The Long Now Foundation

Millennia before engineering or software, robots and
 artificial intelligence were brought to life in Greek myths. The author of "Gods and Robots Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology": https://press.princeton.edu/titles/14162.html traces the link between technology and tyranny from modern day concerns over AI to back to antiquities fear of beings were "made, not born.” Adrienne Mayor:...

"Annalee Newitz's": https://www.techsploitation.com/ new novel, "The Future of Another Timeline": https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765392121, is about time travelers in an edit war over history. But it's also about using stories to change the course of civilization. Annalee will discuss the idea of time travel, as well as the extensive scientific and historical research they did for the novel. A...

Coming to the fore in this century is Asian perspective on everything. A thrilling place to watch the shift is in art. Extraordinary contemporary art from all over the world, especially Asia, has been collected for the new world-class museum in Hong Kong called M+. The massive museum won’t open for a year or two, but a rich sample of the collection as well as insight on why it was collected for di...

If we use AI to write our favorite music for us, will we lose the ability to write music ourselves? If an AI coach keeps divorced parents from arguing by text, can they get along without it? If the only novels and screenplays that get a green light are the ones that AI believes match up with past hits, will we wind up reading and watching the same thing over and over? In this conversation, NBC’s J...

From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, the human story is the story of environmental forces, from plate tectonics and climate change, to atmospheric circulation and ocean currents. Professor "Lewis Dartnell": http://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb will dive into the planet’s deep past, where history becomes science, to explore a web of connections that underwrites our mo...

From kings and philosophers to craftsmen and inventors, horology has been prized as an extraordinary marriage between art and science. Antiquarian Horologist Brittany Nicole Cox will share her unique experience with objects born from this lineage. We will trace their origins to discover how these objects serve as critical mirrors in a world of accelerated discovery. Her lifelong passion for horolo...

“Cities were the first Internet,” says archaeologist Monica Smith, because they were the first permanent places where strangers met in large numbers for entertainment, commerce, and romance. And the function and form of cities, she notes, have remained remarkably constant over their 6,000 years of history so far. Modern city dwellers would quickly find their way around any city in the past, given...

Big Data promises unparalleled insights, but the larger the data, the harder they are to find. The key to unlocking them was discovered by mathematicians in the 18th century. A modern mathematician explains how to find patterns in data with new algorithms for old math. Gurjeet Singh is Chief AI Officer and co-founder of Symphony AyasdiAI: https://www.ayasdi.com. He leads a technology movement that...

We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mostly invisible to us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud teaches that kind of time literacy. With it, we become at home in the deep past and engaged with the deep future. We learn to “think like a planet.” As for climate change... “Dazzled by our own creatio...

What happens when we confuse price with value? We end up undervaluing care. We pollute more. And the financial sector is allowed to brag about how productive it is—while often just moving around existing value, created by others. Most importantly we end up with a form of capitalism that rewards value extraction activities over value creation, increasing inequality in the process. Economist Mariana...

Neal Stephenson author of "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" in conversation with Long Now Board Member, Kevin Kelly. "Fall, or Dodge in Hell": https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062458711/fall-or-dodge-in-hell/ is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson raises...

David Byrne has become a scholar and promoter of new good ideas that work in the world. He finds them in health, education, culture, economics, climate, science & technology, transportation, and civic engagement. He has great examples and great slides--as you might expect from an acclaimed visual as well as musical artist. His goal is to spread the word that there are a LOT of new things that work...

In his new novel, ""Machines Like Me": https://smile.amazon.com/Machines-Like-Me-Ian-McEwan/dp/0385545118/ref=sr_1_1", Ian McEwan uses science fiction and counter-factual history to speculate about the coming of artificial intelligence and its effect on human relations. The opening page introduces a pivotal character, "Sir Alan Turing, war hero and presiding genius of the digital age.” The evening...

