Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon discussed the future of money with special guest Ivan Kirigin.
Ivan recently left iRobot in Boston, where he worked as a software engineer for their Government & Industrial Division, to found Tipjoy. Tipjoy is a micropayment tipping sys that enables content creators to monetize what otherwise would have been free content.
How will micropayment systems change the way content creators are compensated? And how will the Web continue to transform our thinking about how value is created and transferred?
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon laid out the Speculist Manifesto. What is the shocking truth about the future that the mainstream media and the politicians aren't telling you?
What is at stake? What can we learn by studying possibilities and scenarios? And why do we Speculists spend time blogging and podcasting about this stuff? Do we have a contribution to make?
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, and Michael Darling spoke live with author and futurist Jim Elvidge. Elvidge is a Cornell-educated entrepreneur and inventor who holds four patents in digital signal processing. His love of music inspired him to develop one of the first PC-based digital music samplers and to co-found RadioAMP, which was the first private-label online streaming radio company. In recent years he has turned his attention to the ultimate question of existence and, drawing on a broad and eclectic base of knowledge and interests, has come up with a unique explanation for...pretty much everything.
As you might imagine his book, The Universe - Solved, covers a lot of scientific and philosophical ground. A big topic of discussion was whether we live in a computer simulation. If so, are there Easter Eggs in the cosmos?
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Sunday night your hosts Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, and Michael Darling discussed weird ideas about the future... both past-futures that turned out to be bizarrely wrong and very strange futures that may turn out to be right.
Click image to see it larger.
Obviously, predicting the future is difficult. Given the uncertainty, do Futurists still have a role to play in preparing us for the future?
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Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon visited live with futurist Wayne Radinsky. Wayne became a futurist in 1997 when he was working as a software developer and asked the question, "Why does Moore's Law happen?"
Wayne was part of the Bay Area Future Salon in Silicon Valley for five years before moving to Colorado and starting the Boulder Future Salon. He is also a director of the Global Futures Network.
We talked about how groups such as GFN and futures salons can help us to shape both our understanding of and expectations for the future.
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Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon visited live with Michael Anissimov. Michael Anissimov writes and speaks on futurist issues, especially the relationships between accelerating change, nanotechnology, existential risk, transhumanism, and the Singularity. His popular blog Accelerating Future discusses these issues regularly. Michael is a member of the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association and is the North American fundraising director for the Lifeboat Foundation.
They visited with Michael about the philosophy of transhumanism and what the Singularity could look like.
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Sunday night Stephen Gordon and P.J. Manney interviewed artificial intelligence researcher and author Ben Goertzel.
They asked Ben about the current state-of-the-art in AGI and about the recent AGI conference at Memphis University. They also learned how AI is already changing our world.
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Blog Talk Radio seems to be experiencing technical difficulties, and so far no archive of our interview last night with Philippe Van Nedervelde of the Lifeboat Foundation has been published. Stephen is in touch with BTR and working on the problem. Stay tuned. We hope to have the recorded show up soon.
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon talked about risk. There are small risks - like not getting the right thing for your Valentine, medium risks like harvesting corn for ethanol, and existential risks like global nuclear war.
What, me worry?
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Don't miss this, our Super Speculist Sunday Show! Phil Bowermaster, Stephen Gordon, and Michael Darling visited about all things geeky.
Michael Darling filed his first "M Report" on fusion reactors. The picture above is Robert Bussard's electrostatic containment model for a small fusion reactor.
Phil's brought us a new "Tales of the Paranormal" and "Astounding Science Facts." And Stephen covered "Fun Tech!"
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Sunday night Stephen Gordon was joined by guest cohost Michael Darling. Michael is a longtime commenter and independent thinker at the Speculist.
Among many other topics they talked about the Star Trek technologies that are becoming real world inventions. No. Quick and easy (and routine) plastic surgery is not, yet, one of those technologies. But just about everything else is becoming, at least, theoretically possible.
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Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon covered the future. They talked about the latest life extension news, how the $2,500 car will affect our prices at the pump, MRI mind reading, and whether a pill will reduce our need for sleep.
It wasn't all serious news though. They also talked about the new Terminator television show, "The Sarah Connor Chronicles." Don't miss it!
