health Archives - The Next Billion Seconds

In ‘cooversation’ with a newborn, we explore the year 2100: climate change, intelligent computers, editable biology, new tools — and new trials.

Nothing focuses the mind on the future like a newborn. With a bit of luck, today’s newborns will live until the year 2100 – and possibly well beyond.

Six-day-old Alexandros Corey provided the perfect opportunity for an exploration of the ‘deep’ future – a world three billion seconds away, when we’re facing the full consequences of anthropogenic climate change, we’ve built superintelligent computers, can modify almost any biological process using CRISPR, and manage all of it with an advanced generation of augmented reality tools.

Alexandros did well in his first interview.

The ‘Next Big Thing’ always promises to be the cure for all our ails – but inevitably the high promises tarnish and all our best efforts fall back to earth. For as long as we’ve had technology, we’ve believed in its capacity to craft a perfect world – even though we ourselves are far from perfect.

Author and philosopher Erik Davis has spent twenty years dissecting our attitudes toward technology, utopia and belief – and writes about a future where we ‘wise up’ enough to understand the human value of our imperfections.

Here’s a bit of a taste of our wide-ranging conversation about faith, reason, utopia, and why we seem to make the same mistakes over and over again…

Erik hosts an amazing podcast – Expanding Minds – that you can listen to here. (I did an extended interview with Erik in early 2018, you can listen to that here.)

Listen on iTunes

Listen on PodcastOne.com.au

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Episode 3.02: Three Billion Seconds with Alexandros Corey

Episode 2.05: The End of Utopia with Erik Davis