Review The Future

We’re back! In this return episode we’re looking back at the prediction made for this year, 2019, twenty years ago in Ray Kurzweil’s 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. This list was impressively specific and bold, and as we show not all of the predictions panned out. But is Kurzweil just a bit optimistic, […]

In this week’s discussion Ted and Jon talk about the new Robin Hanson article positing a future ‘hypocralypse’ in which useful hypocrisies become impossible to pull off because of technology. How will people and culture react? What might happen to laws and norms that are very influenced by symbolic concerns? Also they discuss the four […]

In today’s episode, we discuss the future of sex robots. Inspired by the book Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, we consider various benefits and harms that sex robots might have on users, society, and even the robots themselves. Will sex robots be on balance a good thing or a bad thing? Will they provide […]

A team of 26 authors just published a fascinating new report on the malicious uses of AI. Inspired by the structure and content of this report, we decided to do a podcast overview of the various ways AI might be misused in the near future. Many discussions of AI tend to focus on either unintended […]

In today’s episode we tried an experiment. Lacking topics that we felt were big enough for a whole episode, we instead discussed a lot of little topics including self driving cars, the philosophy of David Deutsch, cryptocurrency in the Marshall Islands, a new paper on AI dangers, durable goods increasingly becoming services, Walmart scanning robots, […]

In today’s episode, we discuss Google’s new conversational AI, known as Duplex. Although impressive as a tech demo, this new technology has not received the warmest of receptions. We discuss the various ethical and possibly criminal implications of robots that can convincingly fool humans over the phone. Next, we discuss a possible shift to a […]

We discuss Moore’s law and how it undergirds most futurist predictions, and what that means now that it appears to be coming to an end. We cover the benefits of predictable gains for software developers versus the low hanging opportunities to optimize. We then cover the abstract idea of optimism vs. pessimism in argumentation and […]

In today’s episode we dive into the implications of two recent news stories.  The first involves an exciting new tech demo that came out of the MIT Media Lab for a device called the AlterEgo. The AlterEgo combines subvocal recognition with bone conduction tech to create the external appearance of computer-aided telepathy. Does this technology […]

In today’s episode we wade into the ongoing societal conversation around social media and privacy that has been taking place in the wake of the recent Facebook scandal. But before getting started we do some follow up on previous discussion topics: existential risk and self driving cars. Next, after a quick rehash of the Cambridge […]

For the first time ever, today’s episode was recorded and uploaded on the same day, with no editing. As part of our push to get more content out quicker, we are taking steps towards a live radio format. On this podcast, we discuss coverage of the recent Uber self driving car accident. What does the […]

We discuss AI risk argument through two recent articles, one written by sci fi author Ted Chiang and one by Steven Pinker, both of which dismiss the strongest version of the arguments as put forth by Nick Bostrom and others, in this episode. Is insight the same as morality, as Chiang seems to think? Does […]

As part of our new casual discussion series, we do two mini reviews of recent science fiction TV shows. Jon shares his critiques of the the first episode of the new season of Black Mirror, while Ted offers his impressions of the new show Altered Carbon. Although we found some things to appreciate, in general […]

Today we are rejoined by professor and friend of the podcast Robin Hanson. Robin has just co-authored a fascinating new book called The Elephant in the Brain. This book examines our hidden motives, and while it has nothing directly to do with the future, it does have significant implications for policy and institutional design. Robin […]

In this episode we discuss the prospect of designer babies. As genetic engineering and reproductive technologies continue to advance, parents are likely to gain unprecedented control over their offspring. We discuss some of the recent progress in germ line engineering and speculate about the degree of manipulation that might be possible in the near term. […]

Impressive demos promise that new technologies will democratize the kind of high-end audio and video fakery we usually associate only with blockbuster films. In this episode Jon and Ted extrapolate on that idea: what happens when many things can be faked, and everyone knows it? We discuss previous eras of forgery and modern forensics, posit an […]

Thanks in part to Elon Musk and other popularizers, many people have encountered the notion that we might be living in a simulation. However, far fewer people are familiar with the exact details of Nick Bostrom’s “Simulation Argument”, the paper from which much of the conversation originated. In this podcast, we attempt to do justice to Bostrom’s argument by laying it […]

With the explosion of possibilities in new interactive systems brought by ubiquitous computing and VR, we thought it made sense to try to nail down some precise language for how to discuss all these types of systems. In this episode we explore a possible categorization schema for interactive systems along two axes: Variability and Goal-Orientation. We walk […]

In this episode, we have a free-ranging conversation that begins by discussing the modern replication crisis in psychology and other fields. We examine how this development might affect our views on the pace of progress generally. Amidst our many tangents, we consider the possibility of getting tech companies to share their proprietary data for the sake of science […]

In this episode, we discuss the modern Darwinian battle for attention currently playing out on the global internet. We consider some of the psychological methods that have been and will be developed for capturing and keeping people’s attention. We wonder whether the solution that will help us navigate this growing war for our eyeballs is digital assistant technology […]

We’re back! We really didn’t want to talk about Trump, but we felt like we had to at least address it. How does the new US president affect our future predictions? Find out in this episode. Relevant Links: PAPER: Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets