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The futures of the past have curdled into the nightmares of the present. The richest and most powerful people the world has ever known want to colonize mars, live forever, and digitize human consciousness. To make these technological miracles come to pass, they say, will require people to dramatically change the way they live and work. Will it be worth it? Does science even say it’s possible?

On this Angry Planet, astrophysicist and author Adam Becker joins us to explain all the problems with Silicon Valley’s dreams of the future. It’s not a short list. Much of the tech, and even the physics, don’t work the way techno-utopians say it does. Some of the people hawking robot slaves and immortality are chasing the impossible for tragic personal reasons. Others are just trying to sell you something. It’s all the subject of Becker’s new book: More Everything Forever.

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• Franics Fukuyama and the end of everything
• “Death is the ultimate limit, the ultimate loss of control.”
• Moore’s law, the singularity, and Ray Kurzweil’s father
• The Face on Mars and large language models
• Elizas all the way down
• The false binaries of the tech bro future
• Silicon Valley’s lost boys
• “Death is avoidable and taxation is theft.”
• Stasis for me but not for thee
• “Mars sucks”

Against Life Extension by Francis Fukuyama

More Everything Forever on Bookshop

More Everything Forever on Amazon

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

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Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com

America loves the Western. Stories about frontier towns, outlaws and lawmen, and—most of all—killing. How did the myth and legend of the gunfighter come to permeate the U.S.? Were there rules to gunfights? How did you become famous by killing people? Did Texas, yes Texas, make all this possible?

We’ll answer those questions in this episode of the show as we discuss the new book The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. It’s the work of returning guest (and Texan) Bryan Burrough.

• Texas is both the West and the South
• What made Texas so violent
• What, exactly, is a gunfighter?
• The rules of the duel
• “Boys, I’m killed”
• How to win friends while killin’ people
• “What is more equalizing than a man alone with a gun?”
• Olive, Isom Prentice
• Historiography of the gunfighter
• Modern bank robbers are boring
• The cattle business is the perfect vehicle for violence
• The future belongs ... to pirates?

Buy The Gunfighters from an independent bookstore or from Amazon

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com

Palantir, Anduril and a suite of other Tolkien-inspired tech nightmares want to integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of the U.S. military. Both companies have software suites they’re pitching as agents that will help make command decisions during combat. An AI general, if you will.

Yes, that’s a terrible idea.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Cameron Hunter and Bleddyn Bowen will tell us why. Hunter is a researcher at the University of Copenhagen and Bowen is a professor of Astropolitics at Durham University. They’ve just written a paper that skewers the idea that AI will ever be able to make command decisions.

• The narrow definition of AI
• The folly of the AI general
• The games AI can’t win
• “Targeting things is a command decision”
• The IDF’s use of Microsoft’s use of AI systems
• “The enemy gets a vote”
• Killing more doesn’t mean winning more
• American military as a “glass tank”
• Matthew gets lost in a rant
• “They don’t even have an animal’s intelligence”
• The very real military uses of AI

We’ll never have a model of an AI major-general: Artificial Intelligence, command decisions, and kitsch visions of war

Palantir’s pitch

Palmer Luckey on 60 Minutes

Scientists Explain Why Trump's $175 Billion Golden Dome Is a Fantasy

OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims

Eastern Europe Wants to Build a ‘Drone Wall’ to Keep Out Russia

How Palantir Is Using AI in Ukraine

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.