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by Nikola Danaylov
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- 2 weeks ago2h 0m
The Great Progression: Peter Leyden on AI, Trump and the Next 25 Years
Some people see a world coming apart. Peter Leyden sees an old world dying so a better one can be born. That, in essence, is The Great Progression, the thesis of Peter Leyden’s forthcoming HarperCollins book and the spine of our conversation. Peter is the OG Silicon Valley futurist who came to San Francisco at the dawn of WIRED, co-authored the iconic 1997 Long Boom cover story with Peter Schwartz, and has spent three decades trying to draw a coherent map of where humanity is actually headed. His claim is audacious: we are living through a fourth reinvention of America, an event that occurs roughly every 80 years (the founding, 1865, 1945, and now 2025), driven this time by three converging general-purpose technologies: AI, clean energy, and bioengineering. Stack them together, he argues, and we are looking at a civilization-scale change on the order of the Enlightenment. The Positive Reframe: If there is a phrase to walk away with, it is this: positive reframe. Peter is not a naïve optimist. He is something more interesting: a man who has built a methodology for looking at the same chaos everyone else is looking at and pulling out the constructive story buried inside it. Trump, in his telling, is not the future but the wrecking ball that takes the political hit so the next coalition can build the next thing. AI is not the great extractor but the first technology that takes intelligence, the rarest resource we have ever known, and makes it cheap and abundant. You don’t have to agree. I pushed back hard, and he pushed back harder. Where I Pushed Back: I challenged him on three fronts: the human cost of the in-between (every 80-year reinvention he cites was paid for in blood), the myth of golden ages (drawing on Ada Palmer’s Inventing the Renaissance to argue that real breakthroughs continue past institutions rather than replace them), and the empirical record of AI in education (Denmark and Norway, both early digital classroom pioneers, are now removing devices and walking it back). Peter has answers for all three. Whether they hold is for you to judge. What We Covered: The two-line email Kevin Kelly sent that pulled Peter from Minneapolis to early WIRED The Long Boom: what it nailed and what it missed China, 35 years after Tiananmen, and why Peter would not move there today The 80-year cycle and the fourth reinvention of America The Enlightenment parallel and the six foundational inventions of the modern world Why Peter calls Trump a wrecking ball, not the future The emerging abundance politics of the next 60-40 majority coalition The strange Anglosphere pessimism about AI How Peter wrote this book using AI and was two to three times more productive: My Take: I am, as I told Peter, a pessimist of the intellect and an optimist of the spirit, in the Gramscian sense. I genuinely hope he is right. I am genuinely afraid he is not. The technology is not the hard part. The hard part is the gap between our scientific power and the wisdom to apply it without destroying ourselves. Peter has not converted me. But he has reminded me there is another way to look at it, and that the difference between hope and despair sometimes comes down to whether you can hold a positive reframe long enough to actually build something with it. You can see the full video interview here: https://www.singularityweblog.com/the-great-progression-peter-leyden/
- Apr 6, 20261h 26m
Steven Kotler on We Are As Gods
We have godlike technology. Do we have godlike responsibility to match? In this third conversation with Steven Kotler — our first in 14 years — we dig into his latest book, We Are As Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance, co-written with Peter Diamandis. And while the book makes a powerful case for abundance, I came prepared to challenge it. Because abundance without purpose, as Kotler himself argues, is not salvation. It is a different kind of crisis. The evidence is already in. John Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment created a perfect mouse utopia — unlimited food, water, and space, with no predators. The population boomed. Then society collapsed completely. Not from scarcity. From the absence of challenge and meaning. Calhoun’s haunting conclusion, quoted in the book: there is no logical reason a comparable sequence could not unfold for a species as complex as man. This is why it is a survival guide. I also push back on what has — and hasn’t — aged well from the original Abundance: the techno-philanthropist thesis, the formula of capital plus people plus technology, and whether the explosion of AI is actually delivering on the promise — or accelerating the dark side. As the Dalai Lama put it: “We don’t need more intelligence. We need more compassion.” And as Jerry Seinfeld added: “We’re smart enough to invent AI, dumb enough to need it, and so stupid we can’t figure out if we did the right thing.” We explore all of this — and more: What “We Are As Gods” actually means — promise, aspiration, warning, or choice? What the original Abundance got right — and what Kotler now regrets The techno-philanthropist thesis: visionaries or new robber barons? AI: overhyped, underpowered, and why the backlash is a mark of sanity Cognitive offloading and what we risk losing when machines think for us Why sustained large-scale cooperation is the killer app of the exponential age Flow, lateral thinking, and what AI simply cannot do Imagination as the final frontier — and whether it is already being colonized What struck me most about this conversation was how much we agree. For 16 years, I have argued that technology is the How, not the Why. That without the right Why, even the most powerful How does more damage than good. Kotler not only agrees — he builds on it. Cooperation at scale, he argues, requires a shared mental model, a collective Why, without which no amount of godlike technology will save us. And on the dark side of abundance, on the dangers of cognitive offloading, on the gap between our power and our wisdom to apply it — we find ourselves, repeatedly and sometimes surprisingly, on the same page. You can watch the full video of the interview here: https://www.singularityweblog.com/we-are-as-gods-steven-kotler/
- Mar 25, 20264 min
We Don’t Need More. We Need Better: Intelligence Scales. Wisdom Does Not.
