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.
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.
“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.
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.
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:
One day — possibly within your lifetime — an artificial intelligence will wake up smarter than every human being who has ever lived, combined. No alarm will sound. No warning will come. In this video, we break down exactly what happens next, why the world’s top scientists are terrified, and why the future of our species may already be out of our hands. Don’t skip the ending — it changes everything. #WhatIf #ArtificialIntelligence #Singularity
“When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.”
I recorded this conversation with Brian David Johnson 14 years ago, back when he was Intel’s futurist with 25 patents to his name and a mandate to build an actionable vision of computing for 2020.
Read that again. 2020 was the far horizon he was paid to imagine. We are now well past it.
So here is the uncomfortable question worth sitting with: how much of the future he described did we make happen on purpose, and how much simply happened to us while we wondered what was going on?
Brian’s whole method was a refusal to be passive about it. He used ethnographic fieldwork, trend data, and even science-fiction prototyping as a #design tool because he believed the future is not a forecast you wait for; it is an object you construct. His line still lands harder every year: own the fact that you can build the future.
A few things he said in 2012 that read very differently in the age of generative #AI and ubiquitous #robotics:
In 2012, transhumanism was still being called “the most dangerous idea in the world.”
Fourteen years later, we’re casually debating brain-computer interfaces, radical life extension, and what it even means to stay “human” in an age of AI. The fringe became the headline.
So I went back into the Singularity. FM archive and pulled my conversation with Dr. Natasha Vita-More, often called the first female philosopher of transhumanism. We recorded “Transhumanism 101” to cut through the fear and the ideology and get to the actual ideas.
We covered a lot:
Why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein still shapes how we react to enhancement technology, two centuries later. Where the panic comes from (Bill Joy, Fukuyama) and why most of it misses the point. The real differences between transhuman, posthuman, and cyborg. And critical thinking as a core tenet, not a footnote, of the whole project.
The line that stuck with me, and that lands even harder today: “Get creative about the future.”
The race toward an imminent intelligence explosion has escalated from a sci-fi thought experiment into a high-stakes global debate.
Accelerating progress across model reasoning and compute infrastructure forces a critical question: is Artificial General Intelligence already arriving?
Silicon Valley insiders frequently claim human-level AI has passed us by, though critics warn these declarations are heavily warped by financial incentives.
If an AI system successfully achieves recursive self-improvement, the resulting technological singularity could compress centuries of human progress into mere hours.
A best-case takeoff promises staggering rewards like clean fusion energy, automated economic abundance, and radical medical breakthroughs that extend human lifespans indefinitely.
Fourteen years ago, Cory Doctorow told me the #Singularity is a progressive apocalypse.
I have not stopped thinking about that phrase since.
We like to imagine the future as one clean break. A line crossed. A god booted up in a server farm. Cory saw something stranger. The end of the world, sold to us as the perfection of the world. Rapture for the people who swapped faith for code.
His sharpest point was about stories. Good #ScienceFiction does not predict the future. It predicts the present. The genre is not a telescope. It is a mirror.
Re-listening in 2026, the reflection is uncomfortable.
The surveillance he warned about is now infrastructure. The platforms he distrusted now mediate almost everything we do. We still treat the internet as a glorified video-on-demand service, and we still pour everything we are onto it anyway.
