104: Are We Destined to Be Pets? Novacene by ...

"Prime Intellect was an uncertain god. It had acted because it had to, but if it had been human its hand would be shaking on the controls." Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! This episode dives into The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams, a soft sc ...  Show more

"The greatest polluting element in the earth's environment is the proliferation of electromagnetic fields. I consider that to be a far greater threat on a global scale than warming, or the increase of chemical elements in the environment." Welcome back to another episode of Made ...  Show more

If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he's created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-w ...

Few thinkers were as prescient about the role technology would play in our society as the late, great Neil Postman. Forty years ago, Postman warned about all the ways modern communication technology was fragmenting our attention, overwhelming us into apathy, and creating a societ ...  Show more

In the 1990s a group of futurist thinkers meet on one of the world’s first email lists. The Extropians imagine a world of augmented human bodies, nanotechnology, cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. Now, some of the thinkers on that email list are turning that AI future ...  Show more

Hello everyone, Jim here. We're taking a brief two-week break from new episodes to spotlight a couple of golden oldies from the Infinite Loops archive. Years later, these remain some of my favorite conversations. We'll be back soon with fresh episodes, but in the meantime, enjoy ...  Show more