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...
Archive for category: Singularity
Podcast episodes about the technological singularity from the Future Thinkers Podcast by Mike Gilliland and Euvie Ivanova
FTP006: What Makes You YOU? Individuality, Consciousness and The Borg
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...
FTP005: Minecraft, Virtual Reality, and The Simulation Hypothesis
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...
FTP004: Would You Date a Machine?
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...
FTP003: The Fermi Paradox – Why Don’t We Have Convincing Evidence of Extraterrestrial Life?
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...
FTP002: Creativity, The Singularity, and The Meaning of Life
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,...
FTP001: Technology, Spirituality, and Artificial Intelligence
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...