Episode #80 – Applying Reason to the Future – Talking Singularity with Dr. Michael Shermer, Founder of Skeptic Magazine

Vivek Wadhwa began as a software entrepreneur and now is a well-known speaker, writer, and Vice President of Academics and Innovation at Singularity University.

Episode Summary: Today we have a guest who has interviewed more futurists than anyone else I know. While at Emerj a lot of our interviews focus on executives in AI, Nikola Danaylov has had the pleasure of interviewing some of the finest futurists and forward-thinking minds in the world, including Ray Kurzweil, Verner Vinge, Marvin Minsky, and many others. We speak today about the trends he’s seen aggregated (if any) amongst futurists, and about how technology may be dragging us farther into a transhuman future, whether that be closer to a utopia or a dystopia.

Dan Martell started off his entrepreneurial career in a small town in Canada - and no explicitly business mentors to learn from.

Whether it's literature, science fiction movies or other forms of art, can the visions of a possible future actually help to mold or influence actual future outcomes? According to Ariel Waldman, people do look to fiction as a means of stimulating change.

Dr. Mihail Lebedev is a widely published brain-machine interface (BMI) researcher currently at Duke University. In this episode, we cover the past of BMI technology, dating back to the 1950s, into a surprising and unknowable future of enhanced human potential.
Check out this episode on Libsyn.
Listen on iTunes.
Image credit: www.brainfacts.org