Deep Future

I sat down with Kevin Slavin to follow a strange path from punk-rock liner notes and Situationist psychogeography into location-aware games, bees, sewers, and the invisible microbial fingerprints of cities. This is part 2 of 4.

I sat down with Kevin Slavin to talk about how we cultivate curiosity: planting small moments of wonder, learning from light-touch mentors, and helping our children stay open to the world without turning every experience into a long-term optimization problem. This is part 1 of 4.

Sarah Rose Siskind and I talk about the uneasy dance between nature and human intention — from childbirth, medicine, and evolution to the technologies that help us survive and create.

We also explore AI filmmaking, creative pioneers, and how salt, pepper, and software reveal a recurring pattern: once-scarce tools can become universally abundant.

Sarah Rose Siskind and I talk about telling technology stories out of desperation—helping people see how inventions become meaningful, then disappear into ordinary life.

We move from Waymo, AI scribes, and the Sphere to global poverty, gratitude, and the case for celebrating human progress without pretending fear, tribalism, or nature have disappeared.

Sarah Rose Siskind and I start on who wins the data game — Apple, Amazon, Google — and why so many AI tools are features, not products or platforms, especially once a team has to switch with you.

We get into tech storytelling: the hunger for failure stories, her line that fire is technology, user-controlled algorithms, and real wins like speech recognition that finally listens and Be My Eyes helping someone find lavender pancake batter.

Sarah Rose Siskind and I talk about AI panic, job loss, and the work robots should actually take from us — the dirty, dreary, and dangerous tasks that keep humans from doing more human work.

We trace the messiness of past revolutions, from manufacturing and the internet to self-driving trucks, and ask how to stay compassionate with people caught in transition without pretending technology should stop.

Sarah Siskind turned the presidential fitness test into a one-person experiment: sober, on cannabis, on MDMA, and on ketamine. Then she ran a 50K on LSD, at Burning Man.

We talk about pain, pleasure, breath-holding, chasing your bliss, the science of psychedelics, and why pharmaceutical scale may strip away the surrender that makes these experiences meaningful.

Every powerful technology gets subverted — AI already is. Pedro’s realistic optimism, the nuclear analogy, why The Master Algorithm still holds up as perennial truth, and how 2040 weaponizes satire to say what nonfiction can’t.

Realistic optimism vs subversion of every tech; nuclear analogy; Master Algorithm still holds; writing 2040 as near-future satire.

Seattle vs. the Bay Area, departments that ignored machine learning until it ate the world, and the long hunt for whatever algorithm the brain is actually running. This is the Master Algorithm conversation: Minsky’s “one damn thing after another” versus a few deep primitives still waiting to be found.

Where to build (Seattle vs. Bay Area); departments that ignored ML; n-grams to deep learning; the brain’s algorithm and the Master Algorithm quest.

The frontier labs are in a neck-and-neck race that burns talent and barely holds an edge for weeks. Pedro argues the open research ecosystem still dominates breakthrough odds — and why locking up publishing kills the golden goose.

Big labs chase edges they can’t keep; talent, publishing, and why open academia still beats closed labs; IP, secrets, and culture.