As part of the recent BioAgenda Summit 2006, Baroness Susan Greenfield, Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, debates Ray Kurzweil, one of America’s most prolific inventors and a futuristic thinker in his own right. Their topic? One of the burning questions of our time: Will biotechnology save us? Or hurt us? The answers are nuanced, and they often don’t agree. We’ll find out how the audience voted — From help us to hurt us to “It’s too early to tell.”

Click below to hear Ray Kurzweil debate a klucky Barroness Susan Greenfield

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The next 20 to 30 years will produce a shift as profound in what it means to be human as was the case when we moved from being Cro-Magnons or Neanderthals to modern humans. The question is where does the wisdom come from to handle that kind of transcendence. Cultural evolution has made a difference over the last 8,000 years. This engineered evolution, or this radical evolution, we’re talking about is making big changes in the internal aspects of our minds, memories, metabolisms, personalities, and progeny.

Click below to hear Dr. J. Hughes interview Joel Garreau

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Owning 34 Internet brands offers as many opportunities for failure as for success. In a freewheeling and provocative conversation, Barry Diller - legendary media mogul, chairman of Expedia and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp - explains his own recipe for success and speculates about the future of business on the Internet.

Click below to hear Barry Diller at Web 2.0

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Some pioneers in three-dimensional gaming and programming believe that the”year of the avatar” is just around the corner. As 3D open ended environments like Second Life become more accessible and popular, the ability to interact with a network in a “realistic” manner becomes available for more applications.

Taking inspiration from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash and David Gelernter’s non-fiction Mirror Worlds, Jerry Paffendorf imagines a future beyond the web browser. In this talk from Accelerating Change 2005, he presents examples of ways in which 3D immersive experiences are already being used in software, and extrapolates a future using these techniques.

Click below to hear Jerry Paffendorf Accelerating Change 2005

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Paul takes blogging as an analogy and explains how the phenomenon is actually very similar to the open source movement. Both show that amateurs often surpass professionals in what they choose to do, because they love what they are doing. He also points out that in the age of the internet, which has made collaboration extremely easy, large corporations find it difficult to compete with software produced by a bunch of inspired hackers. Paul also takes a dig at workplaces as we know them and illustrates how the most productive phase of any company is when it is still a startup.

Click below to hear Paul Graham at OSCON 2005

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When stuck in a traffic gridlock, you may want to ragefully pray that Paul Moller’s dream comes true. For more than 40 years, the aerospace engineer has been chasing a dream that many viewed as a fantasy. It is now regarded as a marvel-in-the-making: a commercially viable, four-passenger flying car.

Scheduled to make it’s maiden voyage this winter, the inaugural vehicle is being sold by Nieman Marcus in their 2005 Christmas catalog.

Click below to listen to Paul Moller discuss the SkyCar with Artbell on C2C.

Interview with Paul Moller

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Many people still have this nostalgic belief that China somehow continues to be Communist, when in fact, in their constitution in 2003 they incorporated a provision upholding the sanctity of private property. George Gilder believes that China has become a consumer country by building 60 nuclear plants. The Chinese government uses science and technology in a realistic way because China is run by engineers, not lawyers like the United States.

He also feels the next big step in technology will come from the chip companies combining everything on a single chip and eventually developing what Gilder calls the “teleputer.”

Click below to hear Larry Magid interview George Gilder

George Gilder

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A pure peer-to-peer file transfer network does not have the notion of clients or servers, but only equal peer nodes that simultaneously function as both “clients” and “servers” to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement differs from the client-server model where communication is usually to and from a central server.

Michael Weiss doesn’t believe Morpheus or any other file-sharing network for that matter is a pirate company. He’s not against the entertainment industry, Weiss is actually looking to build business relationships with them rather than law-suits. In this interesting installment of Larry’s World, host Larry Magid talks to Michael Weiss, CEO of StreamCast networks, parent company of Morpheus, about file-sharing, piracy, the entertainment industry and the distribution mechanism of P2P.

Click below to hear Larry Magid interview Michael Weiss of Morpheus

Michael Weiss of Morpheus

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The characteristics of the open source movement and its community are not exclusive to the software industry. It runs far deeper than a single industry and drives to the core of human nature. Michael Tiemann shows how various innovations throughout history have only been possible through the architecture of participation. In the software industry distributed problem solving and code sharing has been instrumental to the success of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

The open source movement has redistributed the power structure in the operating system, database, web server and application server markets. Like Robin Hood and his Merry Men will it continue to take away from the few and give to the many?

