The Futurists

What if AI could replicate your consciousness?

Listen as Brett King connects with Paolo Sironi, host of Provoke.fm's The Banker's Bookshelf about Paolo's latest book, Quantum Sapiens.

Paolo's foray into literary fiction explores the intersection of quantum gravity, philosophy, and the future of human consciousness in an AI-driven world, providing a unique way to explore complex topics.

Available at major bookstores and on Amazon, Quantum Sapiens is a haunting novel blending scientific speculation, the frontiers of artificial intelligence, theories of consciousness and urgent ethical questions into a compelling narrative.

Join Paolo and Brett as they dive into the "hard problem" of consciousness and how technology like AI acts as a mirror for the human experience.

Paul Osterman, MIT labor economist and author of Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment , tells Rob Tercek about the fastest-growing category of the US workforce in the age of artificial intelligence. According to Osterman, a rising number of employers prefer to hire three categories of “disposable workers” with no long-term stake in the company.  Today, such workers comprise more than 35% of the entire US workforce. The employers get the benefit of flexibility, and they push the risk and uncertainty onto the workforce. This interview covers the social, political, and organization consequences of the shift. And it anticipates how the deployment of AI will intensify the trend.

Adrian Woolfson, the CEO and co-founder of the biotech company Genyro, joins the Futurists to chat about the audacious vision that animates his book On The Future of Species. Woolfson conceives of a Artificial Biological Intelligence that will unify diverse fields of genomic research into a new system that enables humans to design and create new species of life. According to Woofson, this marks an unprecedented moment on earth. For the first time ever, natural selection is no longer the only means for species to evolve. Humans can generate new life from first principles. This is true authorship of living organisms. Woolfson unpacks his grand concepts for host Robert Tercek in a lively discussion that spans synthetic biology, ethics, physics and the economics of food, medicine, health care and more.

In 2024, Bay Raitt and Rob Tercek co-founded a generative AI startup with experts in machine learning and computer graphics to build agentic tools and workflows optimized for artists. Bay is a polymath: an artist, storyteller, animator, game designer, comic book author. He plays LLMs like a virtuoso performer. In this episode, Bay shares his views on the current state of AI models, trends in vibe coding, the importance of stories with a human heartbeat, context wielding as a creative art, how AI "slop cannons" will get paved over by agentic visualizers, how to build a deeper creative relationship with Claude, how AI can help writers harmonize with the past, how to summon the ghost of Dorothy Parker, how to hypnotize an LLM like a king cobra, why AI sucks when people use artless prompts, AI psychosis, and why Voltaire judged people by their questions not their answers.

What happens when the software you use starts acting independently? Harry Glorikian calls this the invisible interface, and in this episode he unpacks the implications of unseen agency and autonomy in the future workforce. Topics: the personal interface layer;  the memory war;  who owns the context that makes a personal interface valuable; proofseconds;  the four trust signals that determine whether human users are willing to delegate to machines; how occupational dimensionality determines whether an employer will automate an entire job or just parts of it.

This week when two Australian futurists walk into a pub in London...well, almost!

This week host Brett King and fellow Aussie futurist Andrew Grill sit down for a discussion on what the future means. This is a mashup of The Futurists and the Digitally Curious podcast which Andrew hosts. The discussion that ensues is a wide-ranging debate on the future, how quickly and impactful AI will hit, and how we will adapt to rapid, unrelenting change.

Wayfound.AI is one of the most exciting new ventures in Silicon Valley. CEO Tatyana Mamut joins the Futurists to share her vision of the agentic company of the future, where AI agents supervise a swarm of  workforce comprised of subordinate agents, on behalf of human managers who cannot work 24x7. As a startup venture, Wayfound is a novel experiment in running a business almost entirely with an agentic workforce and just a handful of human employees. It’s the ultimate “eat your own dog food” approach to building a product. Matmut brings a unique perspective to software product leadership as an economic anthropologist. She shares those views here. Anyone curious about the workforce of the future will find this episode fascinating.

This week Captain Scott Kelly returns to the podcast with Brett King to talk Artemis II and NASA’s announcement of its intention to put a permanent base on the moon. Capt Kelly piloted and commanded shuttle missions before spending an entire year as commander of the International Space Station. We delve into the challenges for a lunar base, the similarities between the ISS and a base on the moon, and how the Orion capsule and lunar hardware differ from the shuttle and other spacecraft that Kelly piloted. The race is on between China and the US to set foot back on the moon.

This week the three hosts Rob, Ross and Brett are back in the studio debating the likely turning point in Geopolitical history from the Iran War, the resultant energy crisis, combined with the emerging demand for energy and compute based on AI. The world is irreversibally changing and The Futurists bring their unique insights and grasp on superforecasting to the momentum for what is coming.

In this week’s Futurists episode Brett interviews bestselling author Igor Pejic on how AI and technology investment is changing valuations of defense industry players. Pejic is the author of Tech Money: A guide to the new game of technology investing. In this wide ranging conversation, Brett and Igor debate the implications of wars fought largely by AI and how tech-first defense players like Palantir, Anduril and others are changing the sector from an investment perspective.