Conversations with Tyler17 Heinä 2019

Neal Stephenson on Depictions of Reality

If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he's created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in crypto, social networks, and the creation of the web itself. Though Stephenson insists he's more often wrong than right, his technical sharpness has even led to a half-joking suggestion that he might be Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of bitcoin. His latest novel, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, involves a more literal sort of brain-picking, exploring what might happen when digitized brains can find a second existence in a virtual afterlife.

So what's the implicit theology of a simulated world? Might we be living in one, and does it even matter? Stephenson joins Tyler to discuss the book and more, including the future of physical surveillance, how clothing will evolve, the kind of freedom you could expect on a Mars colony, whether today's media fragmentation is trending us towards dystopia, why the Apollo moon landings were communism's greatest triumph, whether we're in a permanent secular innovation starvation, Leibniz as a philosopher, Dickens and Heinlein as writers, and what storytelling has to do with giving good driving directions.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded June 14th, 2019

Other ways to connect

Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
Follow Tyler on Twitter
Follow Neal on Twitter
Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(288)

Lazarus Lake on Endurance, Uncertainty, and Reaching One's Potential

Lazarus Lake is a renowned ultramarathon runner and designer. His most famous creation (along with his friend Raw Dog) is the Barkley Marathons, an absurdly difficult 100-mile race through the Tenness...

20 Syys 202351min

Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men

In this special episode, Tyler sat down with Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss three books: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Of...

6 Syys 20231h 3min

Vishy Anand on Staying in the Game

A five-time World Chess Champion, Vishy became India's first grandmaster at age 18, spurring a chess revolution in the country. Now 53, he is still a world top ten player and has been India's number o...

30 Elo 202354min

Celebrating Marginal Revolution's 20th Anniversary

When Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen launched Marginal Revolution in August of 2003, they saw attracting a few thousand academic-minded readers as a runaway success. To their astonishment, the blog soon...

23 Elo 202358min

Paul Graham on Ambition, Art, and Evaluating Talent

Tyler and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham sat down at his home in the English countryside to discuss what areas of talent judgment his co-founder and wife Jessica Livingston is better at, whether ...

9 Elo 202355min

Noam Dworman on Stand-Up Comedy and Staying Open-Minded

Tyler sat down at Comedy Cellar with owner Noam Dworman to talk about the ever-changing stand-up comedy scene, including the perfect room temperature for stand-up, whether comedy can still shock us, t...

26 Heinä 202359min

David Bentley Hart on Reason, Faith, and Diversity in Religious Thought

David Bentley Hart is an American writer, philosopher, religious scholar, critic, and theologian who has authored over 1,000 essays and 19 books, including a very well-known translation of the New Tes...

12 Heinä 202355min

Reid Hoffman on the Possibilities of AI

In his second appearance, Reid Hoffman joined Tyler to talk everything AI: the optimal liability regime for LLMs, whether there'll be autonomous money-making bots, which agency should regulate AI, how...

28 Kesä 20231h 1min