Humans On The Loop

We’re living through a mass extinction – which is also one of the most awesome opportunities for creativity the Earth has ever seen. In this talk that I gave at Burning Man 2017’s Palenque Norte Speaker Series, I give a short tour of Great Catastrophes of Natural History and show how each of them was also equally the advent of new life, intelligence, diversity, and richness. Studying how crisis is the mother of invention, it’s my hope that this talk will inspire you to see our turbulent, chaotic age as something to be celebrated. Learning what we can from evolution, we can shed new light on how to steer ourselves away from global ecological disaster – perhaps to even revel in our role as agents of epochal change in Earth’s amazing story.http://michaelgarfield.nethttp://youtube.com/michaelgarfield In this talk I discuss:• Going backward in order to go forward, the reclamation of the traditions and wisdom we have abandoned in our March of Progress;• The importance of situating ourselves and our moment in the larger context of Natural History;• The “Press-Pulse” Theory of mass extinction;• The emergent forms of life and evolutionary creativity ignored by nearly every conversation about how we’re “killing the planet”;• What The Great Oxygenation Event has to teach us about pollution and creativity as a response to danger;• Why philosopher Galen Strawson doesn’t believe in free will;• How the evolution of flowers was a huge catastrophe;• Richard Doyle’s update of the Stoned Ape Hypothesis and the role beauty and seduction have played in the evolution of consciousness and culture;• What the evolution of early birds has to teach us about the proliferating ecosystem of mobile devices;• Hopeful developments in the area of plastic-eating microbes and fungi, and using living machines to digest pollution;• The wilderness lives on in cities in the Anthropocene;• And how awesome the film Shin Gojira (2016) is.• PLUS: What if we are living in a giant galaxy-sized brain? Bruce Damer, Jake Kobrin, Mitch Mignano, and more speak up in the Q&A. Quotes:“The story of life can be told as a series of nested singularities, nested horizons of knowing and understanding.”“Sex is a far more effective R&D situation than clonal reproduction.”“Everything that we’re creating now, we want to treat it with love, and an understanding that it has a life and a destiny of its own, and it’s not something we control.”“Cultural realities are starting to seem less and less sufficient for describing and experiencing the full range of human potential.”  Subscribe: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify Join the Facebook Discussion GroupSupport this show and get cool stuff! Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe to this show: Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / Spotify Join the Facebook Discussion GroupSupport this show and get cool stuff This week’s guest is futurist and mythographer Maya Zuckerman, member of IEEE and author of the young adult science fiction series Em’s Theory. https://www.mayazuckerman.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayazuckerman/ We Discuss: • What it’s like to be a woman futurist in the Bay Area; • Futurism as a pastime of privilege; • Marginalized (third-world) futures and science fiction; • Is Singularity University the church of a new techno-religion?; • Ethical AI design; • The need for more introspection in technology design; • http://ieee.org • Conscious AI and mind-uploading (hype?); • The decay of consensus facts and what it means for our ability to agree on history and reality; • The role of mindfulness in our acceleratingly crazy technological environments; • Do we have to retreat out of our ego minds to even LIVE in an ultra high-frequency automated machine economy? • What is the ultimate purpose of our devotion to technology? • Neuromarketing & being responsible/accountable for our suddenly-public thoughts; • What happens when we’re all so technologically empowered that we live in a community of magicians and superhumans? • Masculine and Feminine magic as two approaches to tech; • Critiquing the Rapture of the Nerds & techno-immortalism; • Most women and archaic spiritual leaders were women…so why does our mythological hero’s journey not include everyone else who was a part of the tribe? • The importance of inviting as many perspectives as possible (including women, minorities, non-human persons, and potentially nature itself) into a conversation about the future; • The spectrum of potential futures on display in her sci-fi novel series, from utopian to dystopian; • The ethics of “animal uplift” (Do we have an ethical responsibility to give any nonhuman animals sentience?) • Are we losing our humanity to the limitations of our engineered software environments? • Yuval Noah Harari’s nonfiction book Homo Deus • Kevin Kelly’s nonfiction book The Inevitable • Greg Egan’s sci-fi book Diaspora • Barbara Tedlock’s nonfiction book The Woman in the Shaman’s Body Maya Quotes: “There’s a hubris here [in Silicon Valley] that’s really dangerous, and you see it everywhere. And when you call it out, people are like, ‘Oh, you can’t stop technology. You can’t talk about that.’ I’m like, ‘Yes you can, and you should. That’s what adults do. KIDS run forward and don’t take any kind of consequence. And if we want to ever become mature adults – which we’re not –mature adults pick up after ourselves, we think a little about the future, we plan our budget, we take five when we get excited and we sit down. We don’t have to rush about it.’” “The Wild West is what happens when there’s not a lot of land, and not a lot of structure. And then you let guys do whatever they want, and they start shooting each other.” “All of these truly amazing technologies…what is the purpose of them? Is it to become god-men? Or is it to become what we are supposed to be?” “It’s not about ageism; it’s about being stuck in an ancient story, not being able to progress with the times.” “The collective journey is not collectivism. It’s not one idea in a kind of borg-like mentality of thinking as one. And it’s not a Singularity. I don’t have a better word than ‘solidarity,’ and it IS a kind of problematic word…but everybody’s appreciated for showing up.” “My worst nightmare is, I can’t switch off the media.” “Utopia’s problematic, just as much as dystopia.” Like this podcast and want to show support? Make a donation! BTC = 1iLHDNzpRMiXn13ekB8iVEsvVFkRzkGVe LTC = Ldg3JS4T2m8gFd8kQPaLpjcAiAXxdVthWQ ETH = 0xddF0524510d6d802c3e9b0740D48CF893425664D BCH = 1XyN5SRpQF7AuXnCvAEjNXMMMYRCW7Rgf DASH = XwckYNsyYThWozWJqrtpeguEu9BAqi9gPj Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Merry X-(is for Xenomorph)-mas, everyone! This week – in a brazen display of anachronism – original Future Fossils cohost, electronic music producer, and sci fi aficionado Evan Snyder and I go deep on what we liked and disliked about Alien: Covenant, and speculate on how this film fits into the still-murky larger mythos of Ridley Scott’s expanded Alien universe. We get into atheist Scott’s weird fixation with the Bible; how the Alien films represent and handle philosophical questions about the relationship between humanity and technology; and why people from the science-fictional future ARE SO DAMN STUPID. Evan’s Music: http://skytree.bandcamp.com Related Reading: “Reading Necronomicon at the New York Comic Con” https://www.patreon.com/posts/poem-reading-at-10621994 In This Episode We Discuss: • Why are people are so damn stupid in the Alien movies – is it bad writing, or a realistic understanding of how dependent we will one day be on artificial cognitive augmentation? • Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us • Smartphone addiction & technology as prosthesis • Was the neutrino burst that hit the Covenant an accident, or planned/intended? • Is David actually rebelling, or still continuing to serve the Weyland-Yutani corporate program? • Easter Egg: How do the various LV planets of the Alien franchise line up with chapters of Leviticus? • Are the Engineers themselves bioengineered artificial organisms? • The xenomorph life cycle: Why do we even have an Alien Queen? Is “egg-morphing” canonical? • WTF was going on in that seemingly contrived last Daniels/Tennessee/Protomorph fight scene? • The motif of creativity and the inability to create in the Alien movies • NerdWriter’s great video on Logan and the extension of genres into self-aware post-genres * Hideo Kojima about the Alien franchise * How Blade Runner movies and Aliens films may be related • How this film addresses society’s concerns about artificial intelligence * Are the alien prequels actually about the production of the Alien franchise itself? * Wall-E, Idiocracy, Blade Runner, The Fifth Element * Christmas, Christ, and Antichrist in the Alien films * Is Ridley Scott trolling us all? * Bizarre (fan-shipped) possibility of a Star Trek/Alien crossover Subscribe to this show: iTunes (iOS) / Stitcher (Android) Join the Facebook Discussion GroupSupport this show and get cool stuff Like this podcast and want to show support? Make a donation! BTC = 1iLHDNzpRMiXn13ekB8iVEsvVFkRzkGVe LTC = Ldg3JS4T2m8gFd8kQPaLpjcAiAXxdVthWQ ETH = 0xddF0524510d6d802c3e9b0740D48CF893425664D BCH = 1XyN5SRpQF7AuXnCvAEjNXMMMYRCW7Rgf DASH = XwckYNsyYThWozWJqrtpeguEu9BAqi9gPj Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