Studying primates offers insight into human evolution and behavior. Primatologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf shares her ongoing work with wild chimpanzees
 and gorillas: a unique long-term project that extends the seminal research
 by Jane Goodall and colleagues into the 21st century. Modern humans wean years earlier than African apes, a fact that is associated with several unique behaviors of being human...

A political scientist examines how foundational nationalisms affect democracy globally, using countries like India and Myanmar to illustrate that some kinds of nationalism can be an essential resource for protecting democracy. Maya Tudor is a comparative political scientist whose research focuses on democracy, nationalist movements, and party competition. She is an associate professor of politics...

The ocean is not just filling up, it’s swelling up. Half of sea-level rise comes just from the warming of the water. No matter what humans do next, we are now doomed to deal with drastically higher flooding of the world's coasts every year for decades, possibly centuries. Nearly half of humanity lives near coasts. Many of our greatest cities, and their infrastructure, will have to deal with the ev...

Throughout human history, mapping has been the key to the opening of new frontiers. Mapping of previously uncharted regions has enabled economic expansion and the development of new markets, science, and defense. For similar reasons, mapping the locations and trajectories of the millions of uncharted asteroids in our solar system is the key to opening the space frontier. This four-dimensional spac...

What can fifty-somethings bring of value to companies that are mostly twenty-somethings, and vice versa? A needed blending of depth with currency. Chip Conley, a long-time hotelier (Joie de Vivre Hospitality) and author "(Peak; The Rebel Rules; Emotional Equations)", was hired at 52 by the drastically youthful, disruptive startup Airbnb to be its Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy. He found h...

John Brockman's newly released book "Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI" : https://smile.amazon.com/Possible-Minds-Twenty-Five-Ways-Looking-ebook/dp/B07D6C1X3X/ref=sr_1_1 is the springboard for this Seminar on Artificial Intelligence. Brockman will interview several of the contributors to the book, Rodney Brooks: https://www.edge.org/memberbio/rodney_a_brooks, Alison Gopnik: https:/...

Human civilization is used to being saved by technology. The 20th century was defined by humanity’s ability to invent a pill, vaccine, or device to overcome our biggest challenges. Today, many of the most serious threats to human health well-being require large-scale changes in individual behavior. The problem is people are really bad at prioritizing long-term goals over their immediate desires an...

The warming planet is increasingly the subject of all kinds of fiction. Beyond entertainment or distraction could climate fiction (“Cli-Fi”) actually help us in solving the climate dilemma? Biological anthropologist and environmental scientist James Holland Jones: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0_6ULyIAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao explains the neuroscience of narrative: storytelling fits the human...

In August of 02018, Long Now founder Stewart Brand, renowned geneticist George Church, and a delegation of observers and scientists traveled to one of Earth's most remote places to witness the ongoing restoration of a part of Siberia back to its Pleistocene-era ecosystem. The team brought back DNA samples to evaluate for mammoth de-extinction, and lots of photos, video, and stories of a place wher...

To think usefully about humanity’s future, you have to bear everything in mind simultaneously. Nobody has managed that better than Martin Rees in his succinct summing-up book: "ON THE FUTURE: Prospects for Humanity". As the recent President of the Royal Society (and longtime Royal Astronomer), Rees is current with all the relevant science and technology. At 76, he has seen a lot of theories about...

“This time is different.” Historians: “Ha.” “The Net is net beneficial.” Historian Niall Ferguson: “Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. Technology meanwhile marches inexorably ahead, threatening to render most human beings redundant or immortal or both. How do we make sense of all this?” Ferguson analyzes the structure and prospects of “Cyberia...

The legacy of Ursula K Le Guin: http://www.ursulakleguin.com/ lives beyond the page
 in generations of writers who have learned from her. She used fantastic fiction to imagine ideals for the real world. Kim Stanley Robinson, her student 40 years ago and now a celebrated science fiction writer himself, reflects on Le Guin the teacher, 
her impact on his work, and how she changed the world. Kim Stan...