Hybrid Reality

More than half the world’s population lives in cities, a percent that is estimated to increase to 70% by 2050. Much of the urban growth will be in the emerging economies like China and India where a new middle-class wants Western conveniences … like cars. But there are huge costs to owning and ... Read More

BY AHMED EL-HADY Have you ever thought what is happening in our brains when we wander in the world around us? How do we perceive “reality”? How can we interact with reality in a dynamic and continuous manner? What is “reality” after all? One might think of our reality as 2D sheets put ... Read More

An excellent article by Bill Wasik in Wired UK discusses the role technology and connectivity play in the creation of unruly mobs (as opposed to the peaceful protests seen widely during the Arab Spring). Common lore holds that the use of the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) by rioters in London in the ... Read More

For most of the world, music lessons are a luxury of the bourgeois class. Both musical instruments and music lessons are pricey. As the average American moves his home several times during his lifetime, children find that they have inconsistent teachers, and rarely continue playing instruments ... Read More

by Michael Garfield “As viewed by astronauts from the moon, the earth lacks those lines of sociopolitical division that are so prominent on maps. And as recognized here below, the web of interlacing socioeconomic interdependencies that now enfold the planet is of one life. All that is required is ... Read More

When will humanity reach Singularity, that now-famous point in time when artificial intelligence becomes greater than human intelligence? It is aptly called the Singularity proponents like Ray Kurzweil: like the singularity at the center of a black hole, we have no idea what happens once we reach it ... Read More

By @jason_silva and @notthisbody Hybrid Reality Institute Fellow Jason Silva will be speaking at the Singularity Summit in New York on October 15th. Here is Jason's latest video inspired by the ideas explored in David Deutsch’s new book, THE BEGINNING OF INFINITY.    THE BEGINNING OF ... Read More

BY JASON SILVA   “Limited in his nature, infinite in his desire, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.”   - Alphonse de Lamartine, French romantic poet.   PART I: DREAMING WITH OUR EYES OPEN (The Call To Adventure) The film [Inception] is a metaphor for the way that Nolan as a director ... Read More

When you think of Burberry, do you think of prim and proper English models wearing plaid coats or do you think of beautiful exotic scantily clad holographic models walking on a virtual runway in the middle of Beijing? Probably the former, but the truth is actually the latter (or perhaps both ... Read More

BY JASON SILVA Physicist Freeman Dyson has spoken of a new "Age of Wonder" centered on computers and biology.  He has artfully articulated that in the near future "a new generation of artists will be writing genomes with the fluency that Blake and Byron wrote verses." What I find the most ... Read More

BY JASON SILVA “We are enraptured prose-beings raised to the highest power" . - Walter Benjamin, On Hashish Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller called themselves "performing philosophers", using the power of media communication to spread galactic-sized ideas about the state of the species in ... Read More

After spending years building robots at MIT’s Media Lab and doing stints at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Heather Knight is now a PhD student in social robotics at Carnegie Mellon. She just started a new project “to explore modern relationships between mankind, technology and nature.”  Sounds ... Read More

BY JASON SILVA   The Imaginary Foundation says "Great art expands the way we see—it uplifts the human spirit from the barbaric and thrusts it toward the numinous." - An Interview with The Director of The Imaginary Foundation, (reprinted with permission from The Imaginary Foundation from a recent ... Read More

A DIALOGUE BETWEEN JASON SILVA AND TECHNO-ECOLOGIC SCHOLAR RICHARD DOYLE Richard Doyle also goes by mobius, an indicator of just how important interconnections are to him – and how transformative, bedeviling and hypnotic his ideas can be. As a professor of English and science, technology, and ... Read More

GUEST POST BY JASON SILVA "Intertwingularity" is a term coined by Ted Nelson to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.   He wrote: "EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no "subjects" at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross ... Read More