189 | Brian Klaas on Power and the Temptation of Corruption
All societies grant more power to some citizens, and there is always a temptation to use that power for the benefit of themselves rather than for the greater good. Power corrupts, we are told — but to...
21 Mar 20221h 22min
AMA | March 2022
Welcome to the March 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of quest...
17 Mar 20223h 18min
188 | Arik Kershenbaum on What Aliens Will Be Like
If extraterrestrial life is out there — not just microbial slime, but big, complex, macroscopic organisms — what will they be like? Movies have trained us to think that they won't be that different at...
14 Mar 20221h 21min
187 | Andrew Leigh on the Politics of Looming Disasters
We're pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren't naturally equipped for dealing with unlikely but world-catastrophic disasters. Yet suc...
7 Mar 20221h 20min
186 | Sherry Turkle on How Technology Affects Our Humanity
Advances in technology have gradually been extending the human self beyond its biological extent, as we augment who we are with a variety of interconnected devices. There are obvious benefits to this ...
28 Feb 20221h 11min
185 | Arvid Ågren on the Gene's-Eye View of Evolution
One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin's theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently "purposeful" or "designed" aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolut...
21 Feb 20221h 25min
184 | Gary Marcus on Artificial Intelligence and Common Sense
Artificial intelligence is everywhere around us. Deep-learning algorithms are used to classify images, suggest songs to us, and even to drive cars. But the quest to build truly "human" artificial inte...
14 Feb 20221h 24min
AMA | February 2022
Welcome to the February 2022 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of qu...
10 Feb 20224h 15min