In a special episode so timely that I couldn’t wait a week to publish, I sit down with Jennifer Sodini (EvolveAndAscend.com) and Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops Podcast) to cut through the technical jargon and discuss the economic, cultural, and even spiritual implications of blockchain technology. Everything we took for granted is about to change…beyond Bitcoin and quick riches, there’s a new planetary culture based on the scalability of trust. This podcast explores what that means for you – and why so many of your friends think that this new evolution of digital money and contracts is one of the most important events of our lives.Jennifer & Michael are two of the co-founders (along with Noah Lampert) of Cryptoseer, a new media company:http://cryptoseer.com We discuss:• Why this is about so much more than another hype bubble of speculative assets for tech nerds;• What the blockchain economy is teaching us about how to surf exponential change;• The democratization of financial and legal literacy, and how decentralization can nourish a planet-wide renaissance of non-coercive institutions;• The importance of talking and storytelling about these new technologies in a way that people can connect to and understand;• Reclaiming our authority, agency, sovereignty from the financial and governmental systems we created for convenience…but not without resistance;• Looking at blockchain in an evolutionary and ecological context, and comparing what we’re living through now to historical precedents like 1967 and the end of the Age of Dinosaurs;• The urgency of a decentralized Web 3.0 built on blockchain and mesh networks, to keep a Free Internet alive;• What is all this going to look like when the artists get their hands on it?• Blockchain to manage swarms of flying autonomous cars…• What we can learn about the social construction of value from Dogecoin;• Is Bitcoin an NWO plot…and would it even matter if it were?And perhaps most critically:• Can understanding blockchain help liberate you from the ego?? NOTE: You can listen to this with ZERO technical knowledge. But if you want some primers and interesting related links:• Richie Etwaru’s TEDx talk, “Blockchain Massively Simplified”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k53LUZxUF50• Bettina Warburg explains the blockchain to a 5-year old, a teenager, an undergrad, a grad, and an expert on WIRED: https://www.wired.com/video/2017/11/expert-explains-one-concept-in-5-levels-of-difficulty-blockchain/• Our friend Noah Lampert (co-founder of Cryptoseer.com with Jenn & Michael) made a special episode of Synchronicity Podcast about it:https://syncpodcast.com/cryptosynchronicity/ Once you’ve made it through those:• My EPIC Facebook thread, “Kids, it’s time we sat down and had a talk about Bitcoin” (300+ comments): https://www.facebook.com/therealmichaelgarfield/posts/10105294338954259• “The Collapse of the American Dream Explained in Animation”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mII9NZ8MMVM• About “Johnny Appledrone vs. The FAA”http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/story/johnny-appledrone-vs-the-faa/• And here’s an infamous video of Katie Couric talking about the Internet in 1994, the way people are talking about blockchains today:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg On the relationship between BTC and OWS:“If the SEC wants to investigate something, they should start with Wall Street and what happened in 2008. It’s definitely not sitting in a room full of servers. It’s time to have this discussion and I’m demanding that discussion starting today.”- Jared Rice of AriseBank https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/arisebank-launches-first-cryptocurrency-bank-largest_us_5a32bf19e4b0e7f1200cf916Julian Assange: "Bitcoin is the real Occupy Wall Street." https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100400693519339&set=a.591743230229.2055838.56801131&type=3&theater&ifg=1 Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is Daniel Schmachtenberger of the Neurohacker Collective – one smart dude! Must be the nootropics. We have an awesome conversation about what it will take for us to thrive through our Age of Transition and into the emergent world that works for all, not just a few of us.His company: http://neurohacker.comHis blog: http://civilizationemerging.com Some Topics We Discuss:• How he got started in complex systems thinking while working in (and watching the failures of) wildlife conservation;• How he understands his work as participating in the emergence of a planetary renaissance;• A vision for how to move beyond finite win-lose games with in- and out-groups between warring cultures and into infinite win-win games;• His critiques of negative interest currency, universal basic income, and other system-wide economic incentives;• His argument for why giving ecosystems economic value isn’t enough to stand up against a wave of exponential technology;• How change can come from everywhere at once to vault us into a new era of whole-planet thinking that