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Karl Schroeder: The Singularity is an Old Idea. Keep Moving Forward!

Fourteen years ago, a science fiction author looked me in the eye and told me the singularity was already old news.

This was 2012. Almost nobody outside a small circle was talking about it. And Karl Schroeder, one of Canada’s sharpest minds in #ScienceFiction and foresight, was telling me to stop staring at it.

His words stuck with me: take the singularity, use it, it’s a lens. Then develop other lenses. Keep hunting for blind spots.

At the time, I thought he was just being contrarian. Today, with #AI swallowing every headline and every boardroom, I think he saw something most of us are still missing.

Schroeder doesn’t hand you easy answers. We got into the technological maximum, the Rewilding, why he believes “technology is legislation,” and why he rates the singularity as possible but not probable. He picked apart almost every assumption I walked in with.

Here is what keeps nagging me. The blind spot he warned me about in 2012 might be the exact thing everyone is fixated on in 2026.

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Ray Kurzweil on Why We’re Living in the Singularity | EP #261

In this episode, the mates and Steven Kotler sit down with Ray Kurzweil to discuss AGI, the future, and more.

Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else — https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends.

Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist best known for his pioneering work in optical character recognition and his predictions regarding the technological singularity.

Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360.

Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader.

Dave Blundin is the founder \& GP of Link Ventures.

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Coining the Technological Singularity

Everybody writes about the Singularity now. Almost nobody knows where the word was born.

Not in a lab. Not in a think tank. In the January 1983 issue of Omni magazine, where a mathematician and science fiction writer named Vernor Vinge put a name to the thing the rest of us are still trying to survive.

Think about that. Four decades before ChatGPT, before the AI arms race, before every futurist and their algorithm started forecasting the end of the human era, the framework already existed. Vinge saw the curve. He just needed a word for the point where it goes vertical.

Today, that word is inescapable. Write about AI, about the future of work, about what happens to humanity when the machines get smarter than us, and you are writing about the Singularity, whether you use the term or not. Refuse to, and you owe your reader an explanation for why not. So you are still writing about it.

Thanks to Josh Calder, who dug out and scanned the original page, you can see the exact moment the term entered our vocabulary. A little piece of digital history, hiding in plain sight for 40 years.

Where do you think we are on Vinge’s curve right now? #Singularity #ArtificialIntelligence #Futurism.

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Daniel H. Wilson: We Can’t Win Against Technology, We Are Technology!

“We can’t win against technology. We are technology.”

Daniel H. Wilson said that to me in 2012. Robotics PhD out of Carnegie Mellon, New York Times bestselling novelist, the guy Spielberg optioned for Robopocalypse. Back then, the line landed like a sharp bit of science fiction.

Fourteen years later, it reads less like a provocation and more like a diagnosis.

His novel Amped was about what happens when technology stops being a tool you hold and becomes part of the body you are. In 2012, that was speculative. Now there are chips being implanted in human skulls, and companies are racing to sell you cognitive upgrades. The “superhuman” future Daniel described is being built now, while most people are still debating whether it will show up at all.

What stuck with me most was that he refused the tidy doom story. He didn’t buy that a superhuman AI would spend its existence trying to exterminate us. That’s a human fear projected onto something that owes us nothing. The harder question, the one worth sitting with, is what we become when the enhancement is not a gadget in our hand but us.

Pulled from the archive and worth another look. One of 300+ conversations on #SingularityFM about where #AI and human #enhancement actually lead, not where the marketing promises they will.

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Hugo de Garis on AI: Are We Building Gods or Terminators?

In 2012, I sat down with Hugo de Garis, and he told me billions of people could die this century over one question: should we build machines smarter than ourselves?

Back then, it sounded like pure science fiction. He called the coming conflict the Artilect War. On one side, the Cosmists who want to build godlike machine intelligence. On the other hand, the Terrans who would rather go to war than gamble on human extinction. In between, the Cyborgists who just want to become gods themselves. He even had a word for the body count:

Gigadeath.

Fourteen years later, the war he predicted hasn’t arrived. The question underneath it has moved to the center of the room.

