2013, Chris Hables Gray sat down with me and described, in uncomfortably specific terms, the kind of global pandemic the world would be living through seven years later. Almost nobody paid attention. It’s still one of the most undervalued conversations in my entire archive.

So in October 2020, with the virus raging and the US election weeks away, I brought him back.

Two hours. Pandemics and cyborgs. Surveillance capitalism, including where he lands in the Cory Doctorow vs. Shoshana Zuboff debate. Existential risk, the singularity, and the gap between #ArtificialIntelligence and what he calls artificial stupidity.

Then we got to populism, democracy, and Trump. Listening back six years later, with Trump back in the White House, some of it lands very differently than it did then. I’ll let you judge which parts.

Chris is hard to put in a box: anarchist-feminist activist, union organizer, UC Santa Cruz and NYU lecturer, editor of The Cyborg Handbook and Modified: Living as a Cyborg (a book I was glad to contribute to). He calls himself a pessimist of the intellect and an optimist of the will. That combination is rare in #futurism, and it’s exactly why both the #transhumanism crowd and the #BigTech skeptics should hear him out.

His parting line has stayed with me ever since: make the news you want to see.

The real question is how many of his 2013 and 2020 warnings we’ve already walked into.

Watch or listen to the full 2-hour conversation with Chris Hables Gray here: [ https://snglrty.co/3XVKb0h](https://snglrty.co/3XVKb0h)

Chris Hables Gray foresaw the pandemic back in 2013 during our 1st interview so I’m happy to have him back on Singualrity. FM Check it out!