The Future And You
Ideas and opinion about the future based on verifiable facts of today.
 
The Future And You -- March 7, 2012

George Dvorsky (futurist and ethicist) is our featured guest.

Topics: Why he has changed from a Vegetarian Diet to a Paleolithic Diet (which is limited to the foods our species ate before the rise of farming and animal husbandry),  and his recent personal-record-breaking dead-lift of 400 pounds. Also, his expectations concerning: techlepathy (neurotechnologically-assisted telepathy); postgenderism; astrosociobiology (the speculative scientific study of extraterrestrial civilizations and their possible social characteristics and developmental tendencies); caloric restriction; the work of Matt Lalonde and Rob Wolfe; the Conscientious Carnivore; Ancestral Health; Primal Transhumanism; and his worry that the Fermi Paradox represents a "Great Filter" which may still lay ahead of us, and which our species might not survive.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the March 7, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 41 minutes]. This is the final third of an interview recorded using Skype on February 17, 2012.

George Dvorsky is a Canadian futurist and ethicist. He has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology—particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He is the Chairman of the Board at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the program director for the Rights of Non-Human Persons program.

Direct download: TFAY_2012_3_7.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 1:36am EST

The Future And You -- February 29, 2012

George Dvorsky (futurist and ethicist) is our featured guest.

Topics: Is it wise to use our emotions (especially repugnance) as a guide to truth? Giving protective rights to intelligent animals (apes, whales, dolphins, and elephants), and eventually (when the time is right) to artificially intelligent software; augmenting animals to raise their IQ (animal uplifting); the new movie Planet of the Apes; the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; better ways to conduct the search for extraterrestrials (SETI); Dyson Spheres; the Fermi Paradox; why your host hopes we will forever move to universes of ever increasing dimensionality; as well as artificially created universes and simulated universes.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 29, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 61 minutes]. This is the second third of an interview recorded using Skype on February 17, 2012.

George Dvorsky is a Canadian futurist and ethicist. He has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology—particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He is the Chairman of the Board at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the program director for the Rights of Non-Human Persons program.

Direct download: TFAY_2012_2_29.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 3:59am EST

The Future And You -- February 22, 2012

George Dvorsky (futurist and ethicist) is our featured guest.

Topics: the importance of studying history in order to extrapolate the future; how democratic transhumanism differs from other flavours of transhumanism; why he is a technogaian environmentalist and how that relates to Bright Green Environmentalism; the abolition of suffering in all species; political problems of putting a thermostat on the earth; as well as the good and bad of living an engineered blissful existence permanently.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the February 22, 2012 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 62 minutes]. This is the first third of an interview recorded using Skype on February 17, 2012.

George Dvorsky is a Canadian futurist and ethicist. He has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology—particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience. He is the Chairman of the Board at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is the program director for the Rights of Non-Human Persons program.

News Item: Your host's most transhumanist novel is now available for purchase through Amazon's Kindle program. All the main characters in Plague at Redhook have augmentations which transhumanists look forward to possessing. Computers implanted in their bodies and hardwired into their brains, for example, such that they can share with one another their verbal thoughts, as well as images of what they are currently looking at, or what they remember seeing in the past. These augmentations are not new to them, this is how they live their normal lives. The plot is an action-adventure story combined with a medical-mystery story combined with an exploring-an-alien-world story.

And remember: you don't need a Kindle to purchase and read Kindle books. There is a free app that turns most smart phones into a Kindle reader. And there is a free downloadable program which will turn a PC or a Mac into a Kindle reader as well. So if you have $3.99 to burn, and want to see what your host thinks the future might be like in story form, consider buying a copy of Plague at Redhook.

Direct download: TFAY_2012_2_22.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 1:07am EST


George Dvorsky, executive editor of betterhumans.com, is this week's featured interview. Betterhumans.com is a webzine with News, Articles, and interactive features serving the transhumanist community. George Dvorsky is also the co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association and has served on the Board of Directors for the World Transhumanist Association.

One of Canada's leading futurists, activists and award winning bloggers, George Dvorsky has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology.In this capacity he has been interviewed by: The BBC, Radio Free Europe, and by the British newspaper The Guardian. He's also been on the Canadian television news-magazine The Hour.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the January 23, 2008 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 84 minutes]

Topics include:

Why there is a negative perception of transhumanism in the general public, and what we can do about it.

Why the mainstream medical community is working hard to achieve the goals of transhumanism (without realizing it) and will continue to work toward them with or without our encouragement.

The vaccination of children is a perfect example of the transhumanist ideal, George explains, since it is an engineered hyper-immunity produced by technological intervention.

Why the complete end of personal privacy may be unavoidable and imminent.

We as a species find ourselves living with an increasing array of apocalyptic technologies, George says, and we have to learn how to live with these things since we can't un-invent them.

His personal expectations of The Singularity.

Life extension in general, and how long he personally expects to live.

Why the areas of transhumanist thought that remain controversial are those more removed from just keeping people healthy, and more in the direction of making people better than they ever were before. These areas include such things as increasing the human IQ, life extension, and wiring computers directly into the human brain.

As well as many other subjects.

Direct download: TFAY_2008_1_23.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 12:01am EST