Nikola talked to us about his experience at The Singularity University, and about how formal education is not really a necessity in certain fields today. We also talk about success and failure as an integral component of it.
A common life script that we're all familiar with, and that many of us followed, is to go to university or college to study something we’re interested in, graduate with a degree, and then step out to the real world expecting the perfect job to be there waiting for...
Many of us are societally conditioned to follow a certain life script: go to school, get a degree, go into debt, get a corporate job, get married, buy a house, go into more debt, be unhealthy, retire, do some things you’ve always wanted to do, and then die. Of...
It’s interesting how even in today’s modern world of rapid technological progress, there are still people who view the modification of organisms - be it through implants in the human body or genetic engineering of plants - as barbaric or crazy. Then we see the same people going to...
What makes you YOU? Is it your personal preferences? The things you own? The things you do? The things you create? Your consciousness or soul? Or could it be that none of us are really all that unique, and we just think we are because our own experience is the...
When you start questioning the nature of human experience - how or why we perceive things the way we do, - very quickly, what we think of reality begins to unravel. You realize that most of "reality" is constructed in our minds. Our brains are always being selective about...
Science fiction can be awesome for imagining the future. Everybody loves a good story, and movies are one of the best mediums to tell stories. Though sometimes they aren't as scientifically accurate as they could be, movies are still great at visualizing futurist ideas and communicating them in a...
The Fermi Paradox states that on one hand, the probability of alien civilizations is high. On the other hand, we don't have any convincing evidence that such civilizations do exist. There are many proposed explanations for this paradox - some of them quite simple, some complex, and some outright...
When I went to school (both in Russia and in Canada), "creative" subjects like art and music were considered to be some of the least important in the curriculum. On the other hand, subjects like math and science were over-emphasized, and positioned like career subjects. Now being an adult,...
There are many dystopian scenarios that people come up with when they think about future Artificial Intelligence. The Matrix, Terminator, and many other pop culture examples come to mind. Of course, they’re just movies - but they do reflect a fear that many people have of AI getting out...
