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Category: singularity

Transhumanism 101 with Natasha Vita-More

In 2012, transhumanism was still being called “the most dangerous idea in the world.”

Fourteen years later, we’re casually debating brain-computer interfaces, radical life extension, and what it even means to stay “human” in an age of AI. The fringe became the headline.

So I went back into the Singularity. FM archive and pulled my conversation with Dr. Natasha Vita-More, often called the first female philosopher of transhumanism. We recorded “Transhumanism 101” to cut through the fear and the ideology and get to the actual ideas.

We covered a lot:

Why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still shapes how we react to enhancement technology, two centuries later. Where the panic comes from (Bill Joy, Fukuyama) and why most of it misses the point. The real differences between transhuman, posthuman, and cyborg. And critical thinking as a core tenet, not a footnote, of the whole project.

The line that stuck with me, and that lands even harder today: “Get creative about the future.”

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The Intelligence Explosion is Coming

The race toward an imminent intelligence explosion has escalated from a sci-fi thought experiment into a high-stakes global debate.

Accelerating progress across model reasoning and compute infrastructure forces a critical question: is Artificial General Intelligence already arriving?

Silicon Valley insiders frequently claim human-level AI has passed us by, though critics warn these declarations are heavily warped by financial incentives.

If an AI system successfully achieves recursive self-improvement, the resulting technological singularity could compress centuries of human progress into mere hours.

A best-case takeoff promises staggering rewards like clean fusion energy, automated economic abundance, and radical medical breakthroughs that extend human lifespans indefinitely.

Cory Doctorow on AI: The Singularity Is A Progressive Apocalypse

Fourteen years ago, Cory Doctorow told me the #Singularity is a progressive apocalypse.

I have not stopped thinking about that phrase since.

We like to imagine the future as one clean break. A line crossed. A god booted up in a server farm. Cory saw something stranger. The end of the world, sold to us as the perfection of the world. Rapture for the people who swapped faith for code.

His sharpest point was about stories. Good #ScienceFiction does not predict the future. It predicts the present. The genre is not a telescope. It is a mirror.

Re-listening in 2026, the reflection is uncomfortable.

The surveillance he warned about is now infrastructure. The platforms he distrusted now mediate almost everything we do. We still treat the internet as a glorified video-on-demand service, and we still pour everything we are onto it anyway.

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Singularity Summer 2026: 8 Live Lectures on AI and Story

The technological singularity is usually sold to you as a prediction. A date. A curve. A moment when the machines wake up, and everything changes.

I have conducted more than 300 interviews since 2009, listening to the people who tell that story. The futurists. The engineers. The believers.

Here is what I have come to believe.

The singularity is not a forecast. It is a story. And whoever gets to write that story gets to shape what it means to be human.

This July and August, I am joining machine learning expert Thomas Hamelryck at Philosophy Portal for Singularity Summer. Eight live lectures across two months. Thomas takes the first month to open up the machine. What machine learning actually is, what it is not, and where it breaks.

Then I take August for the part that the engineering never answers. The human story inside the #AI machine, and how we might write a better one.

This is not a course about #MachineLearning as destiny. It is about #technology as the How, never the Why or the What. It is about who holds the pen writing our story.

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Ray Kurzweil on How To Create A Mind: Be Who You Would Like To Be

Fourteen years ago, I sat down in Ray Kurzweil’s office in Boston, fumbled with a slipping lavalier mic, and asked the man whose book pulled me into this whole world a deceptively simple question: Can we reverse-engineer the human mind?

What strikes me now, rewatching this, is how little the core debate has aged. Back in 2012, we argued about Watson, the Turing Test, whether AI deserves rights, and whether a machine would ever care about humanity’s hardest problems. Swap a few names, and that is the front page today.

But the line that has stayed with me all these years was not about #technology at all. When I asked Ray how a kid decides at age 5 to become an inventor, his answer ran counter to every productivity guru on the internet:

“Do not be too concerned about what is practical. Follow your passion and be who you would like to be.”

Coming from one of the most relentlessly practical inventors alive, the man behind the flat-bed scanner, text-to-speech, and the music synthesizer, that is not soft advice. It is a thesis about #innovation itself.

There is a reason I keep coming back to this conversation when people ask me about the #singularity and #ArtificialIntelligence. Ray’s optimism is famous. What gets missed is where he aims it.

