Episodes

Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist who has been since 2001 a founding and senior faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His main contributions have been so far to the quantum theory of gravity, to which he has been a co-inventor and major contributor to two major directions, loop quantum gravity and deformed special relativity. Lee also contributes to cosmology, through his proposal of cosmological natural selection — a falsifiable mechanism to explain the choice of th...

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, blogger, and co-editor of Boing Boing. He is the author of Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults; a young adult graphic novel called In Real Life; the nonfiction business book Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, and more. Cory works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the Un...

Dr. Ben Goertzel is Chief Scientist of robotics firm Hanson Robotics and financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity+; Scientific Advisor of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Br...

Robin Hanson is an Associate Professor of Economics, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech. He joined George Mason's economics faculty in 1999 after completing a two-year post-doc at U.C Berkely. His major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory. Index to The Jim Rutt Show featuring Robin Hanson Introduction and "The Age of Em" (00:00:00 - 00:36:00) = 36 minutes Rates of Change (00:36:00 - 00:39:00) = 3 minutes The Fermi Paradox (...

Simon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. For three years, from 2010 to 2013, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. He and his collaborators study how people use words and signals, and the ideas they represent, to create a world. Th...