Jamais Cascio: You Matter! Your Choices Make A Difference.

Jamais Cascio is one of the worlds top 100 thinkers according to Foreign Policy. He writes and speaks on a variety of topics from technology and global warming, to war, nuclear proliferation, ethics and sustainable development. Thus my goal was to discuss most of those topics for, in one way or another, they are relevant to our future. Unfortunately I got tangled up in our discussion of the singularity and we spent most of our time on that topic. The good news, however, is that I am planning to use this as an excuse and invite Jamais to come back again on Singularity 1 on 1. During our conversation with Jamais Cascio we cover a wide variety of topics such as: his personal story of becoming “an easily distracted generalist;” his undergraduate and graduate training in history, anthropology and political science; his views on the singularity community in general and the technological singularity and Singularity University in particular; his criticism that creators of new technology rarely consider the ethical and political implications of their inventions; what he means by saying “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of the singularity;” the benefits of irrationality and biology; mind uploading versus human augmentation; the lack of agency and assumed machine perfection as some of the most upsetting aspects of the singularity…