Thinking On Paper: The Impact Of Technology On Business And Culture

Will IBM’s Starling Quantum Computer really deliver 20,000 × today’s computing power by 2029?

IBM Quantum CTO Oliver Dial joins Mark & Jeremy to Think On Paper about Starling, the first quantum chip built for real-time error correction and the milestone that could turn quantum hype into quantum reality.

• Fault tolerance, decoded. Forget raw qubit counts; Starling aims for a 1 : 1 000 logical-to-physical ratio, trading 10 000 n...

Why would an award-winning tech journalist quit to study the physics she once wrote about?

Katia Moskvitch won Science Writer of the Year, wrote for WIRED and the BBC and then walked away to finish a physics degree.

Now the author of Neutron Stars: The Quest to Understand the Zombies of the Cosmos joins Mark & Jeremy to Think on Paper about neutron stars, quantum computing, and why science writing fails the moment it stops asking...

Did consciousness exist before biology? Is it built into the structure of the universe? In Chapter 8 of Irreducible, Federico Faggin questions physics, then rewrites it. Consciousness, he argues, isn’t a side effect of neurons. It’s fundamental. It existed before space, before time, before anything we’d call “life.”

Mark and Jeremy break it down like two people with no PhDs but a lot of questions. What if every pure quantum state ca...

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 upg...

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...

AI isn’t conscious. It never will be. But what if that’s exactly the problem?

In Chapter 7 of Irreducible, Federico Faggin confronts the hard problem of consciousness — and so do Mark and Jeremy. Why can machines mimic emotion, but never feel it? Why can they write about grief or joy, but never experience either? And does that make them tools, or something more dangerous?

This episode pulls apart qualia, panpsychism, emotional AI, an...

Technology already 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 actually looks like in the real world. With decades of experie...

Shopify, Duolingo, Box, Hubspot, Meta and Google have all gone AI-first. Before assigning a task to a human, they now ask: can AI do this faster, cheaper, or better?

It’s a shift in mindset, not just tooling. And if your company isn’t thinking the same way, you’re already behind.

Ajay Malik, founder and CEO of StudioX, joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about what business leaders can do today. From AI copilots in Confluence and...

AI is getting smarter. But is it alive? And does that matter?

Chapter 6 of Irreducible draws a hard line between living systems and machines. Federico Faggin argues that consciousness isn’t just complex computation — it’s the result of “live information” layered through energy, feedback, and selfhood. Digital code can’t replicate that. It can’t even understand it.

Mark and Jeremy Think on Paper about what this means for AI. Is consci...

Kevin Kelly joins Mark and Jeremy to think on paper about technology and nature, decentralized systems, and the real-world challenges of AI, creativity, consciousness and more.

You'll hear about Kelly's unique methods for staying curious, including adopting a "Martian" perspective and the power of noticing. This conversation ultimately investigates how our tools shape us, extend our minds, and why grasping their t...

Can artificial intelligence ever be conscious, or are we confusing pattern recognition with awareness? As hype builds around sentient AI and the singularity, the real question remains: what separates human consciousness from machine computation?

In Chapters 4 and 5 of Irreducible, Federico Faggin makes the case that machines process information, but humans generate meaning. Mark and Jeremy Think on Paper about the limits of AI, the ...

What if the answer to Earth’s energy crisis isn’t on Earth at all?

Space-Based Solar Power has lived in science fiction for decades. But now, with falling launch costs, autonomous robotics, and precision manufacturing, it’s moving closer to engineering reality.

Sanjay Vijendran, Director of Space Energy Insights and former European Space Agency lead on orbital solar, joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about what it would take t...

OpenAI and Google just upgraded their arsenals, trained on everything from your search history to your creative work. You didn’t opt in. You didn’t get paid. And you definitely don’t own what your data helped build.

But what if that changed?

Jihao Sun, co-founder of Flock.io, joins Mark and Jeremy to Think on Paper about a radically different model — decentralized AI that trains locally, protects privacy, and rewards users. They get ...

Is that random thought flashing through your mind the quantum wave function collapsing? It's a wild idea, but it gets to the heart of Federico Faggin's challenge in "Irreducible": If consciousness is fundamentally quantum, can machines built on classical logic ever truly possess it?  

The Machine vs. Life DivideComputers process symbols using deterministic rules, even with trillions of transistors. Humans? We oper...

They told him no. Hollywood's gates were closed. So David Bianchi – veteran actor and filmmaker – turned to the bleeding edge: Blockchain, NFTs, and AI. The result? RZR, a sci-fi series funded and distributed entirely outside the studio system, earning a Primetime Emmy nomination and proving a new path is possible.

Tired of studios owning your IP like Miramax owned Pulp Fiction? Frustrated by endless approvals killing your vision? E...

Federico Faggin built the world’s first microprocessor, the foundation of AI. Decades later, he’s calling out its limits. In Irreducible, Faggin argues that consciousness isn’t just complex computation. It’s something classical physics, and people who claim AGI is around the corner, still fail to understand.

In Chapter 1, Mark and Jeremy Think on Paper about where our model of reality started to crack, from blackbody radiation and q...

The internet was built on trust. Now it assumes you’re a bot.

As AI-generated content floods every platform and bots learn to pass every test, proving you're human has become harder than ever. CAPTCHAs fail. ID checks invade privacy. And platforms are collecting more of your data just to confirm you’re real — while using that data to train the next generation of AI.

Ajay Patel, Head of World ID at Tools for Humanity, joins Mark a...

"Whatever this book has taught us, there's a pre-AI world and a post-AI world. However it plays out, nothing will ever be the same."

The future isn't unified. AI is splitting the world into competing digital empires. In the final chapter of Nexus, Yuval Noah Harari explores how nations are building separate AI ecosystems, using different hardware, software, and data to shape their own technological realities. 

The Silicon Curtain is ...