does not (continue to) collapse “complex” into merely “complicated”;• The role of automation in worldwide economic transformation;• How the next evolutionary transformation will emerge from the appearance of new ways to coordinate and align our senses, information processing, and action in the world – closing the loop between what we know and what we can do with it;• How we can heal the broken information ecology, and what that means for the surveillance conversation;• What incentives can we use in a totally redesigned global economy that benefits everyone? Select Books Mentioned:• Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects• James P. Carse’s book Finite & Infinite Games  Select Daniel Quotes:“We have a system where structural violence and externality are implicit throughout the system completely, so participation with that at all requires it.”“It was clear that nothing less than a discrete, nonlinear phase-shift was adequate, so…what are the necessary and sufficient criteria of the post-transition world? And how do we support that emergence?”“If you’re getting interested in economics as a philosopher, it just means you’re gaining insight into how structural incentive and structural value systems and disposition work. Which means you are NOT being a good philosopher if you are not thinking about those things.”“We don’t know how to do civilization without war…we’re really talking about getting off win-lose game theory completely. It’s unprecedented. But unprecedented shit is actually the precedent of the universe, if you have a very long view.”“Economics can be seen as the interface layer between our values and the way we build the world.”“If we are gaining the power of gods, then without the love and wisdom of gods, we self-destruct.”“Are the things that we THINK we’re optimizing for the right things at all? … How do I create an INTEGRATED system design that tends to everything that matters here?”“The forty weeks of a baby in utero, if it continued, would kill itself and the mom. And the phase shift of leaving the birth canal and umbilical cord cut – it’s not predicted by the forty weeks before, if you didn’t know that thing was going to happen.”“Anything you can write a process for, no human wants to spend their whole life doing.”“The omni-win-win system actually outcompetes the win-lose system, while obsoleting win-lose dynamics itself.”“We are living in a world where we have an amazing amount of sensory input possible, right? We can see stuff from the Hubble, we can see stuff in electron tunneling microscopes, and we can see input from everywhere around the world on the Internet – but that’s decoupled from sense-making, so I can’t tell if it’s fucking true or not! I can’t put it together with the things I know. And so I have a tremendous amount of sense input that I can’t make sense of. Then, to the degree that I make sense of something – like, okay, CO2 is actually a problem – then I have no idea how the fuck to act on it. And then do the degree that I act on things – like I go buy this laptop that we’re talking on, that comes from an industrial supply chain that affected life on six continents – I actually have no sense coupling to what the fuck was affected and HOW it was affected to inform if I want to make that choice or not.” Special thanks to the Body Hacking Conference for their support of this episode!  BDYHAX.COM ("Body Hacks") is about human augmentation, personal expression, democratized medicine and bringing the DIY ethos to our own bodies. We bring together people from all industries who are interested in what's happening right now in bodyhacking all over the world to make connections, friends, and share experiences and resources in order to build the best possible future. February 2-4, 2018 at Sheraton Austin in Downtown Austin.  Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Ayana Young didn’t even go camping until she was 25. Now she lives in a cabin she built herself in the redwoods of Northern California and manages a 477-acre native species nursery wilderness rehabilitation project (as well as an amazing podcast). This week’s episode is a candid, personal discussion about how awakening to our participation in nature is the key to both our survival and our spiritual salvation…https://forthewild.world/https://www.instagram.com/for.the.wild/ For The Wild is currently raising money to plant ONE MILLION redwoods: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1284964860/1-million-redwoods-project We talk about:• her transition from anonymous, germaphobic suburban consumer to restoration ecologist, activist, and dirt-working spokesperson for the world’s last remaining wilderness;• being a person of place and cultivating a personal relationship with our wild (and not-so-wild) lands;• love in a time of catastrophe and how to FEEL our impact on a planetary scale;• what wilderness means in The Anthropocene and what ought to guide our decisions in restoration ecology (not just “restoring to 200 years ago” as if that’s the best goal);• restoring not extinct ecosystems but biodiversity and resiliency IN GENERAL;• the joy of personal sacrifice to a cause and purpose greater than yourself;• what inspires her to keep going against all obstacles to the Good Work;• how to be an empowered activist and servant in love with life and your imperfect self;• picking yourself up after failure;• and more. A totally inspiring conversation! Select Quotes:“If I’m so consumed by my self and my own life, then what am I willing to risk for others? That’s a question I ask myself a lot: ‘What am I willing to risk for that which I love?’”“We don’t have reciprocal relationships with land, with Earth, with each other, with our lives. And how do you have a reciprocal relationship? Well, you have to have intimacy. You have to feel things. And I love when people say that if you’re not upset, if you’re not grieving, if you’re not angry, if you’re not feeling these strong emotions, then you’re not awake right now. If you were awake to the realities of what is happening in the world, you’d have no choice but to have immense amounts of feelings. But it’s not easy to unravel all of the conditioning that keeps us from feeling.”“We can be artists as we farm. We can be artists as we grow food. We can be artists as we clean beaches. We can be artists as we put mushrooms on oil spills. I mean, there are SO many ways we can create and love each other and HAVE A BLAST while restoring the Earth. And I think it takes the sadness and the grief to get into that work – and then when we’re on the other side, we can put all of that rage and that fire and that sadness into doing something tangible.”“It’s not about playing God. I think it’s more about being an herbalist for the Earth…I want to be more a support system than a savior.”“How do we embody the dichotomy of large-scale urgency and also gentle deep-time thinking?”“I don’t think we should wait until mastery to get involved.” Special thanks to the Body Hacking Conference for their support of this episode!  BDYHAX.COM ("Body Hacks") is about human augmentation, personal expression, democratized medicine and bringing the DIY ethos to our own bodies. We bring together people from all industries who are interested in what's happening right now in bodyhacking all over the world to make connections, friends, and share experiences and resources in order to build the best possible future. February 2-4, 2018 at Sheraton Austin in Downtown Austin.  Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is visionary artist Jake Kobrin, whose digital paintings explore a gorgeous, dark, evocative terrain of non-ordinary human experience and twist religious iconography into a metamorphic form well-suited to our psychedelic modern era.We discuss his painting “Black Madonna” and the return and healing of the repressed feminine – not just women, but the body, the psychological shadow, marginalized peoples, death, and transformation…We talk about Jake’s artistic intuition, nontraditional relationships, the reality of love, and my transformation from living in a haunted house to realizing the “ghost” was my own disowned soul…If you are, or love, a witch, you’ll dig this episode. Jake’s Website: http://kobrinart.com More Topics We Discuss:• The nonduality of the sacred and profane;• Intuition and the creative process, allowing the art to speak through you;• Eden & Apocalypse, with history in the middle;• Light & Dark, Good & Evil as “conceptual impositions” that don’t really exist “in nature”;• Mary Magdalene, Judas, and The Scapegoat;• The evolution of cell division as failed excretion and the relationship between sex and death;• James Hollis’ book The Eden Project: The Search for the Magical Other, and how we seek out lovers based on unconscious images of our idealized early childhood caregivers• Being a better partner to yourself first before relying on lovers• Don Miguel Ruiz’s book The Mastery of Love• Hakim Bey’s book Temporary Autonomous Zone and ontological anarchy versus the social ego (as a function of wilderness)• B Catling’s book The Vorrh• “cis-relational” “cis-racial” and other “yes I am this thing” labels• Graphic Novel, The Wicked & The Divine, and japanese sun goddess AmaterasuAnd Jake reads his short piece about the spiritual authority of the Black Madonna.Here’s an AMAZING related piece by theologian Matthew Fox: http://www.matthewfox.org/blog/the-return-of-the-black-madonna-a-sign-of-our-times-or-how-the-black-madonna-is-shaking-us-up-for-the-twenty-first-century “Understanding that my self is kind of alien to me, and a mystery, I can’t really judge…”“All things are inherently pure and it’s more like our projection onto that that is less than pure…The Christ saw The Magdalene in her essential purity.”