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Category: singularity – Page 2

The Great Progression: Peter Leyden on AI and the Next 25 Years

80 years, America tears itself down and rebuilds. 1776. 1865. 1945. And now, according to Peter Leyden, 2025.

A couple of months ago I sat down with Peter for SingularityFM. He’s the guy who co-wrote the 1997 “Long Boom” cover story for WIRED, and he’s spent three decades trying to map where this civilization is actually headed. His new book, The Great Progression (HarperCollins), makes an audacious claim:

AI, clean energy, and bioengineering are converging into a change on the scale of the Enlightenment. And Trump, in his framing, isn’t the future. He’s the wrecking ball that clears the ground for whatever comes next.

I didn’t let him off easy. I pushed him on the human cost every one of these reinventions has demanded in the past. I pushed him on the myth of golden ages, using Ada Palmer’s work on the Renaissance. I pushed him on Denmark and Norway ripping devices back out of classrooms after being early adopters. He had an answer for all three. Whether they hold up is for you to decide.

What we get into:

The email from Kevin Kelly that pulled Peter into WIRED’s founding years What the Long Boom thesis got right, and what it missed Why he calls Trump a wrecking ball, not a builder The coming “abundance politics” coalition The strange pessimism about AI unique to English-speaking countries How writing this book with AI made him 2 to 3x more productive.

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Surviving AI: Are We Entering the Economic Singularity? | Calum Chace

Are AI layoffs and rapid automation signs of the Economic Singularity? Futurist Calum Chace explores AGI, jobs, investment, and the future of work.

Calum Chace Books (More Links Below):
https://calumchace.com/the-economic-s…

Futurist and author Calum Chace returns to examine how artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape employment, investment, infrastructure and the commercial economy. Calum is the author of The Economic Singularity and Surviving AI, a co-founder of the AI company Conscium, and co-host of the London Futurists podcast.

In this interview, we separate three very different stories that are often grouped together as “AI layoffs”: workers directly displaced by automation; employees cut or reallocated when companies restructure or abandon AI projects; and conventional layoffs that may be “AI-washed” to make ordinary cost reductions sound like technological transformation.

We also explore the growing AI backlash. Is today’s anxiety simply part of the normal adoption cycle surrounding a disruptive technology, similar to earlier resistance to the internet, e-commerce and electric vehicles? Or is AI fundamentally different because it can compete directly with human cognitive labor, creativity and professional expertise?

Calum shares his predictions for AI agents, artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence, along with the commercial AI applications most likely to generate real value. We examine whether the enormous investment in AI infrastructure represents a speculative bubble, a necessary technological overbuild, or some combination of the two.

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Barry Ptolemy on “Transcendent Man”

In August 2010, I got on the phone with a filmmaker who had spent three years following Ray Kurzweil around the world with a camera.

Barry Ptolemy was twelve years old when he stood on the set of E.T. next to Spielberg. Decades later, he read The Singularity is Near and decided his first feature film would not be fiction.

Transcendent Man had not opened in theaters yet when we spoke. Back then the claims in it sounded like a pitch meeting nobody would greenlight: intelligence that stops being biological, no clean line left between human and machine, aging reversed, world hunger solved, death itself treated as an engineering problem.

Read that list again in 2026 and tell me which line you want to laugh at.

Some of it looks naive now. Some of it looks early. What stayed with me is what Barry said about the man behind the predictions, because the film is not really a documentary about #ArtificialIntelligence. It is a documentary about a son and his father, and about what grief will build if you give it enough compute.

I asked him whether he believed Ray. Sixteen years on, his answer is still the part I turn over in my head when people tell me the #Singularity is finally here.

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Kevin Warwick: You Have To Take Risks To Be Part Of The Future

2010, I sat down with a man who had a computer wired into the median nerve of his left arm and asked him if it was worth the risk.

Kevin Warwick did not hedge: You have to take risks to be part of the future, he told me.

Back then it sounded reckless. Warwick had already done what nobody else would do to their own body: a neurosurgical implant linking his nervous system directly to a machine, the first ultrasonic sense ever added to a human being, and the first purely electronic signal sent from one person’s nervous system to another. The other person was his wife, Irena.

