Peter Adamson

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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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History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps · Bonus Episode: Glenn Adamson on A Century of Tomorrows · 16 Aug 2026 podcast

Uh that's good.

So Dan there's a lot of concern about precisely that question of whether w and of course now we talk about it all the time because of AI, but this goes way back and was very um very hot subject in the nineteen sixties, not just in science fiction narratives, but also in the halls of government and in uh large companies, the question of whether

uh computerization, uh automation was to some extent taking decision making out of human hands and sort of delegating it to this um

Alien.

way of thinking that we didn't fully understand and couldn't fully control.

Um, so uh one story people may have heard uh from this period is the uh limits to growth research that happened uh under the sponsorship of the Club of Rome in the very late sixties and early seventies.

And this is amazing to think about now because it's just so incredibly relevant.

But what happened basically, summarizing a complex story, is that some computer technicians at MIT in Cambridge

gave themselves the task of working out what the likely trajectories of all of human development would be over the next hundred years.

And every single model that they generated, no matter how they did the math, ended up with complete destruction of the world order in around twenty seven.

And depending on how they weighted the variables.

And here by variables we're talking about things like food supply.

population growth.

There's a dramatic population growth over that time is one of the key things that they are concerned about.

So statistical assumptions.

But in a way, no matter how they w within what they considered to be reasonable parameters, no matter how they did the math, it was dystopia.

It was complete apocalypse and collapse within about a century.

And this made huge headlines.

Governments responded to it.

It's thought to have been one of the reasons that the Chinese government, for example, passed its one child policy, one piece of influence on that.

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