The future is not dangerous: Jason Silva

24 Sep 2012, 4:24 pm   -   Source: Andy Park, SBS
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Futurist Jason Silva is using viral video to open the minds of the YouTube generation to big ideas like creativity, evolution and a technological future. He is speaking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas about how we are the gods now - but are we ready, asks Andy Park.

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Hidden in an alcove between two giant white sails of the Sydney Opera House, Jason Silva and I are conspiring about dangerous ideas.

The futurist and filmmaker's energetic way of talking is like drinking six Red Bulls then reading out a Wikipedia page, citations included.

"I think that we are having the technological equivalent of the Cambrian explosion. I don't think that we have to be afraid of that, man. A world of flying aircraft would have been godlike if proposed to our ancestors,” he says.

But flying aircraft also fly into buildings, are we ready to be gods?, I ask.

“Kurzweil says that the man that discovered fire probably burned at the stake by his contemporaries. Perhaps the most dangerous technology is the alphabet - you can use it write Shakespearian poetry and enrich your inner world or you can use the alphabet to write hate speech that spreads like wildfire,” he says, his arms moving wildly.

The Venezuelan-American, in Sydney for the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, is not an academic.

He studied film and philosophy at the University of Florida before presenting shows on the Emmy-winning, independent cable network started by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, Current TV.

And yet his well-referenced ideas sprout from a wide selection of authors and thinkers: Richard Dawkins crashes into David Deutsch and Erik Davis like a beat poet smashing together syllables in a smoky gin joint.

In fact, speaking with him, it’s hard not to be awestruck by his the way he is awestruck.

The self-confessed “wonder-junkie” calls himself a “performance philosopher”, which might make him more like a Vimeo-upload of Alain de Botton at a tripped-out acid kool-aid party.

Just like de Botton, he understands the importance of “packaging an idea”.

“Those ideas still have to compete in the market place. How an idea is packaged is as important as the idea itself,”

But can the charisma of an idea can be more dangerous that the substance - for example propaganda?

“Ideas are like organisms, they replicate, they have infectivity and spreading power, they leap from brain to brain, they complete for the limited resources of our attention,"

“It was Dawkins who put out this notion of memes, after genes comes memes, or the substrate of ideas, what ideas are made out of. Genes are like memes – the more charismatic they are the more sexy they are the more they spread,”

Before I can properly comprehend how an idea replicates, he's already off talking about how our cognitive imagination realized our dreams of landing on Mars.

It's been fifty years since acid-inspired counter-culture icon Timothy Leary popularised the phrase “turn on, tune in, drop out”.

Whether or not Jason Silva is Leary's logical cultural successor and weather or not he has the academic credentials is not as important as his ability to whet people’s desire to seek wonderment and be optimistically curious about the future.

Andy Park SBS , The Future

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