This week my guest is entrepreneur and technologist, Christopher Nguyen, who–in addition to starting his own companies–has spent four decades working at some of the world’s biggest tech giants. In this episode we explore many facets of AI, including Christopher’s ideas around knowledge-first AI, bad training data for AI, issues with the black box, GPT3, deepfakes, and much more. Follow Christopher and his AI work with Aitomatic at twitter.com/pentagoniac ** Learn more about Singularity: su.org H...
Jan 16, 2023•52 min•Season 4Ep. 2
This week my guest is computation social scientist and professor at Columbia University, Sandra Matz, who recently published her book, The Psychology of Technology: Social Science Research in the Age of Big Data. In this episode, we explore many different ways in which technology and psychology are influencing one another in the modern era. This includes but isn’t limited to the influence of big data on psychological research, the battle between exploitation and exploration as fundamental dynami...
Jan 09, 2023•53 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Our final guest of 2022 is entrepreneur, product innovator, and lecturer at MIT, David Rose. Pulling on an extensive background as VP at Warby Parker and as a long-time explorer of ambient technologies, David recently released his book Supersight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future. Exploring this topic takes us on a tour of some of the incredible work currently taking place and the pragmatic impacts many industries will soon experience, as we...
Dec 19, 2022•49 min•Season 3Ep. 47
This week our guest is Distinguished Professor in Law at the University of Virginia, Danielle Citron, who recently released her book The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age. Danielle’s book, as well as this episode, explores the darker side of technology as it relates to the data of our intimate lives. This includes sensitive and challenging topics such as revenge porn and online abuse. We additionally explore the broader topics of online privacy, includi...
Dec 12, 2022•55 min•Season 3Ep. 46
This week our guest is law professor, author, and distinguished speaker, Orly Lobel, who recently published her latest of three books, The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future. In this episode we explore the thread that weaves through Orly’s work, which often emphasizes the way economic markets, technology, and the human condition interact. Specifically, we take a deep dive into the limitations and future of intellectual property and monopolies; t...
Dec 05, 2022•52 min•Season 3Ep. 45
This week my guest is Rama Chellappa, a pioneering AI researcher and distinguished professor at John Hopkins University who recently published his book, Can We Trust AI? In this episode we try to tackle the question posed by Rama’s book from many angles, exploring topics such as the transparency of AI in regards to the black box issue, the accountability issues for when programmers create algorithms that end lives, the reliability of self-driving cars to navigate an ever-changing environment, an...
Nov 28, 2022•47 min•Season 3Ep. 44
This week our guest is David Wood, a long-time futurist and renowned transhumanist thinker. David has authored 10 books on the subject of our technological future, including his recently published book Singularity Principles: Anticipating and Managing Cataclysmically Disruptive Technologies. In addition to exploring some of the principles and ideas from David’s latest publication, this episode takes a wide but succinct tour of the singularity. This includes (but is certainly not limited to) the ...
Nov 21, 2022•58 min•Season 3Ep. 43
This week our guest is Dr. Gloria Mark, who is Chancellor's Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. In addition to having a PhD in psychology and acting as a visiting senior researcher at Microsoft since 2012, Gloria has recently authored the book Attention Span , which will release on January 10th, 2023. In this conversation, we explore many different facets of attention, including but certainly not limited to how our attention span is decreasing, how technology is sha...
Nov 14, 2022•59 min•Season 3Ep. 42
This week our guest is writer, artist and technologist, James Bridle. Famous for trapping a self-driving car with salt in the mountains of Greece, his artworks have been commissioned by numerous galleries and institutions and have been exhibited worldwide. His writing on literature, culture and networks has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Wired, the Atlantic, the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. He is the author of 'New Dark Age' (2018) and his recently publis...
Nov 07, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 3Ep. 41
This week our guest is Brett Johnson, who was listed on America’s Most Wanted list in 2006 for cyber-crime and who the secret service once declared as the “original internet godfather.” Since serving his jail sentence and leaving behind his criminal past, Brett has become a leading consultant on tech security, now helping people learn how to protect themselves against the type of person he once was. In this discussion, we explore a wide variety of topics, including social engineering, deceit in ...