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Tonight your FastForward cohosts got together for a year-end roundtable. Phil Bowermaster, PJ Manney, and Stephen Gordon discussed the technological developments of 2007 and their hopes for 2008 and beyond.
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PJ Manney returned to FastForward Radio - this time to co-host the show with Stephen Gordon.
Stephen and PJ visited live with Dr. Pearl Chin of the Foresight Nanotech Institute. Pearl specializes in advising on nanotechnology investment opportunities. She is a prolific writer on nanotechnology investing, business, management and social issues. Her articles appear in Nanotechnology Now and the Nanotechnology Law and Business Journal. And she is actively sought out to speak about and be interviewed on diverse nanotechnology related topics.
We asked Pearl what nanotech developments are exciting. We also asked her about potential dangers. Don't miss it!
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Tonight Phil Bowermaster and Michael Sargent had the pleasure of visiting with Dr. Robert Zubrin. Dr. Zubrin is an aerospace engineer who is well known as an advocate for a manned mission to Mars and for his book The Case for Mars. After some unfortunate technical difficulties, Phil and Michael spoke with Robert about Mars and his newest book Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror by Breaking Free of Oil.
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This week Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon had a chance to visit with PJ Manney. PJ has written for television - Xena and Hercules - and she's a novelist.
Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon are back with an interview of Dave Gobel. Dave cofounded with Aubrey de Grey the Methuselah Foundation. This is the nonprofit charity that is behind the Methuselah Mouse Prize - a prize for proving life extension technologies in mice.
This interview explains why developing life extension matters more, fundamentally, that almost anything else we can put our efforts into. It's also a fascinating glimpse into how the efforts of a few people can be leveraged to change the world. You'll want to hear this one for sure.
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Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon interviewed special guest Brian Wang. In addition to his many other accomplishments, Brian has been a Foresight Nanotechnology Institute senior associate since 1997.
We spoke with Brian about the crappy beta versions of human enhancement that some people are experimenting with today, often to their detriment. When will better enhancements be available?
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Phil Bowermaster returns to FastForward Radio with a report on this year's Foresight Nanotech Unconference. Also, we have an audio interview with Dr. Zheng Cui who is developing a cancer treatment that works by strengthening the immune system.
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Stephen Gordon and guest host Michael Sargent discuss the speech Eliezer Yudkowsky gave at the 2007 Singularity Summit. It turns out that the Singularity means different things to different people. We also covered the DARPA Urban Challenge that happened Saturday, and the new Fab Lab that won a Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Prize.
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Listen in as Michael Sargent and Stephen Gordon discuss Artificial General Intelligence, the Turing Test, the simplest Turing Machines, Moore's Law, and artery-clearing micro-cyborgs:
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Phil and Stephen started the show tonight, for the first time, by talking sports. Throughout the show Phil reported happily on the progress of the Colorado Rockies. Stephen was less happy about Saturday's upset game between LSU and the University of Kentucky.
This led, as it would only with Phil and Stephen, to a discussion of the difficulty predicting the future of anything in a complex system. Whether it be the fall of communism in the late 80's or technological development in the next twenty years.
Phil and Stephen took calls from Karl Hallowell and Matt Duing. They contributed greatly to the discussion. Thanks guys!
The guys finished by talking about our Sun's twin.
The music can be found at Magnatune.com. The front bumper was a sampling of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song" and they exited to "In The Middle" by Beight.
Make sure to catch next week's show live at the same time Sunday night - 11:00 Eastern/10:00 Central/9:00 Mountain/8:00 Pacific.
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Phil and Stephen had a great time catching up with Sci-Fi author Tobias Buckell. The last time we spoke with Tobias he had just published his first novel Crystal Rain. Now he has published his second novel, Ragamuffin, and is completing a third, Sly Mongoose, for publication next summer.
You'll want to hear all about it - including the surprising inspiration for his latest novel.
Be sure to also check out Tobias' website where you can read the first 1/3 of both Crystal Rain and Raggamuffin!
Enjoy the show!
