The Context Podcast - David Orban

When I started recording The Context several years ago, based on an idea and a conversation with my friend Massimo Curatella in Rome, I didn't imagine that I would keep going with the determination, and the frequency that I found myself being able to deliver. It has been a wonderful experience, and I want to keep continuing. This is the season finale of The Context, and we will take a few weeks of...

Over the course of many years, I had the opportunity of meeting a lot of wonderful creative, passionate people. As I would hear their ideas, I would be becoming their advisor or their mentor. What are the necessary steps that they need to be making in order to maximize their opportunities, overcome their challenges and keep going forward on the path they have chosen? It is something that is very v...

Serendipity is our ability to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves in front of us. Mistakenly serendipity is associated with luck, but that is not the case. Our senses and our ability to perceive the world have evolved in a very precise manner to find the fine balance between the maximum amount of information that they can bring to the nervous system for analysis, and its capaci...

What is the value of knowledge? And how can you both acquire and then deploy knowledge in order to leverage that value, create more knowledge, create more value in a wonderful, virtuous circle? That is the basis of civilization. It has been important but difficult to measure what you could actually do with the knowledge that you acquired as the distance between the moment of acquisition and the mo...

In the world of Blockchain, we periodically have waves of enthusiasm and innovation, where new ways of implementing and leveraging this technology is explored by an increasing number of people: developers, investors, users, experimenters of all kinds. BitClout as of today is barely 2 weeks old, but already about 100,000 people signed up to play with it, and you can too. BitClout is based on its ow...

There is a lot of enthusiasm lately around NFTs, Non Fungible Tokens, especially among those who have been following Bitcoin and Blockchain applications, but they didn't know how to relate to them. Maybe they weren't attracted by the financial aspect or the decentralization that they could represent or the more radical societal implications. Should you care about NFTs? And why all the interest? Sh...

We have always been asking questions about who we are and how we think. What defines our identity, our awareness of ourselves and of others? We have tried to explore and experiment the dynamic boundaries of this understanding by altering our states of cognition through means that go from the pretty abstract, like meditation, to the very concrete, assuming substances like alcohol, or psychedelics....

Taking the first step is dramatic and exciting. Most of us don't remember when we took the first step as a child, learning how to walk, but our parents probably remember it very fondly. But taking the first step is also important in any endeavor, because quite obviously any objective you have in front of you can only be reached if you start. And if you do not start, you don’t even try, you will ne...

Is it worth dreaming impossible dreams? Think about it. What is the alternative? Should you not dream at all, or only dream, reasonable dreams? It is, I believe our nature to yearn for the impossible, and fail, or against all odds and all expectations, even our own, achieve it. Achieving impossible goals is what we have been doing for thousands of years. Improbable, unthinkable, impossible!. And w...

Isn't it fantastic? We are all on Mars! Yes, you too! You cannot directly feel the wind of the thin atmosphere on your hand in the freezing temperature. You cannot feel the lack of oxygen by breathing in the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere or jump high under weak gravity at the red Sunrise over the Martian desert. But we are still all on Mars. Our civilization has been able to produce the knowledge...

  Probably the most important immediate benefit that you can derive from digital biology, is the mRNA vaccine against COVID-19. This has been developed, tested. and then produced based on our increased knowledge about what is the digital basis of biology, and how it works. But there are many other benefits as well: from understanding your ancestry, your treats and the predisposition to certain typ...

Agriculture is the most fundamental and ancient activity that propelled human civilization as we know it today. Before agriculture, there were modern humans, but they formed groups of hunters and gatherers, and they didn't build cities or empires. Agriculture is perceived by many as a very conservative activity. However, it has been over time characterized by a rate of innovation that was necessar...

Technological change not only accelerates. It is jolting. What are the consequences of this jolting technological change? Several years ago, I concluded decentralization was the unstoppable consequence across many different sectors. I could see that new technologies were leading in the same direction. I published. at the time the Network Society Manifesto and the Fundamental Thesis of the Network...

Podcasts allow you to continue with numerous types of daily activities, while at the same time listening to interesting long form content made available by your favorite creators. This is one of several reasons that made podcasts so popular. You can also subscribe to my content in an audio-only podcast format on davidorban.com/podcast using Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Audible or Music, Google...

We build societies based on the technologies that we have available, on the social contract that we can articulate expressing the mutual interest that we have in order to achieve our goals, and the ability to structure these goals in a way that reinforces the particular unit that the society encompasses. In this way, societies are able to self perpetuate until the point at which one of the compone...

Innovation is necessary for the progress of our civilization and invention is necessary in order to be able to generate new kinds of innovation. The first is the improvement of an existing process. The second is about starting on a completely novel path. We can take a look at the creativity that leads to the invention, as the source of this original creation. Human intelligence, human creativity,...

In this past year we have learned how important it is to be resilient. The tools that we can apply in order to build the skills that improve our resilience and adaptability, that improve the probability of being able to cope with the various conditions and the situations that surround are of crucial importance. There have been a scary handful of hours a few days ago, where in a large part of the w...

Jolting technologies provide such a disruptive advantage, that the ability to apply them across different fields, cross contaminating and taking advantage of the increasing rate of acceleration, is irresistible. SpaceX is designing, prototyping and testing a new generation of spacecraft called Starship. Starship serial number 8, SN8, flew to the altitude of 12.5 kilometres just a few days ago. Dur...

Recently DeepMind, a unit of Google that is dedicated to developing AI-based systems, announced that they have achieved a very high score in a standardized test for protein folding. Basically, they solved the 50-year old problem of how to predict the shape of a protein molecule, starting from the amino acids that compose them. This is a very important achievement. You will hear it being labeled as...

The rate of acceleration is increasing! Are you ready? Of course not. No one can really be ready for the jolting times. But we can prepare, and start to be ready. We can acquire a new ability to interpret the world, understand the phenomena around us, applying the lens of the Jolting Technologies paradigm. With the Jolting Technologies Courses you can not only learn about the technologies but also...

We take advantage every day of our collective intelligence in order to keep pace with the evolution of a complex world, using the tools that civilization has built over thousands of years. These tools allowed us to organize ever larger groups of people in ways that increasingly leverage their best abilities, instead of just ordering them what to do. There are today societies that explicitly aim to...

Intelligence augmentation is the ability to complement our biological natural faculties of reasoning with new ones based on cultural and technological advances. Even something as fundamental as speaking, and understanding speech is not entirely just biological. From speech, to writing, the printing press, and electronic communications, the process has been long and important. It vastly increased o...

What are the consequences of the paradigm of jolting technologies, the increasing rate of acceleration of technological change? For an increasing percentage of people it is represented by the fragmentation of their reality. In order to understand the world, we not only have to collect and analyze data, but act on the changes that are coming towards us with increasing acceleration. When we give up,...

What does it mean that Elon Musk is jolting? He understands that in order to reach the ambitious missions of his companies in time, exponential change is not enough anymore. To transition humanity to renewable energy before runaway climate change creates irreversible damage, Tesla must produce cars, solar systems, batteries, in such volumes, that it would be impossible with the current rate of inn...

At a recent conference on the future of electronics manufacturing, the Chief Architect of Intel, Raja Koduri, presented a compelling picture for delivering a 1000 times increase in the power of AI systems by 2025. He counts on the ecosystem of third parties, as well as Intel’s engineering prowess, to achieve a 4x improvement in several key areas: memory, interconnect, architecture, software, and p...