We don’t need more AI. We need a better why for our AI. We are told the why is obvious — cure everything, fix everything, transcend everything. But “solve everything” is not a philosophy. It is an assumption. Even the most powerful intelligence cannot erase moral disagreement or competing visions of justice. Because without a why, intelligence becomes acceleration without direction. It helps us get lost faster. Technology amplifies intention. It does not supply it. It is a magnifying mirror, not a moral compass. If we don’t know our destination, no wind is favorable. We don’t need more innovation. We need better reflection. Innovation without reflection is just motion. And motion is not progress. We have mastered the art of building; we have neglected the discipline of asking whether what we build serves us — or enslaves us. We don’t need more power. We need more discipline in how we apply it. Every generation believes it deserves its tools. Few ask whether they deserve the consequences. Power scales impact. It does not scale wisdom. We don’t need more data. We need better judgment. Data tells us what is. Wisdom asks what ought to be. The distance between the two is where civilizations mature — or collapse. We don’t need more influencers. We need better thinkers. Noise is easy. Leadership is rare. Influence chases attention. Thinking demands responsibility. We don’t need more. We need to do better — with less. Less distraction. Less ego. Less blind acceleration. And perhaps most importantly: We don’t need fewer problems. We need to become better people. Problems are inevitable. Character is optional. We don’t need to live forever. We need to live better — to do better, be better, give better, and listen better. Longevity without meaning is extended entropy. The real question is not how long we live but whether our lives compound into something worth extending. The future will not be decided by how much we can build. It will be decided by who we become while building it. Intelligence scales. Wisdom does not. More is inevitable. Better is a choice.
- Mar 3, 20267 min
Why I Cancelled ChatGPT and Switched to Claude, And Why You Should Too
I cancelled my ChatGPT paid subscription and switched to Claude. Not because of the technology. Because of the values — or the lack thereof. On February 27, 2026, Anthropic — the company behind Claude — refused to give the Pentagon unrestricted access to its AI for mass surveillance and autonomous killer weapons. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei said plainly that he "cannot in good conscience" accede to a deal that would remove safeguards against domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. Within hours, OpenAI's Sam Altman swooped in and took the deal. Let that sink in. One company held the line. The other sprinted to cross it. And just like that, the two biggest players in AI revealed exactly who they are. I've spent the last 17 years interviewing the world's leading thinkers on artificial intelligence on Singularity.FM — scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, artists, writers — brilliant people wrestling with the most consequential questions of our time. One question has always haunted every conversation: What kind of future are we actually building? Not the future we're promising. Not the future we're marketing. The future we're actually building — through our choices, our partnerships, our deals, the things we do, and the things we refuse to do. Well, here's your answer. This isn't just about one deal. It's about a pattern. OpenAI's president Greg Brockman and his wife donated $25 million to Trump's Super PAC, MAGA Inc — making them the single largest donors in the most recent report. OpenAI is the top spender behind a $125 million AI Super PAC that attacks anyone who threatens to regulate them. Meanwhile, psychiatrists are documenting "AI psychosis" — users losing touch with reality after extended chatbot interactions. And now, OpenAI is preparing to add advertisements to ChatGPT. What was once a mission-driven organization, founded as a nonprofit to develop AI for the benefit of all humanity, has abandoned that founding purpose to pursue money, political power, and Pentagon contracts. Over 1.5 million people have already cancelled or stopped using ChatGPT as part of the growing #QuitGPT movement. Claude is now the number 1 download on the App Store. OpenAI is already losing three times as much money as it earns. ChatGPT's dominance is not inevitable. It is fragile. And fragile systems respond to pressure. Cancel your ChatGPT subscription. Switch to Claude. And join the movement at https://quitgpt.org The question has never been whether AI will change the world. The question is who gets to decide how. Right now, you have a vote. Use it.
