Peter Adamson
speaker
1,322 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 2d ago
Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
They're most notorious for their influence on the Vietnam War, but they have a much wider uh ambit of
different thinking than that.
And they're starting to apply things like game theory and simulations to uh the prospect of futurology.
So what they'll do is use early computers and also other um methods of uh creating a kind of simulacrum of a future state and test them.
So assign weightings and try to work out uh what is likely to happen.
So here we're way far
from the heaven and hell situation where you have revelation from above, you have either perfection or perdition, sort of all or nothing.
And this is the opposite of that.
It's highly technocratic.
very um skilled practice uh with its own conceptions of expertise and it um works generally speaking not according to absolute state but rather probabilities.
So things are assigned numbers and it starts to become much more of a quantification system.
And that goes along of course with early computing.
But on the other and the futurologist here is doing something that somehow makes up for the lack of the human any capacity to predict the future because
Getting
oracle before the gun to tell you, you get a computer to tell you.
So you've like built a technology that can allow you to r transcend your nature or your natural capacity for prediction.
That's right.
Yeah.
In fact, um there's a very short science fiction um
story from that period, uh, where they uh build a computer to tell them whether there's a god and the computer says there isn't.
Showing 561–580 of 1,322 · page 29 of 67
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