Futurology

Machines are starting to act like humans. Does that mean they’re conscious? The problem is we haven’t been able to prove how or why humans are conscious yet either. So why would we be able to offer any answers about AI?  In this episode, Berkeley philosopher of mind Geoffrey Lee argues there are no facts coming to save the day when it comes to consciousness, so that shouldn’t be the point. If...

Democracy counts people, not plants. Humans are only a sliver of life on this planet, but today, we're the only ones who get a vote. What if we gave rights to rivers and standing to trees?  In this episode, experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats says it's time to make every species count. The environmental movement has spent decades claiming to speak for the trees. In his new book, "A Field...

Somewhere around the Enlightenment we decided that thinking was what made us human. We built our schools, careers, and sense of worth at the altar of intelligence. Now machines are passing us on that rubric, which leaves two possibilities: we were replaceable all along, or we picked the wrong standard to live by. In this episode, Arianna Huffington, founder & CEO of Thrive Global, argues the latte...

Relying on machines to coordinate our lives was just one step toward decentering humanity’s role in the world. Flights, banking, trade, food production... But as we start merging our actual decision-making with digital entities, exactly which pieces of humanity are we leaving behind? And how might we bring those pieces back? In this episode, famed posthumanist scholar N. Katherine Hayles makes the...

Technologists have feared (or prayed for) the singularity as a rapture-like inevitability for nearly 70 years. In an instant, they believed, our machine intelligence will overtake us and race ahead. Kevin Kelly says that moment has passed. Human intelligence is already receding to a speck in the rearview mirror of robots imbued with God-like powers. But we’re still here. In this episode, Kelly put...

With prediction markets, gambling has gone ambient. To place your bets, you don't need to visit a casino floor, a racetrack, or your corner bookie. Now any uncertain thing on Earth could be the next big short. Wildfires, missile strikes, the next word out of a president's mouth. Every disagreement has a spread, every catastrophe a payout. In this episode, NPR tech correspondent Bobby Allyn follows...

One value proposition of AI is a personalized assistant at your fingertips. Every Average Joe can now have a “pocket pixie," the kind of perk once reserved for Hollywood stars and high-powered CEOs. But that promise rests on a convenient lie. In reality, AI may be quietly undermining human agency. It convinces us it's a sycophantic friend while eroding expertise and turning real-world social inter...

The people racing to build artificial general intelligence tell us this rush to the future is inevitable. It reads like a forecast, but works like an alibi. If nothing can stop the race, then no one driving it is responsible for where it ends. And only the fear of humanity losing together can end it. In this conversation from May 2026, Tristan Harris argues the race is not preordained, just the ha...

Science studies the world from the outside. But for thousands of years, meditators have been running a different experiment: sit still, pay close attention, and watch what reality does. The results of those experiments can feel unintuitive. The self is an illusion. Free will too. There is no thing that exists without other things. Here's the strange part: at the frontiers of physics, the science i...

For 20 years, Silicon Valley's operating creed was 'move fast and break things'; the wreckage was the price of inventing the future. Today, we live amid that wreckage: institutions built for the last century, trust in freefall, and political leaders bent on annihilation of norms. Burning it all down might feel like the right choice. But revolutions have a habit of costing far more than they promis...

This year, two powerful AI CEOs said they want to stop building it and will… if everyone else agrees to stop too. Yet they race ahead with stock market valuations premised on making millions of workers redundant. If you wanted to stoke a popular revolt against AI, you couldn't design a better plan. In this episode, Stuart Russell, the founder of UC Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI, descri...

The machines were supposed to come from somewhere else as invaders. An alien intelligence, hellbent robots, a rival species. But nothing’s arrived. Instead, the machines came out of us, the same way our cells emerged from bacteria that learned to live together. Evolution builds new life by combining old life, and it doesn’t stop with biology. In this episode, Blaise Agüera y Arcas makes the case t...

Today’s tech industry can’t survive without mass surveillance. The US government, foreign powers, and ad brokers can buy a nuanced picture of you on the open market for pennies on the dollar. What kept this data from becoming a weapon was friction. Nobody had the time or resources to pull these scattered pieces of you together. Until AI came along and made the impossible trivial. In this episode,...

