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Category: singularity

Doug Wolens on the Singularity: It’s Ultimately Up To You

13 years ago, I sat down with Doug Wolens to talk about a word almost no one was using: the singularity.

Doug was a lawyer who walked away from the courtroom to make films. His documentary, The Singularity, did something rare. It refused to cheerlead. It asked questions instead.

One thing he said has stayed with me ever since. Science is a means, not an end. It does not deliver a scientific destination. It delivers a humanistic one.

That distinction matters more now than it did in 2013.

Back then, machine intelligence surpassing human intelligence was a thought experiment. Today, it is a product roadmap. We used to argue about whether it would happen. Now we argue about what to do while it does.

But the sharpest question in Doug’s film was never about the machines. It was about us.

Continue reading “Doug Wolens on the Singularity: It’s Ultimately Up To You” | >

Collapsing stars could spawn mini-universes, offering new path to gravastars

Stars shine because atoms fuse in their interiors, releasing energy. When a very massive star has exhausted its nuclear fuel, radiation pressure can no longer provide sufficient counterforce to gravity. The star then collapses under its own mass until only a single point remains: the singularity.

While the formation of a black hole appears plausible, black holes themselves continue to pose major challenges for science. How can 10 billion solar masses concentrate at a single tiny point? How can spacetime be curved infinitely at that point, the singularity? At this stage, the laws of physics break down, making it impossible to predict what happens. Moreover, black holes conceal all information from observation: Everything, including light, disappears irretrievably beyond the event horizon.

Robin Hanson (part 2): Social Science or Extremist Politics in Disguise?!

What happens when an economist starts designing a future society?

Thirteen years ago, I sat down with Robin Hanson for a second time. It became the most vigorous debate ever recorded.

I rarely disagree with a guest. With Robin, I disagreed more than I ever had.

Here is what unsettled me. His work on the Em Economy reads like social science. It uses the language of markets, incentives, and equilibrium. But underneath the economic reasoning sit choices that are not economic at all. Policies of social discrimination. The full privatization of law and punishment. Minds run a thousand times faster, and handed a thousand times more voting power. Emulations deleted when they cannot pay their storage fees.

These are not technical footnotes. They are ethical and political decisions wearing the costume of impartial analysis.

Adam Smith, the father of economics, was first a moral philosopher. He understood where the tools of his discipline stop being useful and start being dangerous.

Continue reading “Robin Hanson (part 2): Social Science or Extremist Politics in Disguise?!” | >

Providing Low-cost Clean Water for a Billion People

This summer I attended Singularity University’s graduate studies program. Alongside 79 extraordinary entrepreneurs and scientists from around the globe, I had the opportunity to learn from some of the best minds in the world about a variety of rapidly advancing areas of technology. The context of these discussions was how we might use these technologies to implement solutions capable of affecting the lives of more than a billion people over the next decade.

Singularity University Limited Briefing: a Webinar Monday Sept. 13

Learn about the projects Singularity University (SU) students developed during its 2010 Graduate Studies Program, with SU Co-Founder and Chancellor Ray Kurzweil, SU Co-Founder & Chairman Peter Diamandis, and SU faculty head Dan Barry, three-time NASA astronaut.

Study Suggests Spacetime Can Crystallize Possibly Solving Several Mysteries

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Hello and welcome! My name is Anton and in this video, we will talk about crystallization of spacetime.
Links:
https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1…
#science #physics #spacetime.

0:00 Can spacetime crystallize?
0:35 So what is this then?
1:55 Let’s define the main terms and phenomena: spacetime.
2:30 Crystals.
2:55 Spacetime crystal.
3:50 Previous challenges and propositions.
5:10 Main achievement in the study.
6:10 What does any of this mean for us?
7:10 Solving singularity and quantum gravity?
8:05 Explaining dark matter?
8:45 JWST observations.
9:28 Any proof? Gravitational waves!
11:55 Conclusions.

Enjoy and please subscribe.

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The hardware used to record these videos:

Continue reading “Study Suggests Spacetime Can Crystallize Possibly Solving Several Mysteries” | >

Zoltan Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager Is A Choice We’ll All Have To Make

Thirteen years ago, I sat down with a writer who had just published his first novel.

It was Zoltan Istvan’s very first media interview as a book author.

The book was The Transhumanist Wager. The question behind it was simple and almost unbearable: what would you do, and what would you give up, to live forever?

I loved half of it. I argued with the other half. That tension is exactly why I think it still matters.

Zoltan built his story out of Plato and Nietzsche, out of Thomas More’s Utopia and Zen Buddhism, then wrapped it all in an Atlas Shrugged plot of lone heroes and evil states. The philosophy is sophisticated. The framing is stark. The contradictions are not a flaw. They are the point.

One line from our conversation has stayed with me for more than a decade:

Continue reading “Zoltan Istvan: The Transhumanist Wager Is A Choice We’ll All Have To Make” | >

Jacque Fresco: Apply the Methods of Science to the Social System!

I have to confess something about this interview.

I really liked Jacque Fresco. Not as a thinker I was supposed to admire, but as a person: the humor, the humility, the scientific curiosity still burning at 97.

That made the disagreements harder, not easier.

Fresco spent almost a century arguing one idea. We apply the methods of #science to engineering, to medicine, to flight. Then we run our economies and our politics on opinion, tradition, and the preferences of the financial elite.

He thought we had it exactly inverted. Rigor for the machines, guesswork for the humans.

“Technology was never the hard part. The harder question is what kind of society we want it to serve.”

Continue reading “Jacque Fresco: Apply the Methods of Science to the Social System!” | >

Chris Hables Gray on AI and the Singularity: We Need Strong Citizenship!

In 2013, I interviewed a man who studies cyborgs and war for a living.

Somewhere in that conversation, Prof. Chris Hables Gray predicted a global pandemic. I chimed in that it would most likely stem from a bird flu outbreak.

We were both right. Neither of us wanted to be.

That was six years before COVID. And here we are in 2026, watching H5N1 headlines pile up again.

The point was never the prediction. The point was what he said we should do about it.

Chris did not pitch a gadget. He did not sell a forecast. He argued that surviving the century is not a technology problem; it is a citizenship problem.

Continue reading “Chris Hables Gray on AI and the Singularity: We Need Strong Citizenship!” | >
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