- Feb 15, 20263h 1m
Ada Palmer on Inventing the Renaissance: How Golden & Dark Ages Are Constructed and Why They Matter
Was the Renaissance truly a Golden Age? Or was it something far more powerful — and far more revealing? In my third conversation with Ada Palmer, we dive into her new book, Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age, and dismantle one of the most enduring myths in Western history: that civilization moves cleanly from darkness to light. This is our third long-form discussion. If you’re new to our conversations, I highly recommend revisiting our earlier interviews here and here, which lay the groundwork for this one. But this episode isn’t really about the Renaissance. It’s about how societies construct Golden Ages and Dark Ages — and how those narratives shape power, legitimacy, and the future. The Renaissance Was Framed, Not Found “Renaissance” means rebirth. But rebirth implies death. To celebrate a Golden Age, you must first invent a Dark Age. As Ada explains, these labels were not objective descriptions. They were rhetorical tools — created by Petrarch, humanists, political actors, and later historians to legitimize their present by reshaping the past. Golden Ages are not natural phenomena. They are narratives. And narratives confer power. Why This Still Matters We do this today. We speak of: The Age of AI The End of Democracy Civilizational Collapse The Fourth Industrial Revolution Utopia and dystopia are modern versions of Golden and Dark Ages. In my essay Ignorance Is the Greatest Evil, I argue that certainty fused with power is more dangerous than malice. Golden Age narratives often operate with precisely that certainty — simplifying complexity into moral clarity. But history is rarely simple. The Renaissance itself was violent, unstable, and deeply unequal — even as it produced extraordinary art and ideas. It was neither purely Golden nor purely Dark. It was human. Manifestos, Dilemmas, and the Future Years ago, I wrote a transhumanist manifesto. It was confident, clear, and certain. Later, I returned to doubt. In Transhumanist Manifestos and Dilemmas, I reflected on how manifestos mobilize action but often erase complexity. Golden Age narratives function the same way: they inspire and legitimize — but they also oversimplify. Ada’s work does not replace one myth with another. It teaches us to question every myth — including the one we may believe we are living in now. The Real Question Are we progressing? Or are we narrating progress? Is AI our Renaissance — or will future historians label this era differently? Golden and Dark Ages are not objective states of civilization. They are constructed lenses. And once those lenses become embedded in institutions, technologies, and political movements, they stop being stories and start shaping reality. That is why they matter. Listen to our full 3-hour conversation. Then ask yourself: Who is framing our present as a Golden Age — or a Dark Age — and to what end? You can watch the full video here: https://www.singularityweblog.com/ada-palmer-inventing-the-renaissance/
- Feb 12, 20262h 49m
Graham Priest on Dialetheism, True Contradictions, the Liar Paradox & Why Classical Logic Isn’t Enough
What if some contradictions are not mistakes — but truths? For over 2,500 years, Western philosophy has treated contradiction as catastrophic. From Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction to modern formal systems, logic has operated under one sacred assumption: a statement cannot be both true and false. But what if that assumption is wrong? In this deep, wide-ranging conversation, I sit down with Graham Priest, one of the world’s most influential philosophers of logic and the leading defender of dialetheism — the view that some contradictions are true. We explore: What dialetheism really means Why the liar paradox still unsettles logicians How paraconsistent logic blocks “explosion” (the idea that from a contradiction, anything follows) Whether classical logic is incomplete rather than universal What Buddhist philosophy and Nāgārjuna understood about contradiction And whether AI systems may eventually require non-classical logics to model human reasoning Far from being an abstract puzzle, the liar paradox exposes deep tensions in how we understand truth, self-reference, and rationality itself. If contradictions can be true, then the foundations of logic, mathematics, metaphysics — and even artificial intelligence — may need rethinking. We also move beyond formal systems into lived philosophy: Graham’s journey from Christianity to atheism His engagement with Buddhist thought The limits of decision theory The discipline of karate as a philosophical practice This is not merely a discussion of symbolic logic. It is a conversation about the limits of reason. About what happens when our most trusted intellectual tools reach their breaking point. And about whether embracing contradiction might expand — rather than destroy — rational inquiry. If your background is in technology, computer science, AI, or engineering, this episode may challenge assumptions you didn’t even realize you were making. If your background is in philosophy, it may unsettle what you thought was settled. And if you care about the future of thought itself, this conversation is essential. You can see the original video recording here: https://www.singularityweblog.com/graham-priest-dialetheism/ As always, you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support, you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation, or become a patron on Patreon.
- Dec 7, 20251h 47m
Breaking: Did Integral AI’s Jad Tarifi Just Announce AGI?
