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
It was also very influential on Jimmy Carter's policy.
So there was a huge concern about what was sometimes called the population bomb of these years.
As it turns out, we now know, by the way, that because of course one of the fun things about this book is you get back to look back at these neurologists and figure out what they were right about and wrong about.
Now we realize that they didn't understand climate change very well.
and underestimated that problem, but dramatically overestimated the problem in population because they didn't realize that the more
The more wealthy a country became and particularly the more educated its women became, the more the population would decline.
And now of course the problem in places like Korea is that you have a shrinking population, not a growing one.
And that starts to become a more general problem s they didn't get that right.
But weirdly, these scientists who were predicting all these problems, you know, looking around the world now with all our wildfires and all the other problems we have, they seem to have been worried at least to the right level, if not about exactly the right things.
And so they seem prophetic in res in retrospect, maybe, even though they were working on computers that obviously had, you know.
barely more memory than the average Microsoft Word document and they were trying to predict all of
The future of human history.
So it's quite counterintuitive, um, to go back to these moments, but also fascinating.
And for me as a historian, I suppose the key thing that I was gripped by was this the simple fact of experimentation and innovation within the domain of futurology itself and it's constantly shifting terminology and terms of engagement with its central problems.
How about party is the idea that you
The future is so bleak that we might as well have fun now and get drunk in?
No.
I think those th th what I would call a party based futurologist, those they were often accused of that kind of, you know not nihilism exactly, but what's the word debauchery?
Debauchery, but I'm also thinking of your ancient philosophy gang and people who only paid only hedonism.
Hedonism.
Showing 601–620 of 1,322 · page 31 of 67
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