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Thanks to Big Tech, our dystopian moment grows darker by the day. Our near future will be defined, in part, by a three-headed hydra. Mark Hurst examines the emerging crises of money, water, and truth.Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly one-hour FM radio show on Jersey City-based WFMU, covering “our shift to a digital future.”

Novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ed Park returns to Techtonic to discuss his new short story collection, „An Oral History of Atlantis.“ Imaginative scenarios abound – from a mythical island, to life on the internet in the 1990s, to a story entirely about passwords and security questions.Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly one-hour FM radio show on Jersey City-based WFMU, covering “our shift to a digital future.”

Billionaire techbros are planning to escape to Mars, upload their minds into an AI, and then colonize the galaxy. Adam Becker, an author and astrophysicist, explains how this is never going to happen – in his book „More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.“Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly one-hour FM radio show on Jersey City-based WFMU, covering “our shift to a digital future.”

Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly one-hour FM radio show on Jersey City-based WFMU, covering “our shift to a digital future.”

AI, robots, and other technologies are raising some thorny ethical questions. Is it OK for people to become attached to robot pets? Or to have a funeral service for a robot when it „dies“? How much authority should people assign to chatbots? Webb Keane dives into these and more in his book „Animals, Robots, Gods: Adventures in the Moral Imagination.“

Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly one-hour FM radio show on Jersey City-based WFMU, covering “our shift to a digital future.”

The descent of Big Tech platforms into exploitative and unethical behavior prompted sci-fi author Cory Doctorow to coin a new term, something like „enfecalization.“ Cory explores the idea in his upcoming book, the subtitle of which is „Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.“
Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly one-hour FM radio show on Jersey City-based WFMU, covering “our shift to a digital future.”

Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly one-hour FM radio show on Jersey City-based WFMU, covering “our shift to a digital future.”

In 1976, an MIT computer science professor named Joseph Weizenbaum published a book warning against the manipulative powers of AI. Tech analyst Faine Greenwood discusses how Weizenbaum was largely ignored, leading to recent harms – even deaths – due to AI therapy chatbots.Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly one-hour FM radio show on Jersey City-based WFMU, covering “our shift to a digital future.”

People in past eras have thought about the future in very different ways. For example, the Jetsons evokes a time when many people were optimistic about a life full of tech gadgets – in contrast to the dystopian scenarios that surround us today. On this Techtonic, Glenn Adamson discusses his book “A Century of Tomorrows,” on how writers, thinkers, and leaders have imagined the future over the past 100 years.
Techtonic with Mark Hurst is a weekly one-hour FM radio show on Jersey City-based WFMU, covering “our shift to a digital future.”