Aural Pleasures for the Ride to BRC

Mayors of Columbia, SC and Reno, NV Interviewed on Playa

October 24, 2018 • 15 mins

Burning Man Project Communications Director Megan Miller interviews Mayor Stephen Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina and Mayor Hillary Schieve of Reno, Nevada during their visit to Black Rock City in 2018. They came as part of a delegation of 11 mayors from the U.S. Conference of Mayors who came to learn what their cities could learn from our city. (Photo by Robert Burnett)

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Burning Man And AI Have Co-Evolved (Anselm Engle)

August 1, 2018 • 27 mins

It's often said that Burning Man and the internet grew up together: both started emerging at around the same time in the late 80s, went through a "wild wild west" phase in the 1990s, when they were seen as counter-cultures. Both started to get really big around the turn of the century, and both became massive cultural phenomenon after that (though, granted, it's a hell of a lot easier to find someone who's never heard of Burning Ma...

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The Human Symphony (Michael Bess)

May 22, 2018 • 45 mins

Vanderbilt Professor of History Michael Bess is the author of the forthcoming book What makes us human? From neurons to the Sistine Chapel, and is studying the technologies that may destroy us, including artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. The risks of catastrophic failures, he says, are significant — basically our newest technologies are a car without a break, and if you drive one of those too fast, you're probably g...

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Paradox Is the Heart of Humanity (Kirk Schneider)

April 16, 2018 • 26 mins

In his previous work, leading Existential Psychologist Kirk Schneider has put the experience of "awe" at the center of human psychology. Without experiencing awe, life tends to become flat, mechanical, and unhealthy — a prison to be broken out of, rather than a possibility to grow into. In his new book, The Spirituality of Awe: Challenges to the Robotic Revolution, Schneider points out that awe itself is paradoxical: it generates...

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Artificial Intelligence Is Just a Story, and We Can Tell a Better One (Jaron Lanier)

March 10, 2018 • 23 mins

Amazon has recently confirmed reports that its home operating system "Alexa," has been spontaneously laughing for no apparent reason, occasionally refusing to obey commands, and sometimes performing actions that were never asked for. No one has any idea why — is this a bug? A glitch? A hacker attack? — but internet pioneer and Microsoft researcher Jaron Lanier is probably not surprised. In his 2017 book Dawn of the New Everything...

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Empowering Robots Are Ethical Robots (Christoph Salge)

February 21, 2018 • 23 mins

The problem with the way we try to give AI ethics is that we design these ethics to work for the status quo, the way things are right now. But things never stay the same for long, the status quo is constantly changing, and so that sets our AI ethics up to fail. That's the insight of Dr. Christoph Salge, a professor of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire and New York University's Game Innovation Lab. Instead of giv...

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How To Practice Being Human (Dr. Sherry Turkle)

February 7, 2018 • 44 mins

Our problem isn't that Artificial Intelligence is getting better at being human, it's that human beings are getting worse at it. That's one of the conclusions that MIT psychologist Dr. Sherry Turkle, who has been studying the psychological impact of technology on its users since the dawn of the internet. One of the foremost researchers on the "soft side" of technology, her early work was optimistic about the power of the internet ...

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Burning Love Ep. 1: Until the End of the Playa

August 21, 2017 • 48 mins

Meet Tony and Daniel Wichowski, also known as Mr. Pepperdine and Scratch. Tony and Daniel met on playa in 2014 and married there legally in 2015. They remain unmistakably in love today. But happily ever after endings don't write themselves. Sometimes, it takes a transcontinental sacrifice, commitment to the sport of extreme paperwork filing, and a Supreme Court case to pull one off. Swiss cigarettes help.

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Awe, Ritual, and Risk (Kirk Schneider)

August 9, 2017 • 27 mins

We don't usually think of "Awe" as one of the essential human emotions, but licensed psychologist and American Psychological Association Fellow Dr. Kirk Schneider's research suggests that we should. Schneider, President Elect of the Existential-Humanistic Institute and past president of the APA's Society for Humanistic Psychology, says that awe is a contradictory emotion - one which makes us feel both elevated and fragile, elated ...

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