In my latest Singularity.FM conversation with Dr. Jad Tarifi, CEO of Integral AI, I heard something I don’t say lightly: a credible claim that AGI may have just arrived — or at least the foundation of it. I don’t often say “Wow” during interviews, but in this one I simply couldn’t stop. Tarifi describes a new AGI-capable model built on an architecture and learning paradigm fundamentally different from today’s large language models, and he argues it can scale toward artificial general intelligence at human-level energy efficiency. If you haven’t seen our first interview, I strongly recommend watching it first — it provides the context that makes this one hit even harder. At the heart of Tarifi’s announcement is a shift from prediction-only LLMs to an abstraction-first world model designed explicitly for AGI. Instead of cramming benchmarks, his system compresses knowledge into deep conceptual structures and then re-derives understanding when needed — a hallmark of genuine general intelligence. Layered on top is a new Interactive Learning loop: planning, taking action, generating its own training data, “dreaming” to consolidate memories, and continually updating its own weights without catastrophic forgetting. According to Tarifi, this is what allows the model to actually learn — not just infer — the way a true AGI must. Tarifi also introduces a concrete approach to AGI alignment, grounded not in rules or filters but in maximizing collective agency — freedom — for individuals and the whole. The AGI evaluates simulated futures and chooses actions that increase our ability to know, choose, act, and renew ourselves. This becomes the moral foundation for what he calls the Alignment Economy, where value is tied to how much an action increases or decreases absolute human freedom. All of this feeds into a larger AGI-driven vision: the Supernet, a global network of embodied AGI agents coordinating factories, robots, labs, homes, and infrastructure to turn human intentions into real-world outcomes. In Tarifi’s view, AGI isn’t just a digital mind — it’s an embodied, operational intelligence capable of reshaping how we work, build, learn, and create. Whether you believe this is the moment AGI truly begins or simply the start of a new chapter in the race toward artificial general intelligence, one thing is certain: Tarifi’s announcement represents a serious, technically grounded break from the “just scale LLMs harder” era. If you’re interested in AGI, this is one conversation you don’t want to miss. As always, you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support, you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation, or become a patron on Patreon.
- Nov 29, 20251h 16m
Jacob Ward on The Loop, AI, and a World Without Real Choices
What happens to free will in a world where AI tells us what to watch, buy, believe, and even who to love? In this new episode of Singularity.FM, I sit down with Jacob Ward — veteran technology journalist and author of The Loop: How AI Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back — to ask a deceptively simple question: what is a choice, and what happens when we quietly hand that power to machines? Jake argues that AI is doing to our decision-making what Google Maps did to our sense of direction: turning a hard-won human capacity into a service layer we outsource by default. Drawing on decades of reporting from Silicon Valley, behavioral science labs, addiction research, and the front lines of “decision technology,” he shows how our brains are shortcut engines that love to offload hard thinking — and how AI, optimized for engagement and profit, exploits that instinct to narrow our options, dull our skills, and automate even our moral judgments. We dig into the psychology that makes us so hackable, the business models that reward “decision outsourcing,” and the cult-like belief that adding AI to anything automatically makes it better. But we also talk about what we can still do — culturally, politically, and personally — to defend human autonomy, preserve difficult choices, and protect the “friction” that makes life meaningful rather than merely efficient. In this conversation with Jacob Ward, we explore: Who Jacob Ward is and how a tech reporter became obsessed with the psychology of choice and AI The core thesis of The Loop: how AI and decision-shaping tech are shrinking the space in which real human choice lives What a “choice” actually is, why it’s rare, and how much of our lives run on unconscious autopilot The brain as a shortcut machine: why we naturally try to offload heavy cognitive work — and how apps, platforms, and algorithms weaponize that Story as both poison and cure: how narrative explains our addictions, identities, and blind spots The chilling dinner with addiction scientists hired to make consumer apps as addictive as possible Why we outsource hard moral decisions (hiring, lending, welfare, bail, custody) to opaque algorithms we don’t understand Google Maps, Spotify, Netflix & co: from convenience to skill-loss and dependency ChatGPT and the new AI wave: why Jake thought he was early, and why the cult of AI “solutionism” worries him more than the tech itself “AI will fix everything” as the ultimate cop-out: from politics and climate to governance and war Great ideas we shouldn’t pursue: the missing virtue of restraint in tech culture Stoicism, free will, and “loving fate” versus outsourcing it to machines Cultural resistance: kids calling AI “clankers,” the return of film cameras, and the hunger for authentic creativity Legal and regulatory pushback: psychological harm, AI distortion, and why insurers are already nervous How we can still fight back: defending autonomy, re-valuing effort and difficulty, and protecting the best parts of being human If you care about AI, ethics, free will, and the future of human agency, this conversation with Jacob Ward is a bracing reality check — and a reminder that protecting our ability to choose may be the most important design problem of the 21st century.
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About Singularity.FM
Singularity.FM is the first and best known singularity podcast - the place where we interview the future. Singularity.FM is a series of singularity podcast interviews with the best scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, film-makers, philosophers and artists, debating issues such as the technological singularity, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, life-extension and ethics.Past guests of this singularity podcast include people such as Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hameroff, Marvin Minsky, Aubrey de Grey, Max More, Michio Kaku, Vernor Vinge, Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross and many, many others.
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