Podcast
StarTalk Radio
It was discussed as a primer on future issues such as climate change, biotech, and artificial intelligence, and how future generations might perceive our current actions.
From climate change to biotech to artificial intelligence, science sits at the center of nearly all decisions that civilization confronts to assure its own survival.
— Episode: The Future of Us, with Sir Martin Rees
Episode: The Future of Us, with Sir Martin Rees
It was discussed as a primer on future issues such as climate change, biotech, and artificial intelligence, and how future generations might perceive our current actions.
From climate change to biotech to artificial intelligence, science sits at the center of nearly all decisions that civilization confronts to assure its own survival.
Martin Rees has created a primer on these issues and what we can do about them so that the next generation will think of us not as reckless custodians of their inheritance, but as brilliant shepherds of their birthright.
And I discuss things but accept that they are very uncertain.
And a theme of my book is that we are a very important transition stage because two things are gonna happen this century. One is spreading beyond the Earth for the first time and the other perhaps is- having the power to as it were redesign ourselves by genetic techniques and cyborg techniques and interfaces with the electronics.
In my book On the Future, I emphasize that this century is very special because depending on what actions we take now, we can either leave a depleted world with mass extinctions and an unappealing climate or we can trigger the transition to a spacefaring civilization where human evolution will be succeeded by a post-human era which could spread beyond the solar system and indeed through the entire galaxy.