Lists

Picture of a TV show: Cosmos: Possible Worlds

Picture of a TV show: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

Picture of a book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Picture of a TV show: The Power of Nightmares

Picture of a TV show: Can't Get You Out of My Head

Picture of a TV show: The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

Picture of a TV show: All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

Picture of a TV show: Battlestar Galactica

15 Shows, 7 Books, 5 Movies, 4 Games, 3 Music Artists, 3 Authors, 2 Podcasts

Skepticism, Rationality, AI

July 2021 | 128 views

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shows

Greydon Square

Eddie Collins, better known by his stage name Greydon Square, is an American rapper, producer and sound engineer from Compton, California. He is an Iraq War veteran an outspoken atheist, and the owner/co-founder of Majestic Comics. He uses his creativity to encourage discussion of atheism, critical thinking and rational thought.

music

Tim Minchin

Timothy David Minchin AM is British-Australian comedian, actor, writer, musician, poet, composer, and songwriter.

music

Tom Lehrer

Thomas Andrew Lehrer is an American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, and mathematician, who later taught mathematics and musical theater. He recorded pithy and humorous songs that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. His songs often parodied popular musical forms, though they usually had original melodies. An exception is "The Elements", in which he set the names of the chemical elements to the tune of the "Major-General's Song" from Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance.

movies

HyperNormalisation

2016

HyperNormalisation tells the extraordinary story of how we got to this strange time of great uncertainty and confusion - where those who are supposed to be in power are paralysed - and have no idea what to do. And, where events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control - from Donald Trump to Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant crisis, and random bomb attacks. It explains not only why these chaotic events are happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand them. The film shows that what has happened is that all of us in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us, we accept it as normal. From BBCiPlayer

shows

Can't Get You Out of My Head

2021

Love, power, money, ghosts of empire, conspiracies, artificial intelligence and You. An emotional history of the modern world by Adam Curtis.

shows

Pandora's Box

1992

The consequences of exploiting technological and political ideas without understanding and concern for the outcome.

shows

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom

2007

Individual freedom is the dream of our age. It's what our leaders promise to give us, it defines how we think of ourselves and, repeatedly, we have gone to war to impose freedom around the world. But if you step back and look at what freedom actually means for us today, it's a strange and limited kind of freedom.

shows

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

2011

A series of films about how humans have been colonized by the machines we have built. Although we don't realize it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.

authors

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov ( AZ-ih-mov; c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was a Russian-born American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction.

Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation series, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are set in the much earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, with Foundation and Earth (1986), he linked this distant future to the Robot stories, creating a unified "future history" for his stories. He also wrote over 380 short stories, including the social science fiction novelette "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted the best short science fiction story of all time by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.