [or not]. As always Feynman gives us an insightful presentation about computer heuristics: how computers work, how they file information, how they handle data, how they use their information in allocated processing in a finite amount […]
Singularity or Bust: In 2009, film-maker and former AI programmer Raj Dye spent his summer following futurist AI researchers Ben Goertzel and Hugo DeGaris around Hong Kong and Xiamen, documenting their doings and gathering their perspectives. The result, after some work by crack film editor Alex MacKenzie, was the 45 minute documentary Singularity or Bust — […]
Dr. Frank J. Tipler is a physicist and cosmologist perhaps best known for concepts such as the Omega Point or The Cosmological Singularity. He is a professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University and the author of books such as The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity. During our […]
The meanings of words change. Meanings evolve. Definitions of words are not set in stone, they aren’t unalterable commandments from God. Words are merely concepts humans have invented. The original definition of “awful” was apparently full of awe, worthy of respect. Anyone can invent a word. Successful inventions enter common usage. All inventions are typically […]
Dave Asprey is founder of The Bulletproof Executive as well as a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur who spent 15 years and over $300,000 to hack his own biology. He lost 100 pounds without counting calories or excessive exercise, upgraded his brain by more than 20 IQ points, and lowered his biological age while […]
In the past 3 weeks I had 3 deaths in the family: First, my aunt died suddenly from pancreatic cancer. Then my dad had a burst brain clot. And a few hours ago my grandmother had a stroke. All in all, I haven’t had so much death since my mother passed away when I was […]
David Pearce is a British utilitarian philosopher who promotes what he calls The Hedonistic Imperative. David is also a co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association and a vegan who argues that we (or our future posthuman descendants) have a responsibility not only to avoid cruelty to animals within human society but also to alleviate the […]
This archive file was compiled from audio and video documentation of a gathering of medical professionals, inventors & entrepreneurs, held at Singularity University in California, February 2013. The selected material gives a portrait of a time in which the field of health found itself at a crossroads between the mature medical institutions which had slowly […]
This title with apologies to J. Robert Oppenheimer Accommodation: When a baby holds a ball, the baby adjusts its grip according to the nature of the ball (its thingness ‘as such’, its “ball-ness”). In re-action to the softness, roundess, smoothness and other attributes of a ball, the baby becomes attracted or repelled by the object. […]
Dr. Noam Chomsky is a famed linguist, political activist, prolific author and recognized public speaker, who has spent the last 60 years living a double life – one as a political activist and another as a linguist. His activism allegedly made him the US government’s public enemy number one. As a linguist he is often […]
Keloid is a fantastic short short science fiction film that reminds me greatly of Daniel H. Wilson’s gritty novel Robopocalypse. It is also appropriate that I happened to watch Keloid right after my interview with James Barrat on Our Final Invention. And so I thought you may also find it relevant or, at the very […]
For 20 years James Barrat has created documentary films for National Geographic, the BBC, Discovery Channel, History Channel, and public television. In 2000, during the course of his career as a filmmaker, James interviewed Ray Kurzweil and Arthur C. Clarke. The latter interview not only transformed entirely Barrat’s views on artificial intelligence but also made him […]
Dr. Stuart Hameroff is a Professor of Anesthesiology and Psychology and Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. Together with British quantum physicist Sir Roger Penrose, Hameroff is the co-author of the controversial Orch OR model of consciousness. I first met Dr. Hameroff at the recent GF2045 conference where the […]
Like many of you here, I saw the recent interview on Singularityweblog with Dr Natasha Vita-More about her idea of the Whole Body Prosthetic. The article raises many interesting questions, not least what it would mean to have an uploaded mind and a physical body, whether natural or prosthetic. In this article I want to […]