Nearly sixteen years later, there is a billion-dollar #BrainComputerInterface industry circling the same territory, complete with funding rounds, FDA trials, and product launches. Warwick got there first, in a lab at Reading, with a surgeon and a spouse willing to go under the knife with him. That is what being the first #Cyborg actually cost.

He also put a question to Ray Kurzweil that has never really been answered: why hasn’t Ray experimented with implant technology yet? Talking about merging with machines is cheap. Getting cut open is not.

We spent an hour on human and artificial intelligence, robotics, God, the beginning of the universe, and the #Singularity. The part that has aged the strangest is not the hardware. It is his line about who gets to shape the future and who just stands there watching it arrive.

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Stephen Wolfram: To Understand the Future, Explore the Computational Universe

In January 2011, I spent an hour on the phone with Stephen Wolfram.

Put that in context. Deep learning had not yet won ImageNet. Transformers were six years away. Wolfram|Alpha was barely a year old, and most people filed it under “search engine that does your homework.”

His answer to my questions kept coming back to the same place: if you want to understand the future, go explore the computational universe. Run the simple programs. Watch what they actually do. Stop assuming that complicated behavior requires complicated causes.

I had spent three days preparing for that conversation and still came away thinking I had just talked to one of the smartest people alive.

Fifteen years later, the industry is quietly rediscovering his argument. You cannot know what a system will do without running it. Wolfram had a name for that long before anyone needed it to explain why #AI alignment is so hard.

What I find strangest on re-listen is what he said about the singularity itself, and how carefully he refused to say what everyone else in 2011 was saying.

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James Martin: We Can Control Accelerating Technology

In February 2011, I spent an hour on Skype asking one of the most influential computer scientists alive whether we could still steer the technologies we were building.

James Martin said yes.

He had earned the right to that answer. Computerworld ranked him fourth among the 25 people who most shaped computer science. The Sunday Times called him Britain’s leading futurist. He wrote 104 textbooks, picked up a Pulitzer nomination, collected honorary doctorates from six continents, then gave away more than $100 million to found the Oxford Martin School so 30 institutes could work on the hardest problems of the century.

So when he told me accelerating technology is controllable, he was not being naive. He was being deliberate. Control, in his telling, was never a technical property of the machines. It was a civilizational choice, and he thought this century was the narrow window in which we get to make it.

We talked about exponential growth in genetics, robotics, nanotech and #AI. We talked about The Meaning of the 21st Century and the project he was working on then, the Transformation of Humankind. He was not selling optimism. He was assigning homework.

Fifteen years later, the claim in the title is a lot harder to defend than it was when he made it. Or maybe that is precisely his point, and we are the ones who failed the assignment.

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Kevin Warwick: Be/Come the Cy/Borg

In February 2011, IBM’s Watson had just beaten two human champions at Jeopardy, and most people filed it under party trick.

A few days later, I sat down with Prof. Kevin Warwick for the second time. He had already run a wire into the median nerve of his own left arm and sent a signal from his nervous system straight into his wife’s. The press called him an eccentric. A few of his colleagues used a less generous word.

So I asked him where the line between genius and madness actually sits. We also got into the magnetic implants and sensory substitution devices his students were building, the trouble his rat-brain-cell robot kept running into, and why Alan Turing was owed far more than Britain ever gave him.

Fifteen years on, #BCI implants have moved from stunt to clinical trial, #AI writes the code that writes the code, and the open question is no longer whether we merge with our machines. It is on whose terms, and who gets a vote.

Kevin’s answer back in 2011 was three words: be/come the #cyborg.

Prophecy or warning? Watch it and tell me which one you hear.

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Vernor Vinge: We Can Surpass the Wildest Dreams of Optimism

Fifteen years ago, I spent an hour with the man who gave us the word.

Vernor Vinge coined “technological singularity.” In his 1993 paper for NASA, he put a clock on it: within thirty years we would have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, he wrote, the human era would end.

That deadline came and went. Vinge died in March 2024, past his own due date, which means he never got to grade his own paper. The rest of us are holding the pencil now.

The title of our conversation was his line, not mine:

We can surpass the wildest dreams of optimism.

From most people, that would be marketing. From a hard #ScienceFiction writer who spent thirty years teaching math and computer science, it was a hypothesis with conditions attached, and he was just as specific about what happens when the conditions are not met.

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