Scifi-preneurship
SciFi-preneurship examines how science fiction inspires people to create things that impact our lives today. In SciFi-preneurship, we’re used an expanded definition of entrepreneurship: we don’t just mean Silicon Valley startup founders; we’re talking to people who make things, especially things that are shaping our future. I did this work with Phil Libin in 2019 and it featured Peter Eckersley, who I ended up co-founding the AI Objectives Institute with.
Below are some of my favorite episodes.
The Matrix
Guests: Writer/director Emily Dean, Partnership on AI research director Peter Eckersley (and my co-founder at the AI Objectives Institute), and MIT Media Lab’s Dan Novy
The impact of the The Matrix on science fiction is difficult to overstate, but beyond the genre itself, it also deeply affected the viewers whose worldviews were made askew. Three of those viewers are featured in today’s episode to talk about their reactions to the film and the ways in which it contributed to the work they do now: writer/director Emily Dean, Partnership on AI research director Peter Eckersley (and my co-founder at the AI Objectives Institute), and MIT Media Lab’s Dan Novy
“Don’t let your AI copy itself in an unbounded way... You don’t want to fight 10,000 copies of Hugo Weaving simultaneously, because though they get away with it in the film... in real life you’re always going to lose that fight.”
Snow Crash
Guests: Dr. Christine Corbett Moran, Veronica Belmont, Peter Eckersley, Joe Betts-LaCroix, and Sophia Brueckner
In the Metaverse, a shared virtual reality space, a character wrestles with a computer-crashing virus that also causes harm in the real world. Thus begins Snow Crash, a Neal Stephenson novel that, when written in 1992, described futuristic systems that eventually became reality. Snow Crash’s impact is so significant that this episode has a record number of guests who wanted to discuss it.