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.

The future is not a prediction. The future is a story. And that means it is up for grabs. You can be a spectator, or you can get your hands dirty and become the author of your own story, as an individual and, together, as a species.

We also cover why we are wired for story, not facts, the Context Effect, and why #AI must borrow its context entirely from us, Karl Schroeder’s camera lens, Ada Palmer on golden ages, Gramsci’s time of monsters, and Frank Herbert’s warning that a certain future is a prison.

This conversation is pre-course content for Singularity Summer:

Eight live lectures on machine learning, story, and the #singularity that I’m co-teaching this July and August with Thomas Hamelryck at Philosophy Portal.

Watch, listen to, or read about the full conversation here: [ https://snglrty.co/4vbE8Dk](https://snglrty.co/4vbE8Dk)

Cadell Last interviews Nikola Danaylov on why the singularity is a story, not a prison: Kurzweil, context, agency, and the Singularity Summer.