Alex Garland is a writer and director of many imaginative and philosophical films from the dreamlike exploration of human self-destruction in the movie Annihilation to the deep questions of consciousness and intelligence raised in the movie Ex Machina, which to me is one of the greatest movies on artificial intelligence ever made. I'm releasing this podcast to coincide with the release of his new series called Devs that will premiere this Thursday, March 5, on Hulu.
EPISODE LINKS: Devs: https:/
Ann Druyan is the writer, producer, director, and one of the most important and impactful communicators of science in our time. She co-wrote the 1980 science documentary series Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, whom she married in 1981, and her love for whom, with the help of NASA, was recorded as brain waves on a golden record along with other things our civilization has to offer and launched into space on the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft that are now, 42 years later, still active, reaching ou
Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist, co-inventor of loop quantum gravity, and a contributor of many interesting ideas to cosmology, quantum field theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, theoretical biology, and the philosophy of science. He is the author of several books including one that critiques the state of physics and string theory called The Trouble with Physics, and his latest book, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum.
EPISODE LINKS: Boo
Vitalik Buterin is co-creator of Ethereum and ether, which is a cryptocurrency that is currently the second-largest digital currency after bitcoin. Ethereum has a lot of interesting technical ideas that are defining the future of blockchain technology, and Vitalik is one of the most brilliant people innovating this space today.
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Anca Dragan is a professor at Berkeley, working on human-robot interaction -- algorithms that look beyond the robot's function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that accounts for interaction and coordination with human beings.
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EPISODE LINKS: Anca's Twitter: https://twitter.com/ancadianadragan Anca's Website: https://people.eecs.berkele
Simon Sinek is an author of several books including Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, and his latest The Infinite Game. He is one of the best communicators of what it takes to be a good leader, to inspire, and to build businesses that solve big difficult challenges.
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Nick Bostrom is a philosopher at University of Oxford and the director of the Future of Humanity Institute. He has worked on fascinating and important ideas in existential risks, simulation hypothesis, human enhancement ethics, and the risks of superintelligent AI systems, including in his book Superintelligence. I can see talking to Nick multiple times on this podcast, many hours each time, but we have to start somewhere.
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Roger Penrose is physicist, mathematician, and philosopher at University of Oxford. He has made fundamental contributions in many disciplines from the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology to the limitations of a computational view of consciousness.
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David Silver leads the reinforcement learning research group at DeepMind and was lead researcher on AlphaGo, AlphaZero and co-lead on AlphaStar, and MuZero and lot of important work in reinforcement learning.
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EPISODE LINKS: Reinforcement learning (book
Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, The Greatest Show on Earth, and his latest Outgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including funny enough the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea. H