Singularity.fm

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 […]

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.” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 last time we spoke via Skype and had a pretty bad video connection. So I vowed to myself that next time […]

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 […]

 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? […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]