Part of a series of intimate conversations between leading thinkers around the theme of “Chronodiversity, other minds, and the temporal dimensions of consciousness” and co-hosted with the ASU’s Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science).
This recording was my opportunity to be self-indulgent. Hosting Jonathon, I desperately wanted to find some time where we could talk about our thinking and work — and as it turned out, about the only time to do this was in front of the microphones.
I’m my own worst critic when it comes to media with me in it, and to my ears I feel really awkward as we kick off the conversation around longtermism. But listening back to it, I’m intrigued (as I always am with conversations like this) where that initial staring point led us.
And, of course, it was an absolute pleasure talking with Jonathon.
There’s some wonderfully and challengingly “interesting” stuff here — you have been warned!
Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist and experimental philosopher acclaimed as a “poet of ideas” by The New Yorker and a “multimedia philosopher-prophet” by The Atlantic. He is best known for his large-scale thought experiments.
Over his career he has produced a library for extraterrestrial beings (to share resources to overcome common existential threats), made fountains with meteorite-doped water (to induce alien hybridity for shared otherness), made a living calendar with a 5,000 lifespan, sold real estate in the extra dimensions of space-time proposed by string theory (selling 172 extra-dimensional lots in the Bay Area in a single day); and made an attempt to genetically engineer God (the attempt reveals God is most likely related to a cyanobacterium). These and other works have been at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO.
He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future.
His bold experiments raise serious questions and put into practice his conviction that the world needs more “curious amateurs”, willing to explore publicly whatever intrigues them, in defiance of a culture that increasingly forecloses on wonder and siloes knowledge into narrowly defined areas of expertise.
Andrew Maynard
Andrew is a professor in Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society and Director of the ASU Future of Being Human initiative. Trained as a physicist, his work cuts across disciplinary boundaries as it focuses on advanced technology transitions and the ethical and socially beneficial development and use of transformative emerging technologies.
In Conversation With … is a series of intimate conversations between creative thinkers and leading experts as they explore the intersection of technology, the future, and what it means to be human.
Recorded on February 15, 2024 in ASU’s Future of Being Human initiative multipurpose space. Production: Sean Leahy.
Jonathon Keats and Andrew Maynard on The Promise and Perils of Longtermism