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Category: singularity

The Singularity Is a Story, Not a Prison: Philosophy Portal Interview

After 300+ interviews on Singularity. FM, I ended up on the other side of the microphone.

Cadell Last invited me to Philosophy Portal and asked the questions that go all the way down. How a Bulgarian army nickname became “Socrates,” and why it started as an insult. How 300 resumes and one failed job interview accidentally started Singularity Weblog. And why, after 17 years of studying the technological singularity, I believe its biggest prophets got the most important thing wrong.

Ray Kurzweil is a genius and a genuinely humble human being. I’ve interviewed him and spent hours in his office. But his six epochs of the singularity converge into a single storyline where the universe literally wakes up. That is creationism in scientific clothing. It promises the same heaven of immortality and abundance, and it treats humanity as the chosen species.

Silicon Valley’s version is no better: the march of technology is inevitable, unstoppable, and there is nothing you can do about it.

That is not a prediction. That is a prison.

I grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Bulgaria. I watched the same technology build socialism in the East, democracy in the West, and fascism before both. The big choices are never technological. They are ethical, which is to say political.

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Cyborg Luddite Steve Mann: Technology That Masters Nature Isn’t Sustainable

14 years ago, Steve Mann told me that technology that masters nature is not sustainable.

At the time, that sounded like the poetic caution of a man the media had nicknamed “the cyborg Luddite.” Today it reads like a weather report.

Steve is the person the IEEE named the father of wearable computing. He built the EyeTap decades before Google Glass, invented HDR imaging now sitting in the phone in your pocket, and was called the world’s first cyborg. So when he argues for using less, for choosing which technologies to embrace and which to walk away from, he is not speaking from fear of the machine. He is speaking from a deeper intimacy with it than almost anyone alive.

His core move was to refuse the framing everyone else accepted.

Not more technology. Not less technology. Appropriate technology. Balanced with nature instead of replacing it.

And here is the line that has aged into something close to prophecy:

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What If AI Becomes Smarter Than Humanity?

One day — possibly within your lifetime — an artificial intelligence will wake up smarter than every human being who has ever lived, combined. No alarm will sound. No warning will come. In this video, we break down exactly what happens next, why the world’s top scientists are terrified, and why the future of our species may already be out of our hands. Don’t skip the ending — it changes everything. #WhatIf #ArtificialIntelligence #Singularity

Futurist Brian David Johnson: Don’t Let The Future Happen To You!

“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.”

I recorded this conversation with Brian David Johnson 14 years ago, back when he was Intel’s futurist with 25 patents to his name and a mandate to build an actionable vision of computing for 2020.

Read that again. 2020 was the far horizon he was paid to imagine. We are now well past it.

So here is the uncomfortable question worth sitting with: how much of the future he described did we make happen on purpose, and how much simply happened to us while we wondered what was going on?

Brian’s whole method was a refusal to be passive about it. He used ethnographic fieldwork, trend data, and even science-fiction prototyping as a #design tool because he believed the future is not a forecast you wait for; it is an object you construct. His line still lands harder every year: own the fact that you can build the future.

A few things he said in 2012 that read very differently in the age of generative #AI and ubiquitous #robotics:

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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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