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Ben Goertzel Just Revealed When AGI Will ACTUALLY Happen | Ep. 38

Ben Goertzel, the godfather of AGI research and CEO of SingularityNet, just dropped some mind-blowing insights about artificial general intelligence that will change how you think about AI forever. This isn’t your typical AI hype this is raw truth from someone who’s been building AGI for decades.

In this deep dive conversation, Ben reveals the shocking reality behind current AI limitations, why decentralized AI infrastructure is crucial for humanity’s future, and his honest timeline for when we’ll actually achieve AGI. Plus, he shares what it’s like running a global AI empire while living on a remote island accessible only by ferry.

Key Topics Covered:
The real timeline for AGI development.
Why current AI models aren’t actually intelligent.
How SingularityNet is building decentralized AI infrastructure.
The ASI Alliance and the future of artificial superintelligence.
Ben’s daily routine managing hundreds of AI researchers globally.
Why math and music drive breakthrough AI thinking.

⏰ Timestamps:
0:00 — Introduction to Ben Goertzel.
2:30 — Daily life of an AGI pioneer.
8:45 — Managing a global AI empire.
15:20 — The truth about current AI limitations.
25:10 — SingularityNet and decentralized AI
35:40 — When will AGI actually happen?
45:30 — The future of artificial superintelligence.
58:15 — Closing thoughts.

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💬 What do you think about Ben’s AGI timeline? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!

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Marco Santini on The Alpha Centauri Project: There Is A Lot Of Space For Rational Optimism

Fourteen years ago, I sat down with an Italian engineer who gave his novels away for free.

Marco Santini was not chasing royalties. He was chasing readers.

His book The Alpha Centauri Project imagines the 24th century split three ways: humans, artificial intelligences, and souls, the digitized minds of people who refused to stay dead. Their interests do not align. Their futures collide. An interstellar voyage becomes the only way to avoid a war.

It reads like a thriller. It lands like a warning.

What stayed with me was not the plot. It was his stance on the future.

Pessimistic scenarios can always exist. With rationality, optimistic ones can be created.

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James Hughes on Citizen Cyborg: Interrogate and Engage the World

In 2012, I sat down with Dr. James Hughes, bioethicist, sociologist, and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

Fourteen years later, the questions we wrestled with have only sharpened.

Why are transhumanist atheists so often drawn to Buddhism? Is optimism rational, or just a posture we adopt to keep moving? What does it mean to redesign the human being, and which democratic institutions are ready to respond when we do?

James does not flinch from any of it. He talks about his first book Citizen Cyborg, the then forthcoming Cyborg Buddha, moral enhancement, animal uplift, and what our actual chances are of surviving the technological singularity.

What struck me most was his refusal to retreat into easy camps.

Not a cheerleader, not a doomsayer. Someone who interrogates the world and engages it on its own terms.

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Tracy R. Atkins on Aeternum Ray: Don’t Wait For The Singularity

“Don’t Wait For The Singularity.”

That was Tracy R. Atkins’ message when I sat down with him 14 years ago, and it lands harder now than it did then.

While almost every story about #ArtificialIntelligence was busy imagining the apocalypse, Tracy wrote a novel that flatly refused to. Aeternum Ray is unapologetically utopian: a series of letters from a 240-year-old father to his newborn son, looking back across centuries of love, loss, and a world watched over by an AI named Ray.

In our conversation, we get into what the #Singularity actually means to him, why he chose to write utopia when dystopia sells, whether humanity’s future is digital or whether biology still matters, and the uncomfortable question of whether we even survive the road to get there.

Fourteen years on, the technology has caught up to much of what we talked about. The harder question is whether our reasons for building it have, and that is the part I keep coming back to.

So is openly imagining a good future naive, or is it the most radical thing a #futurist can do? Watch the interview and decide for yourself.

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David Brin: What’s Important Isn’t Me. And It Isn’t You. It’s Us!

David Brin warned us. In 1989.

Global warming. Cyberwarfare. The World Wide Web, named in a novel before most people had ever heard of it.

I recorded this conversation with him 14 years ago. Astrophysicist. Hugo and Nebula winner. The mind behind the Uplift novels and Existence.

We dug into the most powerful form of science fiction. Not the prophecy that comes true. The prophecy that prevents itself. Orwell’s 1984 is the classic case. The warning so loud the future course-corrects.

We also went straight at #transparency. His book asks a question that hits harder now than it did then: will technology force us to choose between #privacy and freedom? Fourteen years on, with AI watching everything, that question is no longer hypothetical.

And then there is the line from David that I have never been able to shake.

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