Thinking on Paper: AI, Quantum, Web3 & The Future of Technology

Karen Hao’s Empire of AI is a rare inside account of how OpenAI, Sam Altman, and a small circle of Silicon Valley elites built the most powerful AI company in the world.

In this episode of Thinking on Paper Book Club, Mark Fielding and Jeremy Gilbertson read the first four chapters, tracing the tension between OpenAI’s founding ideals and the reality of billion-dollar deals, boardroom battles, and global consequences.

The conversatio...

AI AGENTS ARE HERE, and there could be billion of them by the end of the decade. They will be your personal assistant, your bank manager and travel agent. They will organise your emails, book your holidays and invest for your retirement. The more adventurous will play the stock markets, code software and act as cyber security.

If you're asking what an AI agent is - which we answer here - the next, and bigger question is: how do you...

In 1971 Federico Faggin produced the world's first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4001. But he wasn't finished. A few years later he started making neural networks.

When it comes to technology, not many have as much skin in the game. It's no surprise when he speaks about artificial intelligence and consciousness, the world's greatest minds listen. But what about the meaning of life? Well, he has an opinion on that too.In this...

Hold on to your consciousness. In Chapter 12 of Irreducible, Federico Faggin battles classical assumptions: probability, the block universe and maths don't exist.

The universe is conscious, your consciousness is made of seities, conscious units that report back to the quantum field (what Faggin calls 'The One') so that it can know itself.

That is the meaning of the universe.

Yes disruptors and curious minds, book club has taken a turn...

Customer service is a tricky one. It's ripe for an AI takeover, but 20 million people worldwide work in the industry. 95% of the industry is salaries. There is a lot of collateral damage there. Millions of jobs will vanish and not everyone can be re-trained. And yet, as anyone who has experienced customer service in 2025 can testify: it's pretty lousy. Frustrating. Annoying. Expensive. And how often do your queries, questio...

There is an energy crisis. There is an environment crisis. And the two - sooner rather than later - are going to collide. Humanity will have to make some brave decisions about fossil fuels, sustainability and the cost of electricity.

But even now, the giants of oil and gas are using AI to speed up their search for new pockets of oil and gas. They are using the same artificial intelligence to speed up the mining process, to make...

Jeremy and Mark dissect Dario Amodei’s essay Machines of Loving Grace. Amodei is the CEO of Anthropic and predicts - if all goes right - an AI utopia where most physical and mental diseases are a memory, wealth and development is evenly distributed across the world, AI has not been hijacked by dictators and all the world's a beautiful stage.

The hook? This could happen in five to ten years.

Please enjoy the show. And share with a cu...

In Chapter 10 of Irreducible, Federico Faggin, Mark and Jeremy Think on Paper about the real architecture behind consciousness: The Seity. Quantum gremlins, seities want only to know. To know themselves and help the universe - The One - know itself.

And the seities have been here from the beginning, because they are everything. Reality is a construction of seities and Good news ladies and gentlemen, Death isn't the end! Your consci...

Consciousness, life and free will exist from the very beginning as properties of the holistic whole (The One). According to Federico Faggin, the inanimate universe didn't come first, but derives from a deeper quantum reality inhabited by seities with consciousness and free will that communicate meaning with each other.

In this week's Thinking on Paper Book Club, Mark and Jeremy read Chapter 9 of Irreducible by Federico Faggin and t...

Can AI ever be aware? Can it be conscious, and if so, what would that mean for business and the future of work?

In this week's show, Jeremy and Mark sit down with Ram Srinivasan, author of The Conscious Machine: From Artificial to Enlightened Intelligence, to think on paper about consciousness, Advaita Vedanta, panpsychism and why Eastern philosophy changes how we design every AI system. It might be the most important podcast o...

Kony Kwong, CEO and Founder of GAIB joins Mark and Jeremy to Think On Paper about GPU backed stablecoins and investing in AI infrastructure.

GAIB turns GPU clusters into yield machines. Real hardware. Real cash flow. Real contracts. You don’t need deep pockets. You need guts and a wallet.Top-shelf AI chips don’t go to market. They go straight to the vaults of Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Billion-dollar pre-orders.

Closed systems. ...

Oliver Dial, CTO of IBM Quantum, joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about Starling. IBM’s first quantum processor designed for real-time quantum error correction.

Forget qubit counts. Starling is built to scale.

Backed by $30 billion in R&D, this isn’t science fiction. This is IBM swinging for fault tolerance by 2029, with a roadmap targeting a 1:1000 ratio of logical to physical qubits. Translation? The first quantum system...

Katia Moskvitch was European Science Writer of the year. She wrote for WIRED, Nature, and the BBC, then walked away from it all to research Neutron Stars.

She joins Mark and Jeremy to Think On Paper about her book Neutron Stars: The Quest to Understand the Zombies of the Cosmos. From her background in science writing and working for the World Economic Forum on quantum computers, to her time at CERN and speaking with Jocelyn Bel...

Did consciousness exist before life itself? Is it fundamental to the universe? Mark and Jeremy continue their book club exploration of Irreducible, by Federico Faggin.In Chapter 8 of Irreducible, Federico Faggin redefines physics, maths and what it means to be human: consciousness isn’t just a byproduct of your brain, but a fundamental feature of the universe.

Please enjoy the show. And share with a curious friend.

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Chapters

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If the hype vanished tomorrow, what would Web3 still need?”

Animoca Brands backs almost every household name in Web3—from The Sandbox to Dapper Labs, Polygon, and OpenSea.
But CEO Robby Yung isn’t here to flex a portfolio; he’s here to explain why they’re still building when the market cycles out of euphoria.

In this Thinking on Paper conversation, Robby, Mark, and Jeremy dig into:

• Digital property rights that survive chain upgrade...

Would you read a book written by an AI? We did. And it wasn’t just text prediction. It was story. Pacing. Theme. Character arcs. No human prompts, no edits, no intervention. But what does that mean for art, culture, copyright law and IP?

Brian Naughton asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet to write a novel from scratch. What he got back was The Echo Chamber, the first full-length novel written, planned, and revised entirely by AI. The result rais...

Would you let your children have an AI boyfriend or girlfriend? We're reading Irreducible, by Federico Faggin. It's Chapter 7 and Mark and Jeremy think on paper about the hard problem of consciousness, qualia, ai awareness and the inner semantic space that creates your experience.There are 4 types of qualia: physical sensations and feelings, emotions, thoughts and spiritual feelings. From there they go back in time to Aldou...

Is technology for good anything more than a marketing strategy?

Technology shapes everything. From how you work and connect to how you make decisions. But is humanity using it to solve the right problems? And when millions of people rely on boring, repetitive jobs to survive, what happens when AI takes them away?

On Victory in Europe Day, Khang Nguyen-Trieu joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about what ethical technology actuall...

A podcast for people who refuse to let algorithms, headlines, or influencers do their thinking for them.

What happens when technology moves faster than meaning? When AI writes code, raises your kids, and reshapes your job, but no one asks what it’s doing to your values?

Thinking on Paper is a podcast for people who want to think clearly about the future. Created by curious minds, strategists, and builders, this show explores the deep...