AI Podcast Interviews Articles and Reports

Ariel Waldman loves space, and once wanted to work for NASA. Badly. So badly, in fact, that NASA could sense it when they read her letter to them – stating that she wanted to be involved in any way. Though she got to learn about dark matter and black holes, and though she got to send objects into space, she realized she didn't need NASA for this job.

Starting a new company is challenging, exhilarating and something you never forget. It can also be very rewarding. In 1999, David Beisel co-founded the email marketing company Sombasa Media. After a successful exit, he shifted in the the venture capital world, spending three years with Venrock. Nowadays, Beisel is co-founder and partner at NextView Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in internet-enabled startups. Beisel specializes in helping entrepreneurs build successful digital media and internet companies.

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.

Randal Koene, PhD, is CEO and founder of CarbonCopies.org, and one of the world's foremost experts on neurology as it relates to uploading human minds. "Uploading" is still the stuff of science fiction, but it's a life mission for Koene – and legendary futurists and scientists such as Ray Kurzweil expect it to be possible within just a few decades of progress.

Dr. Patrick Hopkins is a philosopher and bioethicist. In this interview, we don't contemplate traditional bioethic concerns of animal testing or disease treatment. Instead, we discuss some important considerations of how emerging technologies might alter our bodies, minds, personalities and gender – and, indeed, what "human" might imply in the first place.

Since the inception of the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI) in the 1950s, progress in the field has advanced at a rapid pace. We have seen the development of early neural networks, game AI, the Turing Test, and theories involving expert systems and intelligent agents, but according to Ben Goertzel, there is a specific element of AI today that is significantly missing.

Augmented Reality (AR)—a live view of a real-world situation with extra elements supplied by computer-generated sensory input—is a rapidly advancing field in high technology. Pete Wassell is the founder and CEO of Augmate, a B2B augmented reality enterprise that is on the cutting edge of AR.

In this episode, we interview Brad Burge, marketing and communications director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).