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Phil and I had some technical difficulties last night, but after an hour's delay we soldiered on with an abbreviated 20 minute test program. As promised it was live and we even had some audience participation. We had a good discussion on life extension:
We will be rescheduling our intended guest, Dave Gobel, for an upcoming edition of FastForward Radio. Meanwhile, since we threw some props both his way and in the general direction of Aubrey de Grey, it's probably appropriate that we include links to the MPrize and SENS home pages.
Special thanks to Speculist blogger El Jefe for his participation in this week's show.
Then Phil and Stephen discussed personal freedom in the contexts of both geneticengineering and fab labs - the fab labs that can replicate themselves, and those that are big enough to print a house. Can we protect intellectual property while maximizing creativity?
Here are the books referenced in our podcast:
Music for this episode comes from Magnatune.com. This episode opened with a sample of the song "Fountain of Life" by Artemis. We closed the episode with "Sweet Melissa" from Chris Juergensen.
Just prior to publishing Episode 13, we changed the RSS feed for our show. Our apologies to our subscribers, but (if you haven't already done so) you will need to resubscribe to the show at this feed:
http://fastforward.mypodcast.com/rss.xml
If you've never subscribed to a podcast before, your first step is to install podcast software. The most popular podcast software is the ubiquitous iTunes. Click here to download iTunes, or here to download other podcast receivers.
For more Speculicious podcasting fun, check out The L2si Report.
After the break Stephen asks Phil whether The Speculist is more mystical or skeptical. This discussion quickly moves to Phil's recent lampooning of "The Secret." And don't miss Phil's follow-up post - "Reasonable Expectations."
Lastly Stephen brings up a potential shortcut method for intersteller travel proposed by physicist Kip Thorne. Can we leverage relativity?
And, here are the books referenced in our podcast:
Music for this episode comes from Magnatune.com. The song we used to open the show and for the commercial buffer is...well, see if you can place it... but this version of the song is from DJ Cary. You can find it here. We closed with "Happy Blues" from artist Burnshee Thornside.
Just prior to publishing Episode 13, we changed the RSS feed for our show. Our apologies to our subscribers, but (if you haven't already done so) you will need to resubscribe to the show at this feed:
http://fastforward.mypodcast.com/rss.xml
If you've never subscribed to a podcast before, your first step is to install podcast software. The most popular podcast software is the ubiquitous iTunes. Click here to download iTunes, or here to download other podcast receivers.
If you've missed past episodes of Fast Forward Radio, you can find them all at the Fast Forward Radio webpage. For more Speculicious podcasting fun, check out The L2si Report.
Phil and Stephen talk about how nuclear power is becoming a bipartisan energy option, what can be done about the whole global warming problem, the new real-life "tricorder" invented at Purdue University, and whether our biocosm is really a simulation. They close with Phil's review of Urinetown: The Musical.
And they've got some great new music! This episode opens with a quick sample of "Endorphine" from the band Binary Time Lapse. It closes with the song "Apart" from indy artist Freddy Litwiniuk. Check both out at Garageband.com.
We are trying out a new podcast host - Mypodcast.com. The price (free!) is attractive, and there's even the possibility that we might get paid a little for advertising.
Our apologies to our subscribers, but this means you will need to resubscribe to the show at this feed:
http://fastforward.mypodcast.com/rss.xml
If you've never subscribed to a podcast before, your first step is to install podcast software. The most popular podcast software is the ubiquitous iTunes. Click here to download iTunes, or here to download other podcast receivers.
If you've missed past episodes of Fast Forward Radio, you can find them all at the Fast Forward Radio webpage. For more Speculicious podcasting fun, check out The L2si Report.
Ben Young suggests that Tabloid Journalism is good for society. Is it possible that this is just another example of how everything "bad" is good for you?
And check out the NPR interview with Steven Johnson - the author of the book "Everything Bad Is Good for You."
Must-know terms for 21st Century Intellectuals
George P. Dvorsky at Sentient Developments put together a list of key concepts that every intellectual should know.
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
Plus, check out Kathy's new Speculist challenge related to the Doomsday clock.
Click here to download iTunes, or here to download other podcast receivers.
If you've missed past episodes of Fast Forward Radio, you can find them all at the Fast Forward Radio webpage. For more Speculicious podcasting fun, check out The L2si Report.
Sunday night Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon visited live with Michael Anissimov. 
