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The Good Robot podcast: Transhumanist fantasies with Alexander Thomas
Hosted by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney, The Good Robot is a podcast which explores the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.
Transhumanist fantasies with Alexander Thomas
In this episode, Eleanor talks to Alexander Thomas, a filmmaker and academic who leads the BA in Media Production at the University of East London. They discuss his new book about transhumanism, a philosophical movement that aims to improve human capabilities through technology and whose followers includes Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and also apparently the DJ Steve Aoki. Alex is himself one of the foremost commentators on transhumanism. He explores transhumanist fantasies about the future of the human, is obsessed with the extremes of possibility: they either think that AI will bring us radical abundance or total extinction. Transhumanism, Alexander says in this episode, reduces life down to information processing and intelligence, which amounts to a kind of IQ fetishism
Listen to the episode here:
Dr Alexander Thomas is a multi-award-winning film director and screenwriter. His academic research questions what it means to be human when cultural, cybernetic and biotechnological developments undermine the notion of the human as a cogent and eternal category. Alexander has directed four multi-award winning short films including Beverley which screened at over 100 international festivals and events, won 38 awards and was longlisted for an Oscar. Alexander is the host and producer of the A-Z of the Future Podcast which explores 26 key topics of our times to provide a better understanding of our future and includes interviews with global thought leaders. He co-runs the company IntoTheFuture, which develops creative projects designed to entertain, educate and inspire on future-related themes. He has contributed chapters to books, written numerous articles and reviews and has featured on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed.
You can find the episode reading list and transcript here.
About The Good Robot Podcast
Dr Eleanor Drage and Dr Kerry McInerney are Research Associates at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, where they work on the Mercator-Stiflung funded project on Desirable Digitalisation. Previously, they were Christina Gaw Postdoctoral Researchers in Gender and Technology at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic they decided to co-found The Good Robot Podcast to explore the many complex intersections between gender, feminism and technology.
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