Click below to hear Michael Tiemann of Red Hat present at the…

2005 MySql users conference.

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Ray Kurzweil explores the social and philosophical ramifications of our potential to overcome the limitations of biology.

How close are we to a world in which the abilities of machines are indistinguishable from those of the species that invented them? Closer than you think, says award-winning scientist and author Ray Kurzweil who has dedicated his career to blurring the line between humans and machines. His inventions have used technology to enhance and replace humankind’s biological capabilities, while his most recent books reverse the relationship, attributing souls and intelligence to machines. His forthcoming book, to be published by Viking Press, is entitled The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology; it explores the social and philosophical ramifications of our potential to overcome the limitations of biology.

Click Below to listen to the Presentation from WGBH

Ray Kurzweil’s presentation at Cambridge Forum

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Author and lecturer Dr. Nick Begich discusses startling advances in the area of mind control technology in both military and private sector applications.

Electromagnetic devices can delude people’s senses, effect their emotional state and make them believe that they’re seeing or hearing something that isn’t really there. Begich cited the article The Mind Has No Firewall for further insights into militaristic approaches.

Concerns over citizens’ privacy are also raised by Begich in connection with mind control. By embedding signals in radio broadcasts, for instance, people’s behaviors could be manipulated, he warned. To counteract, he suggests political measures to strengthen penalties against such activities, as well as setting up whistleblower mechanisms to hold people accountable. Begich also details some positive applications for mind control, such as biofeedback, which have been successfully used for treating addictions.

Click Below to listen to the interview from C2C

Interview with Dr. Nick Begich

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IT Conversations is a refreshing source of audio information that provides education as well as inspiration. ITC hosts tech interviews, discussions on future trends in science and culture and presentations from major industry conferences. It began as a one-person labor of love.

Doug Kaye is ITC’s original host, producer, developer, writer, interviewer and engineer. He launched IT Conversations in June 2003 and still produces many of ITC’s programs.

Click below to hear Cameron Reilly of thepodcastnetwork interview Doug Kaye about the future of IT Conversations and Podcasting.

Cameron Reilly interviews Doug Kaye

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Cultural revolution correspondent to the Washinton Post, Joel Garreau, explains that the powers of super humans already exist, or are in development in hospitals, labs, and research facilities around the country — from revved-up reflexes and articulated power to the enhanced mental acuity and memory capabilities of a new advanced species.

We are at an inflection point in history. As you read this, the next stage of human evolution is being engineered. Through advances in genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnologies, we are altering our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny–and perhaps our very souls.

Click below to listen to Dr. Moira Gunn interview Joel Garreau

Interview with Joel Garreau on Tech Nation

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Scientist and lecturer, Dr. Bruce Lipton shares his groundbreaking research in cellular biology with Art Bell. “We’ve mistakenly given genes intelligence,” Lipton rebuffs, “genes do not control the dynamics and fate of an organism.” Instead, he suggests genes are accessed and put into action in response to an organisms perception of self and its environment (see fractal evolution).

He shows that our perceptions, positive or negative, affect genetic activity and actually alter our DNA. Dr. Lipton’s work, being hailed as one of the major breakthroughs in the New Sciences, shows how we can retrain our consciousness to create a healthy belief system that positively effects our bodies and our lives.

Click below to listen to the interview

Interview with Bruce Lipton on C2C

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Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 Paul and Robert Morris developed the first web-based application, Viaweb. In 2002 he described a simple Bayesian spam filter that inspired most current filters. He is currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book for O’Reilly, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator.

Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (O’Reilly, 2004). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard. Paul also studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence.

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Paul Graham on Great Hackers from OSCON

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J2EE, .Net. Who needs em? Not, apparently, Amazon, Google, Yahoo or Sabre.

Peter Yared, who headed up the Liberty Alliance project at Sun, took notice, left Sun and founded ActiveGrid, a company dedicated to building Web applications upon LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), XML, Javascript and DHTML.

