G’DAY WORLD #255 – Jamais Cascio, Futurist

Jamais Cascio is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer and ethical futurist. He chatted with me last week about the “Participatory panopticon“, Sousveillance, and why everyone should take “democratic transhumanism” very, very seriously. Read Jamais’ blog to find out more about his views on the preferred future. You can also catch Jamais at the Singularity Institute‘s conference in September 2007.

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G’DAY WORLD #252 – Steve Omohundro, Self-Aware Systems

Steve Omohundro

Steve Omohundro is a computer scientist and President of Self-Aware Systems in Palo Alto, California. Since April 2007 he is a research advisor to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. We chatted this morning about his timeline and vision for the possible ways that artificial intelligence will emerge and how he believes self-aware machines will benefit humanity.

Steve is going to be another of the speakers at SIAI’s conference in September 2007.

Become part of the G’Day World conversation.

If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.

Do me a solid and digg the show.

Get the TPN version of Particls?

Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.

You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.

If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!

The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me” by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.


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Cam’s World 15 June, 2007

Been quiet for the last couple of days. Lots of travel and meetings.

Yesterday, Duncan Riley (aka Michael Arrington’s bitch), Jim Stewart and I spoke on a panel at the evolve conference in Melbourne. The panel was about content anarchy or something. We were the last session of the day and today Kimberley (the event organizer) told us that the audience voted our session the best of the day. I bet she says that to everyone though. Jim says his favourite moment was my dildo reference. Don’t ask. You had to be there.

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Caught a taxi to the airport with Ross Dawson and we had a great chat about the Singularity. Ross looks like an accountant but he’s really a major geek. He’s got a one minute video interview with my ungrateful protégé Rich Giles from his Web 2.0 event in Sydney last week. As usual, he didn’t invite me to speak. Hmph.

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For those of you who can’t get enough of me (which isn’t many of you), I’m on this week’s edition of The Father Bob Show. I’ll be taking over co-hosting the show again for a few weeks while Michaela takes a holiday. Someone want to start a book running on how long it will be before Bob and I get into a screaming argument over the evils of religion?

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What’s Cam reading at the moment, did I hear you ask?

Here’s a quick selection of the latest tomes added to the veritable mountain beside my bed:


Kurzweil doesn’t believe global warming is a problem

Didn’t expect THAT, did you?

I’m prepping for my chat with Vint tomorrow morning and happened upon this recent interview with Kuzweil on CNNMoney where he says:

“These slides that Gore puts up are ludicrous,” says the man who once delivered a tech conference presentation as a singing computer avatar named Ramona. (That stunt was the inspiration for the 2002 Al Pacino movie “Simone.”) “They don’t account for anything like the technological progress we’re going to experience.”

I guess he means that accelerating technological progress will allow us to generate power using fossil-fuel substitutes and undo the damage we’ve already done. He might be right. I hope he is. I still don’t think that means we should stop doing what we can do now to change our behaviours though.

By the way… I’ve got something VERY exciting in the works for TPN’s audience regarding carbon offsets. Stay tuned.

Cam’s World 21 May, 2007

The guys from the Singularity Institute are trying to get on the front page of Digg. Do me a favour and DIGG SIAI.

See also Eliezer’s new video interview.

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Remember Stan Relihan from episode #219? The LinkedIn guy? Well I’m excited to announce that he’s starting his own show on TPN! You may recall I half-jokingly set Stan a goal at the end of the show to use LinkedIn to get me a good guest for the show. Well he’s the guy that set up my interview with Vint Cerf. So we both agreed he proved his point. 🙂 We haven’t come up with a title for the show yet but it’s going to be around networking, using LinkedIn and Web2.0 tools but also how to network the old fashioned way. Strategies for getting the most out of your network. As networking is something I’ve never really been good at or comfortable with, I’m really excited about the show.

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Michael Lemonick over on Time’s site has a good article on ID vs Evolution. There’s some fiery debate in his comments. Michael’s post on the recent “dark matter” images is also good. Helped me start to get my head around what I’m looking at.

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Anyone know when GRINDHOUSE is opening here?? When I wrote this post on March 30th, according to YourMovies.com.au it was supposed to open on May 31st but it seems to have disappeared? I wonder if this has anything to do with the news that they are going to split the films up?

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OH MY ZEUS!! I just watched the most brilliant, amazing, mind-wrenchingly awesome film I have seen in eons – HARD CANDY. I’ve been hearing about this film since it hit the cinemas and most people told me “it’s hard to watch”. But I loved it. I haven’t been this excited about a film since… Fight Club. This is the best psychological thriller I have seen since DEATH & THE MAIDEN. I thought Ellen Page‘s performance was amazing. Although it’s pretty hard to pass her off as a 14 year old, even a “mature” 14 year old, she’s believable enough. But her performance was simply spellbinding. I can’t think of enough adjectives to describe this movie. If you haven’t seen it yet, get it out on DVD immediately. Do not pass GO, etc.

G’DAY WORLD #238 – Eliezer Yudkowsky

Forgive me Father – it’s been at least two weeks since my last podcast.

I figured you guys needed some time to digest my last run of shows. Ready for more yet?

Another show on the coming of the technological singularity today. My guest is Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder and research fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in California.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

I have been aware of Eli for ten years or more. He was featured fairly prominently in Damien Broderick’s book The Spike and was a contributor to Natasha Vita-More’s Extropian mailing list in the mid to late Nineties.

An autodidact prodigy, Eliezer wrote the first version of his Singularity “call to arms”, Staring Into The Singularity, at the age of 15 and has been re-working it continually since then.

On this episode I’ve tried to capture Eliezer’s vision for the different forms that the Singularity might take, the timelines for it, and his motivations for trying to make it happen as soon as possible.

I hope you enjoy it.

If you want to hear more interviews about The Singularity or AI, try these previous episodes of G’Day World:

Dr Aubrey de Grey

Ray Kurzweil
Roger Williams
Dr Ben Goertzel