Oct 31, 2022•52 min•Season 3Ep. 40
This week our guest is David Carroll, a professor of media design at the New School in New York City who gained worldwide renown when he decided to engage in a legal battle with the Cambridge Analytica. For those who may not know, Cambridge Analytica was involved in a massive data scandal using Facebook data to manipulate voters into voting for Donald Trump and Brexit. In this conversation, we explore David’s battle against Cambridge Analytica from start to finish, attempting to go beyond the de...
Oct 24, 2022•56 min•Season 3Ep. 39
This week our guest is business and technology reporter, Peter Ward. Earlier this year, Peter released his book The Price of Immortality: The Race to Live Forever, where he investigates the many movements and organizations that are seeking to extend human life, from the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida, to some of the biggest tech giants in Silicon Valley. In this episode, we explore Peter’s findings, which takes us on a tour from cryonics to mind uploading, from supplements to gene editing, ...
Oct 17, 2022•53 min•Season 3Ep. 38
This week our guest is author and podcaster, Azeem Azhar, who has a robust background as an investor, founder, and regulator in the tech space, including several years working with the World Economic Forum on the Global Future Council on Digital Economy and Society. Azeem spends much of his time these days creating content for ExponentialView.co, where he provides weekly assessments of the dynamics at play in humanity’s exponential transformation. The key ideas he’s uncovered on this journey can...
Oct 10, 2022•49 min•Season 3Ep. 37
This week our guest is Michael Shermer, who founded Skeptic Magazine and is the executive director of the Skeptic’s Society. Michael’s written many books over the years, including Heavens on Earth , which explores technologists efforts towards immortality; Giving the Devil His Due , which is a collection of essays on scientific humanism; and later this month he’ll be publishing Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational . Given Michael’s wide array of interest, we take a wide tour of ma...
Oct 03, 2022•52 min•Season 3Ep. 36
Hi everyone, Just wanted to make a quick episode to let you know we're taking a short break for these next few weeks, but we'll be back with a steady stream of more episodes on October 2nd. I also wanted to take a moment to say thank you to all of those who take time to listen every week. With your support we've been able to consistently rank as one of the most listened to tech podcasts in the world, attracting a remarkable lineup of guests who I've felt truly honored to talk to and whose conver...
Sep 19, 2022•2 min•Season 3Ep. 35
This week our guest is Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The New York Times and author of several books including his latest Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation. In this episode, Kevin and I discuss how the world’s tendency towards automation is leading to the end of many professions as well as a world of individuals whose behavior is shaped by algorithms. We explore how humans have promoted technology from an assistant that helps us meet our goals into now being a boss that...
Sep 12, 2022•38 min•Season 3Ep. 34
This week our guest is Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who recently authored The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s. In this episode, Mark and I discuss how the latest advancements in materials, machines, and information are unlocking a profound new paradigm represented by the cloud, the impact of which Mark argues has been severely underestimated. As part of this conversation, we also explore t...
Sep 05, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 3Ep. 33
This week our guest is author and technologist, David Weinberger, who has spent years lecturing at Harvard as well as acting as a fellow and senior researcher at the renowned Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. And just prior to covid, David released his latest book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We’re Thriving in a New World of Possibility. In this episode, David and I explore some of the key ideas he focused on in Everyday Chaos. This includes looking at the ways...
Aug 29, 2022•55 min•Season 3Ep. 32
This week our guest is lecturer, investor, and author, Nir Eyal, whose previous two books include Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life . Nir has a lot of experience teaching and discussing these subjects, so we were able to explore many different aspects of attention in a very short time. This include the triggers that drive us to get hooked to products, the morality of “hooking” people’s attention, the distinction bet...
Aug 22, 2022•56 min•Season 3Ep. 31
This week our guest is NBC technology correspondent, Jacob Ward, who recently released his book, The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back. In this episode we focus broadly on the ways in which technology and AI are learning from the worst instincts of human beings, and then using those bad behaviors to shape our future choices. As a result, Jacob suggests this creates feedback loops of increasingly limited and increasingly short-sighted behavior. This co...