Yared maintains there are really three types of grids: computational, utility (on-demand) and transaction grids (an example of which is ActiveGrid). He explains what makes a transaction grid different than using conventional load balancing software. Listen to Yared’s effort to revive fourth-generation languages from their doldrums by building one that outputs standard XML metadata, XForms and Web service-defining BPEL flows.

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Peter Yared of ActiveGrid on Opening Move

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Author and columnist Frosty Wooldridge discusses global overpopulation and illegal immigration in America. He estimates that there are currently over 20 million illegal immigrants in the U.S., with around half of them coming from Mexico. There is also a 7-billion dollar people-smuggling operation originating in Asia that is contributing to the situation. Illegal immigrants have taken over many blue collar jobs and driven down the salary for such positions. This scenario seems to be an effort by the powers that be to get cheap labor and bust up unions. He also explores what he calls the “Cancer of Multiculturalism”.

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Slavery and the Destruction of the American Middle Class from c2c

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In this interview with Larry Magid, Justin Kitch shares his expertise on designing and presenting information on the web, pointing out that most sites on the web are fairly ugly. People tend to over design their own sites or hire professionals who overuse technology to justify what they’re charging the client.

He discusses his company’s new professional design service but he also offers some great tips for anyone who designs and maintains their own website.

Click below to listen to the interview

Justin Kitch from ITConversations

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It was 1905, and an obscure 26-year-old patent clerk in Bern, Switzerland, produced four separate science papers that would change the laws of physics and turn the world upside down. That young man was Albert Einstein. His teachers thought him to be of below average intelligence. Later in life Einstein railed against the academic community stating the fastest way to kill a mind was to put it in school.

Click below to listen to the interview

Michio Kaku on cbc quirks & quarks

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Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with New York Times Business and Tech Writer, John Markoff. They look at the beginnings of personal computing and how the counter culture of the 60’s opened the door to the idea of a world connected by computers. Enhancement consciousness and Doug Englebart’s idea that computers could augment the human intellect were at the very least psychedelicly visionary.

Click below to listen to the interview

Moira Gunn & John Markoff on Tech Nation


also see the history of the gui

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USC Engineering Professor Bart Kosko shares his vision for the year 2030, which he explored in his novel Nanotime. He foresees a world fueled by increases in computer efficiency. A “smart war principle” will be in effect— namely that it’s “cheaper to attack, than to defend,” and that could translate into incursions carried out souly by information devices. He also promotes the idea that digital networks will be able to hold our own consciousnesses, putting an end to human death: “Biology is not destiny for the minds that will follow us…. Chips are destiny.” (recorded May 6, 2005 on Coast to Coast AM )

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Bart Kosco from Coast to Coast

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Matt Drudge discusses new media and personal web reporting. Drudge says individuals publishing on the web should not allow themselves to be called bloggers. There is a lot of information being provided by “web-journalists” that is having a major impact on the media and it should be taken seriously and it shouldn’t be a stamped with a marginalizing dismissive. (recorded April 30, 2005 on C-SPAN)

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Matt Drudge on C-SPAN

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Peter Griffin has been in involved various aspects of the film business for more that 50 years.

His film credits include, Man in the Dark, Blackboard Jungle and Kiss me Kate.
Some of his television work can be seen in the early Star Trek episodes as well as
Babalon 5. Over the years he has worked with Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros, Fox,
MGM, United Artist and Disney.

Griff is known to be quite a character and his insights are often surprising.

Click on the link below to listen to our interview:

Interview with Peter Griffin

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Chris Vincent is an accomplished classical and jazz guitarist from Austin Texas. Chris studied composition under Michael Henigan at the Univerisity of Oklahoma and traveled to Spain to hone his guitar techniques. He currently teaches classical and jazz guitar as well as music theory at The Austin School of Music. His performances can be heard live in many of the most exclusive venues in the Austin area.

In this interview we discuss the process of purchasing a fine guitar, Chris’s method of teaching music and the state of affairs in the academic community. We also delve into his life in the Austin music scene and his philosphy on writing, playing and recording music.

Click on the link below to listen to our interview:

Interview with Guitarist Chris Vincent

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Mr. Armin Amler is a well known broadcaster in Germany. He has lived in the United States for a number of years and has a great passion for science and broadcasting. He currently produces a news and science website called Erdstation.com. In our interview he recounts his life in Germany, the use of voice recognition in his work and the future of space exploration.

To listen to our interview click on the link below:

Interview with Armin Amler

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