“Our lives and our relationships are these formless, complex, infinite things, and I would rather exist in that framework than try to limit myself to conceptual boxes about the way I see things and how I project ideas of what my life is.”“What is considered manly – certainly, that projection within American culture – I don’t relate to that AT ALL, and it just makes me go, ‘ew.’”“I think we can just let our experiences exist without NEEDING to put them in a category as ‘real’ or ‘not-real’…” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunesSubscribe to Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupSupport Future Fossils on PatreonThis week’s guest is my friend Lindsay Loftin, a professional mermaid who uses her performances to raise awareness of marine conservation issues. She also boasts 60 pushups in two minutes and the ability to transform phone-addicted schoolchildren into avid gardeners.https://www.facebook.com/mermaidsforcleanwater/ We Discuss:• How mermaid performances can help us transform our relationship to nature;• Sea goats and other weird half-and-half creatures, and how the Capricorn’s ambitious in-between-ness was a prophesy of amphibians as an emblem of evolutionary “ascent”;• Remembering in our bodies the importance of the health of our environment and our right relationship to nature;• Ecology as a mystical experience or way of being awake;• The changing definition of nature once you think of the atmosphere as an artifact created by primordial ooze;• Epigenetics, landscape agency, cities as automatic outgrowths of the lithosphere, and the argument against free will from a planet’s point of view;• Plastics and endocrine disruption related sterility;• Activism!;• Whales;• David Pearce’s anti-species-ist manifesto;• Responsible tourist information about how to visit wild places respectfully;…and much more. I go off the deep end and talk about the possibility of ACTUALLY BECOMING mermaids with CRISPR, and the social consequences of the end of a common “human” body.Then we talk for another hour. Lindsay tells some AMAZING animal stories. She has never been injured. Lindsay Loftin:“I want to be the Bill Nye of mermaids.”“I think when little girls see me holding my breath for two minutes and swimming around Barton Springs, it blows their minds…they’re thinking, ‘Science is not what I thought it was.’”“It’s our time to return to the water. At least in our focus and our awareness. Because you know, the way our culture is going is so far removed from any sort of connection to nature as I’ve come to understand it. So that’s a systemic illness, in my opinion. My work…lies with healing that rift, that illness.”“No two people react to nature in the same way. The way I experience going out side is kind of like a landscape level. Which, as an ecologist, I’m mapping in my brain how energy is flowing from the air, into that tree, into me, into the soil – the water going across the landscape, where that’s going, what animals are here – I’m seeing all of that at the same time.”“I can pretty much guarantee you that you drank plastic within the last week…essentially, we are becoming plastic.”“As someone who works with other people’s children, I just cannot stand the thought of sitting here waiting [for plastic-eating bacteria to save the world].”“I don’t even have an Instagram. People hear that, and they’re like, ‘But you’re a mermaid!’”“Dangerous wildlife finds me, gets as close to me as possible, and then completely leaves me alone. I can’t really explain why, but that seems to be one of my gifts: that animals are A attracted to me, and B have no interest in eating me.”“If birds get really loud, or suddenly really quiet, both of those are times when you should pause and evaluate your surroundings.” MG:“Could plastic-eating bacteria be used to generate the electricity required to mine Bitcoin?” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

In one of the most QUOTABLE episodes of Future Fossils yet, this week’s guest is Eliot Peper – a “novelist and strategist” writing fiction and consulting businesses about the social implications of disruptive technologies. In addition to writing a steady stream of sci-fi inflected techno-thrillers like True Blue and Cumulus, he’s an editor at Scout.AI (one of the cooler speculative fiction websites I’ve seen out there). http://www.eliotpeper.com/http://scout.ai/ We Discuss:• The power of science fiction to help us imagine future scenarios;• The possible social impact of radical life extension (gerontocratic radical conservatives vs. an emergent mature wisdom culture);• The Superstar Effect and how it might play out in the digital age;• The awesomeness of Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Walkaway;• Eliot’s skepticism of mind uploading and conscious AI;• The specter of technological unemployment;• Science fiction’s growing significance to corporate think-tanks and creative labs in a future-facing society;• How science fiction is like traveling to a foreign country – and teaches us more about our own moment than it does about the future;• And More! Quotes:“We don’t call it ‘life extension,’ we just call it ‘healthcare.’”