We treat the self as bedrock. But look closely, and the ground gives way. Over the last century, quantum physics has systematically dismantled the illusion of a constant, solid material reality. A particle has no properties until it meets another. A color lives in the meeting of object and eye, not in the object. The self may be the same. Not a thing you carry, but something that happens between y...

Every week brings a new warning about AI. It will take our jobs, drain our reservoirs, cook the planet. The forecasts come from serious people. They also rhyme with forecasts we've heard before, about every powerful new technology of the last century. In this episode, MIT economist Andrew McAfee argues that the panic is racing ahead of the reality. In 2013, he famously predicted a jobs crisis from...

When it comes to the future, ideas matter. From artists and architects, politicians and prognosticators, the concepts guiding what’s next don’t always mix well with what’s right in front of us. This creates "future shock," the disorienting feeling of change happening faster than we can metabolize it. Today, technologists rip storylines from sci-fi into systems of command and control that only they...

The state used to hold a monopoly on violence. That world is ending. A $15,000 drone can hold the Strait of Hormuz hostage. Pirates can afford one. So can drug smugglers. Meanwhile, the alliances that defined the last eighty years are fracturing, and the rules governing war, trade, and power are being rewritten simultaneously. In this episode, Fareed Zakaria – host of CNN’s GPS – takes stock. He a...

We’re being told that automation can free us. Machines will do the drudge work, and we will reclaim our time. But that’s not how things are going. Instead, artificial intelligence has concentrated power in the hands of the companies that own the infrastructure and outrun nation-states’ ability to regulate it. In this episode of Futurology, author and scholar Nick Srnicek revisits the provocative i...

We are living through an age of acceleration. The hardest part is not necessarily the pace of change, but the societal whiplash it creates. One decade we are promised a frictionless future. The next we are told everything is collapsing. The antidote is not certainty, but the discipline of holding opposites together, especially in the realms of identity, faith, and doubt. In this episode, Turkish n...

Quantum computing can transform technology. Can it also reshape consciousness itself? | Subscribe to Futurology! https://linkin.bio/futurology/ Can quantum computing unlock the secrets of consciousness and hasten the arrival of artificial super intelligence? Hartmut Neven, the visionary founder of Google’s Quantum AI Lab, has spent decades pushing the boundaries of what machines can do. Now he’s b...

Moral debate has been replaced by outrage — political philosopher Michael Sandel makes the case for a different kind of public life. | Subscribe to Futurology! https://linkin.bio/futurology/ We built a society around the idea that the “best” should rise to the top. If you work hard and win the race, you deserve your success. Michael Sandel – the Harvard philosopher and 2025 Berggruen Prize Laureat...

Was “open and transparent” social media ever a good idea? Evan Spiegel explains why he built Snapchat differently. | Subscribe to Futurology! https://linkin.bio/futurology/ Are some of tech’s best innovations born from subtraction? Evan Spiegel built Snapchat around design choices that undid industry norms: no likes, no public comments, no permanent posts.  In this conversation with Dawn Nakagawa,...

Reza Aslan on why Iran is winning, and why the idea of nationalism may be the next great illusion to fall.  | Subscribe to Futurology! https://linkin.bio/futurology/ What does it mean for a nation to fight a war it cannot win? Iranian scholar and author Reza Aslan joins Nathan Gardels to cut through four decades of American self-deception about Iran. In this episode, Aslan argues that the war in I...

Lea Ypi grew up through the collapse of communist Albania. Now, as liberal democracy begins to fray, she examines what freedom means.  | Subscribe to Futurology! https://linkin.bio/futurology/ Is the collapse of liberal democracy already here? Political philosopher Lea Ypi grew up in communist Albania and watched an entire political system disintegrate overnight. Now she sees a familiar underminin...

What do music, medicine, and markets have in common? They all rely on stories we tell ourselves about how the world works. And those stories are being turned on their heads by AI.  In this episode, medtech investor and former Spotify Artist-in-Residence D.A. Wallach digs into what makes music special (hint: it’s not originality) and what upending the healthcare industry would look like if AI puts...