Watch and listen

Some recent podcasts and videos worth checking out:

• James Hughes interviews neuroscientist David Eagleman
• The latest RadioLab episode is pure win: Lost & found
• Cynthia Breazel gives a TED talk on the Rise of personal robots
• Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett discuss the meaning of life and death

Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Radiolab

Be sure to check out the recent Radiolab podcast featuring Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson:

Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature?

In this conversation recorded as part of the New York Public Library series LIVE from the NYPL, Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants) try to convince Robert that the things we make—from spoons to microwaves to computers—are an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And we may need to adapt to the idea that our technology could someday truly have a mind of its own.

Singularity Podcast interview now available

I was recently interviewed by Nikola Danaylov for the Singularity Podcast. You can listen to it here.

Latest podcast posted

Yes, I'm podcasting again. The latest episode can be found here. You can subscribe to this feed.

In this episode I discuss deep brain stimulation, Marquis de Condorcet and our poor attitudes about mental health.

Interviewed by 'The Future and You'

I was recently interviewed by Stephen Cobb for his podcast, 'The Future and You.' You can listen to the interview by following this link.

Here's Cobb's description of the interview:

George Dvorsky, executive editor of betterhumans.com, is this week's featured interview. Betterhumans.com is a webzine with News, Articles, and interactive features serving the transhumanist community. George Dvorsky is also the co-founder and president of the Toronto Transhumanist Association and has served on the Board of Directors for the World Transhumanist Association.

One of Canada's leading futurists, activists and award winning bloggers, George Dvorsky has written and spoken extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology.In this capacity he has been interviewed by: The BBC, Radio Free Europe, and by the British newspaper The Guardian. He's also been on the Canadian television news-magazine The Hour.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the January 23, 2008 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 84 minutes]

Topics include:

Why there is a negative perception of transhumanism in the general public, and what we can do about it.

Why the mainstream medical community is working hard to achieve the goals of transhumanism (without realizing it) and will continue to work toward them with or without our encouragement.

The vaccination of children is a perfect example of the transhumanist ideal, George explains, since it is an engineered hyper-immunity produced by technological intervention.

Why the complete end of personal privacy may be unavoidable and imminent.

We as a species find ourselves living with an increasing array of apocalyptic technologies, George says, and we have to learn how to live with these things since we can't un-invent them.

His personal expectations of The Singularity.

Life extension in general, and how long he personally expects to live.

Why the areas of transhumanist thought that remain controversial are those more removed from just keeping people healthy, and more in the direction of making people better than they ever were before. These areas include such things as increasing the human IQ, life extension, and wiring computers directly into the human brain.

As well as many other subjects.

C-Realm Podcast interview

I was recently interviewed by KMO for the C-Realm Podcast.

In this episode KMO speaks to Bill McKibben and gets his insight into the "transhumanist agenda" and what it means to remain human in an engineered age. I provide the counterpoint and discuss the ethical and sociological implications of transhumanism.