future

A Kurzgesagt animation on longtermism, arguing that because the future could hold trillions of people, our actions' effect on future generations may be what matters most.

The 1972 documentary based on Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock, narrated by Orson Welles. It is a dystopian look at the accelerating pace of technological change and its psychological toll.

Microsoft's 2015 concept video imagining how ubiquitous computing, collaboration services and data analytics might change work 5-10 years later.

A Vanity Fair Summit conversation between Elon Musk and Sam Altman, moderated by Andrew Ross Sorkin. They discuss the future of technology, including AI and the simulation hypothesis.

Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.

A video essay explaining hauntology, Mark Fisher's idea of lost futures, and 80s nostalgia. It uses the Fallout games and other media as examples of a retro-futurism that mourns futures that never arrived.

A 2006 IBM commercial depicting a future supermarket where shoppers walk out and RFID automatically charges them for their items.

Apple's late-1980s Knowledge Navigator concept video, produced under John Sculley, showing a professor using a tablet-like device with a conversational software agent. It envisions hypertext, touchscreens and voice assistants.

Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.

Lex Fridman interviews chip architect Jim Keller about the future of computing, AI, life and consciousness. Topics include CPU design, branch prediction and why imperfect designs often win.

The 1985 Channel 4 TV film 'Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future', the origin of the computer-generated TV host Max Headroom, with a soundtrack by Midge Ure and Chris Cross.

Lex Fridman's long podcast interview with Yann LeCun on Meta AI, open source, the limits of LLMs, AGI and the future of AI.

Shaun Lebron surveys 50 years of Lisp editing history and forgotten innovations in structural editing. He argues future Clojure editors could learn from them, and covers ideas like Parinfer.

Lex Fridman's long interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about GPT-4, ChatGPT, and the future of AI. Topics include models as reasoning engines, AI risk, and consciousness.

Mark Fisher's 2014 talk in Zagreb on the slow cancellation of the future, about cultural stagnation and the sense that popular culture has stopped producing the new.

A roughly five-hour Lex Fridman podcast episode with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, plus Amanda Askell on Claude's character and Chris Olah on mechanistic interpretability. It covers Claude, AGI and the future of AI.

A 29-minute cinematic timelapse by melodysheep that journeys trillions of years into the future, covering the death of the sun, the end of stars, proton decay, black hole evaporation and the fate of the cosmos.

Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture covers his career at Xerox PARC and how to think about inventing the future. He goes through what came out of PARC and why companies fail to capitalize on such ideas.

Part two of Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture on inventing the future. He draws on his time at Xerox PARC and elsewhere to discuss how to think about new technology and what makes ideas useful.

A 60fps capture of Future Crew's 1993 MS-DOS demo Second Reality, one of the best-known pieces of the demoscene. It runs about 16 minutes of real-time graphics and music effects on PC hardware of the era.

Captain Disillusion explains the visual effects behind the Back to the Future trilogy. He covers ILM's motion-control, computer-controlled camera work and clever pre-CGI tricks.

A capture of Second Reality, the real-time audiovisual demo by Future Crew first shown at Assembly 1993, recorded from a 486DX2-66 with a Gravis Ultrasound. It showcases the peak of early 1990s PC demoscene techniques.

Home video from 1993 showing Future Crew members at Mika Tuomi's home finishing the PC demo Second Reality shortly before release.

The first-place PC demo at Assembly 1992, Unreal by Future Crew, showing real-time effects such as palette-based wormholes.

Andreas Antonopoulos explains how to tell Bitcoin-style blockchains from corporate blockchain hype. He argues the goal should be de-banking everyone rather than banking the unbanked.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

An animated short on limits to growth, covering oil formation, peak oil, energy, economic growth and resource depletion. Its central section deals with exponential growth, and the author notes some statistics are dated.

MC Frontalot's nerdcore song "Secrets From The Future" (2007), about secrets not staying hidden once future technology can break today's encryption.

A WIRED Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen, covering its hardware-prototyping culture and shanzhai copycat manufacturing. It looks at how the city's ecosystem evolved and what the rest of the world can learn.

Mathematician Kevin Buzzard explains why he believes the Lean theorem prover will shape the future of mathematics, and describes digitizing his university curriculum in Lean with undergraduates, plus the cultural challenges.

Sean Carroll's 2013 Fermilab Users Meeting lecture on particles, fields and the future of particle physics. He explains that particles are vibrations in underlying quantum fields and touches on the Higgs, neutrinos and dark matter.

Wendover Productions explains why drone delivery has not become the future once promised. It covers no-fly zones, costs and the difficulty of the final drop-off.

Lex Fridman interviews Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum, cryptocurrency and the future of money. The conversation also touches on technical topics such as quantum computing and mining.

Gabe Newell of Valve speaks at UT Austin's LBJ School on productivity, economics, political institutions and the future of corporations. He discusses in-game economies and how Valve organizes work.

Lex Fridman's long podcast conversation with Chris Lattner, creator of Swift, LLVM and MLIR and co-founder of Modular. Topics include the Mojo language, the future of programming and AI, and hardware.

A 20-minute Y Combinator interview in which Sam Altman asks Elon Musk how to build the future. Topics include which problems a 22-year-old should work on, such as AI, genetics, and brain interfaces, and general advice for founders.

A roughly three-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. Topics include Python's design, the GIL, asyncio, the future of programming and AI coding tools.

Pete Hunt explains why React's virtual DOM was built, how it compares with databinding-style systems, and what it means for future browser technology. Recorded at FutureJS 2014 in Barcelona.

Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, discusses the future of microprocessors, including the economics of scaling below 28nm and why much of a chip must stay powered off.

Part 3 of WIRED's Future Cities series on Shenzhen. It examines how attitudes toward patents and intellectual property differ from the West, and how shanzhai (copycat) manufacturing created an ecosystem of rapid iteration and distribution.