FastForward Radio is taking a few weeks of this summer, but the show goes on. You know how on the weekends they play those old Coast to Coast AMs with Art Bell? It’s kind of like that. Last week we revisited two shows, one about future Salons with guest Wayne Radinsky and one involving speculations […]
There are revolutions and then there are revolutions. It’s one thing to throw off an old form of government in favor of a new one, but what about throwing off an entire mode of existence in favor of a new one? Phil and Stephen celebrate US Independence Day with a new declaration to kick off what may be the […]
Futurist Colin McInnes joins Phil and Stephen to discuss hios controversial essay: Bringing Dead Matter to Life. They explore how dead matter comes to life — first at the molecular level and then at the planetary level, why no one should be freaking out about gray goo and other shock scenarios, and why the fate of humanity and […]
This week NASA announced that the Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, may soon reach interstellar space — if it has not done so already. Let the star age begin! Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discuss the significance of this milestone and explore how and when humanity might truly begin to venture to the […]
Ayesha Khanna joins Phil and Stephen to discuss her book Hybrid Reality. Co-authored with Parag Khanna, Hybrid Reality explores the frontier of the information revolution: The Hybrid Age, making the case that what human civilization needs more than anything is not greater IQ or EQ, but TQ: technology quotient. Has “balance of innovation” superseded the military “balance of […]
Stephen Pinker, writing in The Better Angels of Our Nature: It makes no sense to scrimp all your life so that you can have one hell of a ninetieth birthday bash. Self-indulgence becomes irrational only when we discount the future too steeply—when we devalue our future selves way below what they should be worth given the […]
Last week we talked about fallible vs. infallible futurism. We demonstrated how predictions can be phrased in such a way that they are never wrong. That can be an important skill, what with the future being so difficult to predict. But it isn’t just the future — sometimes we can’t even predict the present. To demonstrate, Phil […]
This program may well be the most important 60 minutes of your entire life… …or possibly not. If you phrase your predictions the right way, they can’t be wrong. Is there any value in infallible futurism? And what is its relationship to the fallible kind? Hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon talk about why we […]
Increasingly two models for the near future compete for our attention. We’ll call one model Abundance and the otherLimits to Growth. The former tells us that circumstances are improving and are likely to continue to improve; the latter says that a big reckoning is on its way. A recent debate at TED between Paul Gilding and Peter Diamandis captures the […]
Phil and Stephen discuss the quest for immortality, which has been with humanity for a long time — perhaps since the very beginning, and which has done much to shape the world in which we live. New organizations are emerging with a whole new take on the proposition that life can be extended indefinitely. How […]