Foresight Institute Radio

“For me being able to quantify aging is one of the most important endeavours in the field. There is a lot of emphasis on intervening in aging, to either reverse or slow it, but I would argue that there’s no way to test if you did that if you can’t directly measure the thing that you’re trying to intervene in.” In this session, Morgan Levine, Assistant Professor at Yale, gave a sneak peek into the...

“Did the first amendment protect us from the atomic bomb, or the nuclear arms race, or Vietnam or Iraq? No, it didn't. Everybody kept their mouths shut.”  Daniel Ellsberg is the 90-year-old whistleblower that leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Since the end of the Vietnam War, he has been a lecturer, scholar, writer, and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions...

“Is it possible to take the principles of what is possible and impossible that already exist in physics, and formulate the whole of physics in terms of these statements in a way that gives us a new theory of computation?” Chiara Marletto is a physicist at Oxford University, and the author of the book “The Science of Can and Can’t”. This is a new and different approach to physics where the idea is...

“Humans play with social rules - that way we can test the boundaries without actually violating the rules” Robin Hanson is a pioneer in rigorous futurism, an Economics professor at George Mason University, a Future of Humanity Institute Research Associate, and the founder of OvercomingBias. In this podcast episode, Hanson discusses his book “The Elephant In The Brain”. Hanson argues that our brain...

“If your view is that the future per se matters as much as the present, then you are led to maximizing sustainable economic growth.” In this episode, we are joined by Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University. Cowen writes the "Economic Scene" column for The New York Times and since 2016 has been a regular opinion columnist at Bloomberg Opinion . Here Cowen speaks about his bo...

“Whenever you take venture capital it immediately creates the expectation of this being worth 10 times more within 3 years.”  Tom Chi is a business leader and innovator who started out doing astrophysical research when he was only 15 years old. His CV includes executive roles at Yahoo, being a key influencer in the design of Microsoft Outlook, and shaping Google X and Google Glass. In this episode...

“To me democracy is a form of technology, so as a technologist I’m equally excited about each and every new governance proposal and mechanism.” In this episode, we are joined by Taiwan’s digital minister Audrey Tang , a software programmer as well as the digital minister of Taiwan, in charge of social innovation.  Audrey talks about what it means to be a conservative anarchist while working with t...

“Think about a situation in which 5 years from now half of the developed world is going to shift from an expectation that they will live only slightly longer than their parents did, into an expectation that they are going to live far longer than anyone has ever lived before.” Dr. Aubrey de Grey is one of the world’s foremost researchers on aging. His view is that the possibilities that medical tec...

“In some sense, we already have very special purpose quantum simulators that already do things that are interesting to physicists, it's just that most of those systems, we don't call quantum computers, because they're all completely specialized to one purpose. And what you really want is a programmable device.” Scott Aaronson is a Professor of Computer Science at The University of T...

“Very few institutions that predated the internet will survive the internet.” Balaji S. Srinivasan is an angel investor and entrepreneur, formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.  Balaji has turned his attention to the creation a Network State, in particular a polis with a transhumanist mission “which starts with a virtual university, bootstraps a digital economy, a...

Welcome to the Foresight Institute’s podcast! Since 1986, Foresight has been advancing technologies for the long-term benefit of life and the biosphere. We focus on three areas: molecular machine nanotechnology for building better things, biotechnology for health extension, and computer science and crypto commerce for intelligent cooperation.  This podcast is where we share a portion of our public...