Neal Stephenson on Predicting the Metaverse, Crypto, and AI Decades Ahead

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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Neal Stephenson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Termination Shock, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning … Was the Command Line. He is also the coauthor, with Nicole Galland, of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. His works of speculative fiction have been variously categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, maximalism, cyberpunk, and post-cyberpunk. In his fiction, he explores fields such as mathematics, cryptography, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. Born in Fort Meade, Maryland (home of the NSA and the National Cryptologic Museum), Stephenson comes from a family comprising engineers and hard scientists he dubs “propeller heads.” He holds a degree in geography and physics from Boston University, where he spent a great deal of time on the university mainframe. He lives in Seattle, Washington. As The Atlantic has recently observed, “Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. And nearly three decades before the release of ChatGPT, he presaged the current AI revolution.” His new novel is Polostan, the first installment in his Bomb Light cycle.

Shermer and Stephenson discuss:

• How to write professionally
• How to write science fiction and fantasy
• How lives turn out: genes, environment and luck
• How so much of history is contingent
• No Hitler, No Atomic Bomb
• How the bomb was developed and why
• The ethics of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• The Hobbesian Trap, Security Dilemma, and the Other Guy Problem and the bomb
• Mutual Assured Destruction and why it has worked (so far)
• Cryptocurrency
• AI, ChatGPT, and the Singularity
• Mind uploading
• Human evolution and the far future of humanity
• What type of political and economic systems will we have on Mars?
• Charles Sanders Peirce and the philosophy of Fallibilism
• Platonic realism.

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