Taking a question from the audience, author Ian McEwan says that we’ll know we’ve achieved complete trust with lifelike machines once we stop asking them, “Are you real?”

From the Long Now Seminar, “Machines Like Me” by Ian McEwan. . .   Read More

Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC-Berkeley, believes that the changes AI will bring to humanity will be profound, but that we won’t notice them.

From John Brockman’s Long Now Seminar “Possible Minds. . .   Read More

In a new essay for BBC’s Deep Civilisation series, British philosopher Tom Chatfield explores how technology has co-evolved alongside humans. While humans have only existed as a brief interval on the cosmic timescale, the process of “recursive iteration” that defines our relationship with our tools has led to us having an outsized impact. . .   Read More

On Monday, February 25th, 02019, John Brockman (Founder of edge.org) will speak at Long Now about his new book on artificial intelligence, Possible Minds. Brockman will interview several of the contributors to the book, Rodney Brooks, Alison Gopnik and Stuart Russell on stage. Following the interviews, Kevin Kelly will host the Q&A. . .   Read More

The featured “Long Short” from our Seminar on Long-term Thinking in January 02019 with Martin Rees, “Future Thoughts” by Loek Vugs.

Future Thoughts is an experimental, short film showing a collection of ideas about everyday life and new technologies in the near future. . .   Read More

“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available…a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.“ — Astronomer Fred Hoyle, 01948 I. “Why Do You Look In A Mirror?” InFebruary 01966, Stewart Brand, a month removed from launching a multimedia psychedelic festival that inaugurated the hippie counterculture, sat on the roof of his apartment […]

Long Now Partners with Zebra Movement to Help Bring Long-Term Thinking to Startups and Venture Capital

The disruptive potential of Silicon Valley, epitomized in the mantra to “move fast and break things”, was once praised as its killer feature. These days, it is increasingly perceived as a bug.  Startups come and go, but the. . .   Read More

In 01872, California Governor Leland Stanford hired the famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a question of popular debate—whether all four of a horse’s feet ever left the ground when it galloped. The resulting series of photographs, Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, showed without a doubt that horses do indeed go airborne at. . .   Read More

In a widely-shared essay first published in Backchannel, Kevin Kelly, a Long Now co-founder and Founding Editor of Wired Magazine, argues that the inevitable rise of superhuman artificial intelligence—long predicted by leaders in science and technology—is a myth based on misperceptions without evidence.

Kevin is now Editor at Large at Wired. . .   Read More

During the Cold War, this underground bunker in Culpeper, Virginia was where the government would have taken the president if a nuclear war broke out. Now, the Library of Congress is using it to preserve all manner of films, from Casablanca to Harry Potter. The oldest films were made on nitrate, a fragile and highly. . .   Read More