These miraculous machines! Do we shape them Or do they shape us? Or reshape us from our decent, far designs? But we are learning. We are learning to build for the future From the ground up. – Robert Flaherty, 1948 This was written for a forthcoming essay collection by Bennington…

Mixed reality and biometrics will transform the experience of and marketplace for live entertainment. Originally published in 2009 at HPlusMagazine. Some of this I got profoundly wrong, but I still feel more validated in my hunches every day… – It’s 2006, and I am now accustomed to the jumbo screens…

On Evolution, Improvisation, Music, and Art In all the years I studied evolutionary biology in school, there was one word I can hardly believe I didn’t learn. It figures so prominently into my understanding of the evolutionary process and creativity in general that I am amazed it isn’t in the…

…in which I prompt prospective Future Fossils Podcast guest GPT-3 via my delightfully weird friend, visionary film-maker Oscar Sharp, who notably directed Sunspring, the first screenplay written by artificial intelligence. This “conversation” took place in the summer of 2020, while GPT-3 was still in closed beta. …

My response to disparaging comments made by several of my friends, including this one about how Starfleet and The Federation of Planets no longer represent what they did in Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation, I felt it necessary to say a few words in defense of…

Arvo Pärt’s minimalist soundscapes are a major feature of the Twentieth Century’s musical terrain; his is a particularly windblown and barren, starkly beautiful land, with grand vistas and time-carved expanses. It’s rare that an artist evokes such obvious and linear geographic metaphors for me, but I love Pärt’s music for…

Taking deep time into the music studio, a robotics engineer and midtempo producer uses modern tools to commune with rocks and send notes to the distant future. — Evan “Skytree” Snyder straddles two worlds: by day, he is a robotics engineer. By night, he produces electronic music that drops listeners into lush atmospheres evocative of both the ancient world and distant future. We had a chance to speak with Snyder about his 02020 album Infraplanetary and his recent…

Abstract: Modernity was largely built upon the “epistemic backstop” of recordings we can trust. What happens when we lose this privilege? As of 02020, most widely-subscribed visions of the future seem like presentist projections of a brief moment in which the West was capable of large-scale consensus on reality. Between…

Beta-testing Google Glass was only the beginning. Uninstalling AR dinosaurs taught me no man’s an island…and that we must be far more careful about who gets administrative access to our minds. — About: This continues my now-ancient essay series on my experience as a Google Glass Explorer and the lens it offered me on the evolution of intelligence and cognitive/sensory arms races going back half a billion years. Before you dive in you may want to read Parts 1, 2, and 3…