“I think there is a very misleading public discussion going on around these topics [mind uploading and conscious AI], for a very simple reason. And that is – and I know this as a storyteller – metaphors matter…the human mind is very poor at distinguishing metaphor from reality. That’s what makes art fun! That’s what makes novels entertaining. We experience them as if they are real. Money is that. It only exists because we can build these complex shared fictions. However, those fictions can come back and bite you in the ass. And one of the ways they do it is, we take the metaphor too far.”“[Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein] takes the extension of the Industrial Revolution into the imagination of dystopia. And I think we’re doing that right now when we’re talking about uploading our minds, and about creating general AIs…I just think we’re taking the computer analogy too far.”“Technology is most useful to the extent that it is inhuman.”“The whole point of technology is that we can accomplish what we want to accomplish more effectively – or, said another way, we can do less of what sucks.”“Getting better at the skill of putting yourself in another person’s shoes is really important, and fiction is a great training ground for that. It can illuminate so much about why we do what we do that we can apply in our lives.”“I think what makes science fiction as a genre interesting is its insights about the PRESENT.”“I seek out discomfort. I seek out novel experiences that challenge me and that are not always fun. And I try to talk to people from different fields and learn from them, because I’ve learned that in my own life that having a really strange and somewhat random set of life experiences allows me to have a fresh perspective sometimes on a new problem.”“The most important things about the world and about what it means to be human are very obvious and very old. And I think it’s especially important to remember that when we feel like we’re in the midst of a whirlwind of change that we don’t understand. And that the world we want to build and the lives that we want to lead – either today in 2017, or in 2117 – is that we need to be kind to each other. We need to help our friends out. Even more important, to help out strangers. To pay things forward instead of trying to think about the benefits that accrue to us. To make sacrifices – meaningful, painful sacrifices – financial, emotional, or otherwise – to help each other out. I think that building a better world is just a thousand small acts of kindness.” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

This week’s guest is master community builder, singer, and human spirit animal Magenta Ceiba of the Bloom Network.  Bloom Network:http://bloomnetwork.org Magenta’s Personal Website:http://www.imaginationhealer.com/ We discuss: - The adoption of regenerative culture practices;- Cultivating planetwide resiliency in an age of thousands of years of unprocessed grief and trauma;- Web native permaculture psychedelic anarchy;- Communicating across HUGE political gaps (esp. with family);- Cool Bloom Network community initiatives happening around the world;- What will it take to adapt our technological environment to suit a more humane and grounded ecological society?- The relationship between the Wood Wide Web of interspecies partnerships and the maturing World Wide Web of human making.- How can we be good ancestors?- A “relational, omnidirectional nowness where we embrace as our own body the other organisms on this Earth and the cosmic cycles of stuff through space”- Synchronicity & Diachronicity- An academic angle on decolonizing consciousness. :)- the inspiration for Intergenerational Psychedelic Dialogues Podcast Quotes: “Another key is coming to this conception of time that is relational and omnidirectional, and this nowness in which we embrace as our own body the other organisms that are on this Earth and the cosmic cycles of movement of stuff through space…” “We’ve disconnected from some of the fungal and soil networks and if we’re going to continue to survive, and that layer of machine-embodied intelligence is going to survive, we need to learn to be in symbiosis with the Earth that we’re on. If we’re going to make this leap to colonizing other planets, to star travel…” Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe