John Brockman: On the Promise and Peril of AI • Seth Lloyd: Wrong, but More Relevant Than Ever • Judea Pearl: The Limitations of Opaque Learning Machines • Stuart Russell: The Purpose Put Into the Machine • George Dyson: The Third Law • Daniel C. Dennett: What Can We Do? • Rodney Brooks: The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into • Frank Wilczek: The Unity of Intelligence • Max Tegmark: Let's Aspire to More Than Making Ourselves Obsolete • Jaan Tallinn: Dissident Messages • Steven Pinker: Tech Prophecy and the Underappreciated Causal Power of Ideas • David Deutsch: Beyond Reward and Punishment • Tom Griffiths: The Artificial Use of Human Beings • Anca Dragan: Putting the Human into the AI Equation • Chris Anderson: Gradient Descent • David Kaiser: "Information" for Wiener, for Shannon, and for Us • Neil Gershenfeld: Scaling • W. Daniel Hillis: The First Machine Intelligences • Venki Ramakrishnan: Will Computers Become Our Overlords?

George Dyson was born in 1953 and had a unique opportunity to witness firsthand the conjunction of mathematics and physics that brought the digital revolution to life. He has been observing the relationship between nature and technology ever since. Dyson's latest book, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, illuminates the transition from numbers that mean things to numbers that do things in the aftermath of World War II. I am very happy I had the opportunity to have him appear on Singularity 1 on 1 where we talked for over an hour. During our discussion with Dyson we cover a very wide variety of topics such as: his unique childhood of growing up as the son of theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson; playing around the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton; having Helen Dukas i.e. Einstein's secretary as a babysitter; his interest in boats and boat-building as inspired by reading Kon-Tiki; George's previous book titled Darwin Among The Machines; Samuel Butler and Ted Kaczynski; Turing's Cathedral and the origins of our digital universe; Alan Turing and John von Neumann; the hydrogen bomb and what von Neumann called "the deal with the devil"; technology's power to liberate and/or enslave; artificial intelligence, the technological singularity and our chances of surviving it.

The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There's always been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn't be a program. There has been a domineering subculture--that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world--that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us. You'll have a figure say, "The computers will take over the Earth, but that's a good thing, because people had their chance and now we should give it to the machines."

The idea that computers are people has a long and storied history. It goes back to the very origins of computers, and even from before. There's always been a question about whether a program is something alive or not since it intrinsically has some kind of autonomy at the very least, or it wouldn't be a program. There has been a domineering subculture--that's been the most wealthy, prolific, and influential subculture in the technical world--that for a long time has not only promoted the idea that there's an equivalence between algorithms and life, and certain algorithms and people, but a historical determinism that we're inevitably making computers that will be smarter and better than us and will take over from us. You'll have a figure say, "The computers will take over the Earth, but that's a good thing, because people had their chance and now we should give it to the machines."