Aubrey de Grey on Colbert
Posted on 14. Feb, 2008 by Cameron Reilly in transhumanism
Aubrey de Grey was a guest on G’Day World #42 and recently he was also on The Colbert Report. I love his line “aging is a major cause of death… but it’s not the ONLY cause.”
Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbows End” Wins ‘Best Novel’ at Hugo Awards!
Posted on 06. Sep, 2007 by Cameron Reilly in singularity, transhumanism
Via Simon Sharwood’s twitter, I just learned that Vernor Vinge’s “Rainbows End” has just won the coveted ‘Best Novel’ award at the Hugo Awards! A massive congratulations from all at TPN to Vernor. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend getting yourself a copy of RAINBOWS END. It is a brilliant imagining of what the net will probably look like in 2025.
Vinge was recently on G’Day World and I guess this is as good a time as any to give it another plug! Listen to my July 2007 interview with Vernor Vinge here.
G’DAY WORLD #271 – Vernor Vinge, SF Author Extraordinaire
Posted on 31. Jul, 2007 by Cameron Reilly in Podcast, singularity, transhumanism
Today I had the fortune to chat with another living legend – Vernor Vinge (pronounced “vin-jee” as in, he explained off air, “stingy”). While VV may not have the public profile of a William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, in geek circles no SF author carries more respect. Why is it so?
In 1981 Vernor wrote a novella called TRUE NAMES which was the one of the earliest stories to present a fully realized concept of cyberspace which he called the “Other Plane” and which people accessed by attaching electrodes to their scalp. Inside the Other Plane, people hid their “true names” from the Government by creating avatars with pseudonyms – sound familiar? This was several years before NEUROMANCER (William Gibson, 1984) or SNOW CRASH (Neal Stephenson, 1992) and is therefore a seminal work in cyberpunk fiction.
Vinge’s novels A FIRE UPON THE DEEP (1992) and A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY (1999) both won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. In 1993 he wrote an essay called “The Coming Technological Singularity” which popularized that term.
His latest novel, RAINBOWS END, is a masterpiece of near-future Sci-Fi which explores the world circa 2025. Marc Andreessen called it “the clearest and most plausible extrapolation of modern technology trends forward to the year 2025 that you can imagine.” It has been nominated for the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
You can learn more about the huge potential ramifications of the Singularity by attending the Singularity Summit 2007.
Become part of the G’Day World conversation.
I’ve created a couple of groups inside Second Life. You can now add yourself to the following groups:
If I knew how to link directly to those groups from here, I would. But I don’t. So for now you just need to search for them in-world. Or you can add “Cameron Switchblade” to your friends and check out the groups I belong to.
If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.
Add me to your Twitter account.
Do me a solid and digg the show.
Get the TPN version of Particls.
Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.
You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
- Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
- If you use iTunes, click here.
- If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
- If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.
G’DAY WORLD #255 – Jamais Cascio, Futurist
Posted on 26. Jun, 2007 by Cameron Reilly in Podcast, singularity, technology, transhumanism
Jamais Cascio is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer and ethical futurist. He chatted with me last week about the “Participatory panopticon“, Sousveillance, and why everyone should take “democratic transhumanism” very, very seriously. Read Jamais’ blog to find out more about his views on the preferred future. You can also catch Jamais at the Singularity Institute‘s conference in September 2007.
Become part of the G’Day World conversation.
If you’re a member of Facebook, you can ADD ME AS A FRIEND and then ADD YOURSELF TO THE G’DAY WORLD GROUP.
Do me a solid and digg the show.
Get the TPN version of Particls?
Don’t forget to make use of my new comments line – +613 9016 9699.
You can now buy transcripts of this podcast from Pods In Print.
If you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you don’t miss future episodes by subscribing to our feed and leave us a voice comment!
- Subscribe to TPN::G’day World by Email
- If you use iTunes, click here.
- If you use another aggregator, grab our RSS feed here.
- If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this description in Wikipedia.
The G’Day World Theme Song is “Save Me†by The Napoleon Blown Aparts.