Show Notes
This is an interview with Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology and co-founder of the Earth Species Project. His work has focused on the societal impacts of technology systems and how incentives shape large-scale human behavior. In this episode, Aza frames AGI governance as part of a broader pattern: when technology confers new forms of power, it creates races to exploit that power - and without coordination, those races tend toward harmful outcomes. The implications of ...
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This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Eric Smith, Specially Appointed Professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI), Institute of Science Tokyo, External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and co-author with Harold Morowitz of The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth: The Emergence of the Fourth Geosphere. Eric argues that sorting the world into living and non-living things is a category error. He asks whether the difference between a planet with life ...
This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor of English at UCLA and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emerita of Literature at Duke University, and author of How We Became Posthuman, Unthought, and Bacteria to AI. Katherine defines life through cognition: a process of interpreting information in contexts that connect it with meaning, marked by five criteria she calls SIRAL (sensing, interpreting, responding...
This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with David Pearce, the philosopher who wrote The Hedonistic Imperative in 1995 and co-founded the World Transhumanist Association with Nick Bostrom in 1998. In this conversation, David argues that the pleasure-pain axis discloses the world's inbuilt metric of disvalue, and that our overriding ethical obligation as a species is to phase out the biology of suffering throughout the living world and replace it with information-s...
Eörs Szathmáry co-developed, with the late John Maynard Smith, the theory of major transitions in evolution - the framework for understanding how life has repeatedly reorganized itself into higher levels of complexity across nearly 4 billion years. He's also a co-author, alongside Viktor Müller and Luc Steels, of a recent PNAS paper arguing that AI may be on the verge of undergoing a major transition of its own. In this conversation, Eörs lays out what actually constitutes a major transition...
This installment of the Stewarding the Flame series is an interview with Connor Glass, founder and CEO of Phantom Neuro, a company building implantable technology that interfaces with the body's peripheral nervous system. Connor argues that artificial intelligence already meets his own definition of life, and that biological evolution has effectively hit its ceiling - the cyborg, not the pure robot, is what he sees as humanity's next stage, with implantable technology (not wearables) as the ...