Because de Garis got one thing profoundly right, even if the timeline was lurid. The hard part was never whether we could build these systems. It’s whether we should, and who gets to decide. That is not a #technology question. Technology is only ever the How. This is a Why and a What, a question about power, values, and what kind of species we choose to become.

He was asking it when almost nobody else was. That is why this conversation still holds up.

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George Dyson on Turing’s Cathedral: In Wildness Is The Preservation Of The World

Fourteen years ago, I sat down with George Dyson to talk about “Turing’s Cathedral.”

We talked about the machines that were coming. Now they are here.

Dyson watched the digital revolution get built from the inside. His father was Freeman Dyson. Einstein’s secretary was his babysitter. He grew up at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, playing in the halls where Turing’s ideas became von Neumann’s machines.

He gave me a line I still cannot shake:

“There is no way to completely govern the digital universe. It will always be a wildness, not a bureaucracy or a national park.”

Read it again. Then look at every #AI governance debate happening right now.

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Growing Plants in Space: The Science Behind Future Moon and Mars Colonies | Mark Ciotola

Mark Ciotola, CEO and Co-Founder of Sustain Space.

Everyone talks about getting humans to Mars. But almost nobody talks about the harder question — how do you keep them alive once they get there? My guest today says the answer isn’t bigger rockets — it’s plants.

Mark Ciotola is CEO and Co-Founder of Sustain Space (https://www.sustainspace.com/), a company focused on developing regenerative life-support technologies for future space missions while translating those innovations to improve agriculture and sustainability on Earth. Through Sustain Space’s Orbital Genomics initiative, he is helping advance research into growing plants in space environments — an essential capability for long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Mark’s career spans entrepreneurship, academia, industry, and government, including work with NASA, Genentech, Applied Biosystems, Intuit, Carnegie Mellon University, Monash University, San Francisco State University, and Singularity University, where he served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence and faculty member in Space and Physical Sciences.

A physicist, entrepreneur, educator, and sustainability advocate, Mark is particularly interested in regenerative ecosystems, closed-loop life-support systems, space agriculture, and the broader question of how humanity can build a sustainable future both on Earth and beyond it.

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Transhumanist Anders Sandberg: Embrace Strangeness

“That which does not kill us only makes us stranger.”

14 years ago, I sat down with Dr. Anders Sandberg, computational neuroscientist and research fellow at Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, for his second appearance on my podcast. His twist on Nietzsche has stayed with me ever since.

This was 2012. Before ChatGPT, before CRISPR babies, before Neuralink implants in human skulls. And yet listen to what we covered:

The ethics of transhumanism and the limits of being human The Epic of Gilgamesh and humanity’s oldest obsession: immortality Enhancement arms-races and the risk of conflict between transhumanists and neo-luddites Hive-minds, distributed intelligence, and whether the Borg should scare us Mind uploading and what survives when the body doesn’t.

What strikes me now, rewatching it, is how little the fundamental questions have changed. The technology raced ahead. The philosophy is still catching up.

Anders argued that embracing strangeness is not a bug of the human future; it’s the feature. The question was never whether we would change. It’s whether we will change wisely.

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The Singularity Is a Story, Not a Prison: Philosophy Portal Interview

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.

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Cyborg Luddite Steve Mann: Technology That Masters Nature Isn’t Sustainable

14 years ago, Steve Mann told me that technology that masters nature is not sustainable.

At the time, that sounded like the poetic caution of a man the media had nicknamed “the cyborg Luddite.” Today it reads like a weather report.

Steve is the person the IEEE named the father of wearable computing. He built the EyeTap decades before Google Glass, invented HDR imaging now sitting in the phone in your pocket, and was called the world’s first cyborg. So when he argues for using less, for choosing which technologies to embrace and which to walk away from, he is not speaking from fear of the machine. He is speaking from a deeper intimacy with it than almost anyone alive.

His core move was to refuse the framing everyone else accepted.

Not more technology. Not less technology. Appropriate technology. Balanced with nature instead of replacing it.

And here is the line that has aged into something close to prophecy:

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