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This is our second week on the road and we're broadcasting from uber-sunny Joshua Tree, California. Today we start out with the observation that a dominant faction of the techno-futurist community seems to believe that if our civilization maximizes intelligence, everything will be just fine in the end. We intuitively balk at this promise - and in general, we are skeptical at the lack of vision about what that future might look like. To understand this belief we have to understand what is meant by "intelligence." Then we have to consider the alternatives. We look at the evolution of this dream/nightmare from the earliest days of computer science through the lenses of sci-fi authors like Bradbury & PKDick up through a recent JRE interview with Ray Kurzweil.
Tell us your thoughts in the comments!
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(00:00) Go!
(00:06:14) Futurists value computation above all
(00:08:14) Quality matters for vision
(00:10:20) Intelligence: wisdom, insight, computation
(00:14:45) Futurists dream to become god?
(00:17:44) Insight & wisdom at the cellular level
(00:23:13) False wisdom & hallucinatory insight
(00:31:53) Comfort, computational value structure, and slavery
(00:38:54) Bradbury corollaries
(00:45:24) Soviet model: computational decision making
(00:53:23) Exponential computation goes to bureaucratic singularity
(00:58:09) We could be wrong. Let's be honest.
(01:03:02) Tech should work for us, not the other way
(01:09:19) Allure of authority
(01:16:52) When computational futurists go blind
(01:23:37) Caution for catastrophism. Looking within.
#science #sciencepodcast #TechnoFuturism #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureVision #SciFiAnalysis #RayKurzweil #JoshuaTreeBroadcast #IntelligenceDebate #FuturistPerspectives #SkepticalViewpoints #ScienceFiction #TechnologyTrends #FutureSociety #EvolutionOfIdeas #JREInterview #Bradbury #PKDick #FutureOutlook #VisionaryThinking #PodcastDiscussion #SpeculativeFutures
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PODCAST INFO: Anastasia completed her PhD studying bioelectricity at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting, reading, and guiding backcountry excursions. Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities.
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