Episode #14: George Dyson on Childhood's End

I had the pleasure of recording this on-site with George in his Bellingham workshop (a former tavern). I experimented with having Claude write shownotes for this episode, and it proposed this as a "key theme" of our discussion: "The parallels between Clarke's Overlords and modern artificial intelligence as agents of human transformation." This is a pretty remarkable guess given that I only told Claude that the episode was a conversation with George Dyson about Childhood's End. In any event, that is precisely what George and I talk about.

We also talk about many other things, including AI and social media as "overlord technologies," analog computing, ESP, and why he believes every company should employ an historian and a biologist.

Show notes:

• Buy George's new edition of Project Orion
• George's 2002 TED Talk about Project Orion
• Solar cigarette lighters
• Mina Rees, first female head of the mathematics department of the Office of Naval Research
• Tim O'Reilly: The End of Programming as We Know It

More show notes at techsontexts.net

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

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