Is there intelligent life beyond Earth? Is it possible that alien beings have already contacted us? What do we make of the thousands of testimonials of human-alien contact, including from scientists, diplomats and astronauts? Yet… where’s the proof? And if there is proof, why is alien contact not the biggest story of the millennia?
Virtual Reality: A Technology of Transformation
Kent Bye and Ken WilberKent Bye, host of the Voices of VR podcast, talks to Ken Wilber about the many ways virtual reality can bring Ken’s integral map of consciousness to life, exploring how VR’s unique capacity to elicit feelings of awe, empathy, and flow can help it become a uniquely powerful platform of transformation.
Peering into the Post-Privacy World
Dr. Keith Witt and Jeff SalzmanToday Jeff talks with integral psychotherapist Dr. Keith Witt about the arising of big data and its effect on our individual and collective psyches. They share their insights on the fascinating new book, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are.
Can Virtual Reality Create a More Virtuous Reality?
Corey deVos and Jeff SalzmanJeff and Corey explore the exhilarating emergence of virtual reality technology and the far-reaching implications it has across the full spectrum of human experience, from entertainment to education, to medicine, art, journalism, spiritual practice, sexuality, communication, and any number of other exciting and potentially groundbreaking applications.
Virtual Lucid Dreaming: The Intersection of Consciousness and Technology
Andrew HolecekAndrew Holecek explores the fascinating and fruitful vanguard of consciousness and technology in this stunning presentation about virtual reality, lucid dreaming, and awakening in the midst of rapid social change.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Artificial Consciousness
Michael E. Zimmerman and Jeff SalzmanThe hopes and fears surrounding the advent of artificial intelligence are fantastical, from Ray Kurzweil’s promise of spiritual machines to Elon Musk’s warnings of killer robots. And yes, some version of that future is barreling toward us at an ever-increasing speed, says philosophy of technology professor Michael Zimmerman, who is Jeff’s guest today.
Move Fast and Break Things: Are Facebook, Amazon, and Google Hacking Our Democracy?
Jonathan Taplin and David RiordanA hot topic in the 2016 election was the business and targeting practices of the tech giants Facebook, Google, and Amazon and their possibly corrosive effects upon democracy. One of the excellent new books on this subject is Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things – How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. Jonathan’s book does a really great job tracing the motivations of their founders as they morphed from startup tech innovators to dominant tech monopolies.
Loving AIs: Bringing Unconditional Love to Artificial General Intelligence
Julia Mossbridge, Ben Goertzel and Robb SmithAs part of our work on the Innovation Lab advisory board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, I had the pleasure of sitting down with OpenCog founder and leading AGI researcher Ben Goertzel and IONS Innovation Lab director Julia Mossbridge to discuss LOVING AIs, a project aiming to design and develop an “unconditional loving” module for AGIs. In this interview, I dive into the rabbit hole of AGI with Ben and Julia to discuss the state of the field, what it would mean to program unconditional love into AGIs, and some thorny implications for the brave new world we’re entering.
The Shape of Things to Come: A Singularity in All Four Quadrants
Corey deVosIt seems clear is that we are seeing a general pattern of accelerated returns in at least four irreducible dimensions of our lives. It is a “singularity in all four quadrants” — Post-Humanism, Post-Scarcity, Post-Irony, and Post-Metaphysics. Let’s take a brief look at each of these dimensions.
The Great Divide
Robb SmithPopulism is on the rise. Too many people feel left out of the march of prosperity and more people than ever believe that the future will not see their kids better off than they are today. The rich get richer while the middle class remains stagnant. There is a growing and robust backlash to political correctness and immigration. And artificial intelligence threatens to make the coming jobs war even worse than previously anticipated…
The Future of Artificial Intelligence
Ken WilberWhen it comes to the future of artificial intelligence, we have more questions than answers. Are atoms, molecules, and mathematics alone enough to produce machines with genuine human-equivalent intelligence? Can that intelligence ever become truly conscious and possess the “inner light” of interior self-awareness? Will artificial intelligence be capable of determining its own morals, ethics, and values? Listen as Ken Wilber reflects on the future promise — and potential perils — of artificial intelligence.