Aug 15, 2022•55 min•Season 3Ep. 30
This week our guest is Rob Reich, a professor of political science at Stanford University and co-author of the recently published book System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot. In this episode, we focus heavily on how the tech industry’s obsession with efficiency and optimization has often meant sacrificing our values and even democracy itself. This includes conversations about data privacy, the tension between recklessly fast innovation and mindful but slow progress, concer...
Aug 08, 2022•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 29
This week our guest is cognitive neuroscientist and author, Bobby Azarian, who recently released his book “The Romance of Reality– How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity.” In this episode, we do our best to get the full picture of this process, from how physics shapes life, how that life has an evolutionary tendency towards increased information processing, and how the resulting computational universe presents us with existential problems that requ...
Aug 01, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Season 3Ep. 27
This week our guest academic philosopher, Susan Schneider, who is the founding director for the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University, as well as the author of the 2019 book, Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind. In this episode we focus heavily on Susan’s thoughts, hopes, and concerns surrounding the current conversations regarding artificial intelligence. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the philosophical and ethical questions that AI presents in ge...
Jul 25, 2022•41 min•Season 3Ep. 26
This week our guest is philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist, Isabel Millar, who recently released her book, The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, in which she explores the much neglected role of enjoyment and psychoanalysis in AI. Throughout the book, she uses the sexbot as a focal point of discussion, which allows her to emphasize the role of gender, sex, and a body as it relates to deeper questions about AI & humanity. In this conversation we explore the notions of Isabel’s boo...
Jul 18, 2022•48 min•Season 3Ep. 25
This week our guest is German professor and philosopher, Stefan Sorgner, who has extensively studied and written about the topic of transhumanism–which is commonly defined as a movement that promotes the use of technology to enhance the capabilities of humans. Stefan’s work on the subject includes his 2020 book “On Transhumanism,” his recently released “We Have Always Been Cyborgs,” and peer-reviewed publications such as “Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism.” In this conversation, Stefan...
Jul 11, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Season 3Ep. 24
This week our guest is businessman and entrepreneur, Jim Rutt, who you may know as the former chairman of the Sante Fe Institute or from his own podcast, The Jim Rutt show. Jim is also arguably the founding spearhead for a movement known as “Game B,” which we’ll discuss much more deeply in the episode but which could quickly be described here as an alternative to the destabilizing, exploitative, and zero-sum approach to society we currently have. Beyond detailing the specifics of Game B, this ep...
Jul 04, 2022•53 min•Season 3Ep. 23
This week our guest is hacker, Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, who is well known for clashing with Microsoft in the early 2000s when he taught others how to hack and modify the Xbox. Nearly twenty years later, and Bunnie is suing the US government for ways in which the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens free speech, all while also creating hackable hardware with other influential tech figures such as whistleblower Edward Snowden. In this episode we explore Bunnie’s thoughts on current trends and ...
Jun 27, 2022•52 min•Season 3Ep. 22
This week our guest is Todd Rose, who was previously a professor at Harvard University where he led the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality and was the faculty director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program. Since then, Todd co-founded the think-tank Populace to help improve society and the lives of individuals, and wrote a book we’ll be talking about a lot in this episode: “ Collective Illusions: Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions. ” We explore what...
Jun 20, 2022•55 min•Season 3Ep. 21
This week my guest is Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and politician who was the acting Minister of Finance in Greece during their debt crises in 2015. Since then, he founded the political party Mera25, and now sits in the Greek parliament as a member of the party. Aside from his work in government, Yanis has extensive experience with the role of technology in the economic sphere, which includes researching virtual economies at one of the world’s largest gaming companies, Valve, and he has e...
Jun 13, 2022•38 min•Season 3Ep. 20
This week my guest is Bernardo Kastrup, who has an impressive background of working for CERN, the world’s largest and most advanced particle physics laboratory, has written 10 books, and holds a PhD in both computer engineering and philosophy. During these years of honing his unique expertise, Bernardo developed his ideas of analytical idealism, building on the philosophy of metaphysical idealism. In the simplest terms I can explain it, Bernardo basically believes that there is no physical world...
Jun 06, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Season 3Ep. 19
