In this gig-economy age of entrepreneurs and full-time hustlers, podcasts have become a signature way to stay up-to-date, inspired, and educated while on the move. Whether you’re at home making dinner, commuting, or at the gym keeping the mind and body pumped full of healthy endorphins, podcasts offer a rare chance to learn and laugh without getting in the way of your daily grind.
So to help the Singularity community, who we know are some of the most passionate hustlers out there, we’re launching a podcast network: Singularity University Radio.
This is part of our continued effort to provide free, easy-to-digest content. You may have already noticed Singularity Hub articles can now be listened to at the top of most posts and via the auto-narrated Singularity Hub Daily, but SU Radio will provide completely new and original content—including news reports, conversations with cutting-edge thought leaders, and much more.
Singularity University Radio will ultimately act as a channel for highlighting the podcasts coming from our partners and community members from all around the world. By funneling all of these podcasts into one location, we seek to separate the signal from the noise, delivering curated content directly to you rather than forcing you to search it out on your own.
And to ensure there’s always something new and inspiring for you to enjoy, we’ve created our very own podcast in-house, directly from SU headquarters: “The Feedback Loop.”
Introducing Our First Podcast: The Feedback Loop
“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” –Marshall McLuhen
The Feedback Loop will focus on the human side of technology, to understand how technology is reshaping individuals and culture. We’ll look at the economic and sociopolitical possibilities and impacts of technology through the lens of psychology and philosophy.
The podcast’s namesake is inspired by the concept of ontological design—our capacity to actively play a role in shaping reality, being, and existence itself.
This process of self-creation takes place within the feedback loop, where the output of a system is routed back into the system as new input creating a circuit. Every time the system creates something, the new creation alters the system in return—and so on and so on, ad infinitum.
This is the story arc for humanity and civilization. We humans take input from our environment, process it in our brains, then output new ideas and innovations. These ideas and innovations alter the environment from which we took our input and inspiration, opening the possibility for even more complex ideas and innovations.
As our brains learn to navigate and process our ever-changing environment, we are changed as a result. Ideas like space travel, smartphone addiction, virtual reality, and external memory are drastically altering the human condition, and as we continue to progress, we’ll continue changing faster and more drastically.
Via conversations with philosophers, educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, and business people on the cutting edge of the feedback loop, we will seek to gain an understanding that will not only prevent us from experiencing vertigo during this transformation, but will also empower us to steer it in a way that is beneficial to ourselves, our endeavors, and our species.
You can find all text-to-speech Hub articles and the first five episodes of the Feedback Loop at this link, or listen directly with the embeds below. This week’s Feedback Loop episode is with the poetically insightful and brutally honest media theorist, Douglas Rushkoff.
Sign up for the SU Newsletter and follow along with our podcasts here. And be sure to check back Sunday for this week’s interview with The New York Times bestselling author, Annaka Harris, as she discusses her new book, Conscious.
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