For the Love of Darwin: Beyond the Selfish Gene
David Loye and Ken WilberDavid Loye, author of Darwin in Love, talks to Ken Wilber about the life and often-distorted legacy of Charles Darwin, as well as Darwin’s belief in LOVE as a critical driver of the evolution of species.
The Future of Consciousness, Culture, and Technology
Ken WilberWhat future we are imagining for ourselves, for the integral movement, and for the impact of the integral vision on our shared future? With all the emphasis we see in spiritual communities about the importance of being in the NOW, it can be easy to forget how important it is to keep a careful eye on the future. After all, aren’t our thoughts about the future just another way to distract ourselves from connecting to our true selves in this present moment?
Brave New Future? An Integral Look at Super Artificial Intelligence
Michael E. ZimmermanThese days, discourse about intelligent robots—thinking machines—is as widespread as discourse about zombies. Both have been the subjects of recent bestsellers, which are the basis of two forthcoming films. Popular culture’s depiction of humankind under attack by either the undead or by the never alive (autonomous machines) suggests widespread anxiety about and fascination with technical developments that may generate a future out of human control (as if the future ever were under our control!)
Yes, Virginia, Consciousness Goes All the Way Down. But Does It Go All the Way Up?
Michael E. ZimmermanAlthough the apparent confirmation of the Higgs Boson, the so-called God particle, has been attracting attention recently, the most vexing problem in science and philosophy remains the mind-body problem: What relation is there between material brain states and conscious, first-person experience? In the past few years, as we shall see in a moment, some neurosciences have now arrived at an answer that was anticipated by Ken Wilber’s version of integral theory.
Taking the Long View: Immortality and the Technological Singularity
Ken WilberAnti-aging and longevity research reports, in addition to predicting lifespans beyond 200 years within just a few decades, also report no theoretical reasons preventing extensions into the thousands of years a few decades after that. What if you lived for another few hundred or thousand years? Would you bear witness to the end of disease, the coming of an integral age, the creation trans-human cyborgs, the end of poverty, the enlightenment of the planet — or maybe even flying cars…?
Bringing Legitimacy to UFO Research
Leslie Kean and Stuart DavisLeslie Kean talks with Stuart Davis about her book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record, the result of a ten-year investigation into one of the world’s most mysterious (and most marginalized) phenomena. Whether you “want to believe” or you want to roll your eyes at the mere mention of UFOs, we invite you to open your mind, open your heart, and allow yourself to sit in the radical, unknowable Mystery for just a little while. The universe is so much bigger and darker than we can ever imagine. Good thing we’ve got a flashlight.
Technology, Evolution, and God: Exploring the Technium
Kevin Kelly and Ken WilberWired magazine’s own “Senior Maverick” talks with Ken Wilber about some of the ideas behind Kevin’s blog The Technium, which explores the various ways humanity defines and redefines itself through the interface of science, technology, culture, and consciousness. Kevin also shares some of his own thoughts about the role of spirituality in the 21st century, going into considerable depth around his own spiritual awakening several decades ago.
Video Games and the Future of Interactive Entertainment
Ken WilberKen Wilber and Moses Silbiger discuss the artistic, educational, and transformational potential within the medium of video games, and how they can act as “trojan horses” of human development.
Morphic Fields, Memory, and the Creative Advance
Rupert Sheldrake and Ken WilberThe man behind the theory of morphic resonance shares his impulse to explore the evolutionary impulse behind the Kosmos itself. From physics, to chemistry, to biology, to psychology, to spirituality and more, these two pioneers share their understanding of how Spirit is manifesting moment-to-moment in and through the leading edge of consciousness awareness.
To the Best of Our Knowledge: Science, Spirituality, and the Future of Technology
Ken WilberIn his first interview for NPR in over 20 years, Ken Wilber offers one of the finest, most sweeping introductions to his work he has ever recorded, presenting a profound new way to integrate science, spirituality, and technology — along with every other facet of the single ever-expanding gem of human knowledge.
Does Quantum Physics Prove God?
Ken Wilber and Corey deVosThis conversation sheds clarity on a very confused notion in the area of spirituality today—namely, the “tao of physics” and all its variations, as exemplified by the recent film What the Bleep. So what relationship, if any, does God actually have with quantum physics?