Arthur C. Clarke

You know that moment of it being wonderful, right? And we spend all of our time thinking about how to design things practically, whereas designing for wonder, I actually think, and magic, hugely important.

Arthur C. Clarke, another science fiction writer, has a number of laws.

I find the first two to be self-serving.

The third one is useful.

But essentially, if you look at, say, the Manichaean, this is all Manichaean cathar.

This is the idea, you go back, whatever, is that basically you see this in Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land, various other books, Childhood Ends, or Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke, is that...

God, this creation is by its nature evil um satan is the one who's going to set you free because this creation is flawed and they have the dual god right so this isn't you know a lot of the gnostic uh stuff is this dual god you have the god that made this world who's or else you have the so this is like the kilophot progression right see the downward progression he goes down to his upward ascension is to death right he thinks he's going up he's going down but he's it's already pre-programmed it's predestined it's predetermined the fan can't get off its track it just keeps going

just like the elevator you know he gets in the elevator and it's like he's it's not his will anymore it's going down it's taking him and then he's frozen like when he gets to the bottom there's no more motion

I read Neuromancer...

I had been reading just before a lot of Arthur C. Clarke.

I'm like a third generation science fiction fan and I had finally...

My mum really loved Arthur C. Clarke.

My grandfather was into Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

And I picked all of the Arthur C. Clarke novels.

So Clarke is...

There is a little bit of interest in the transcendent in Clarke as well.

But it's funny because I think you are more of a user of it than I am.

I think this technology is a perfect example of Arthur C. Clarke's second or third law.

Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It's incredible stuff.

But then I started talking to other people.

I had an interview with Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer.

And he said, well, intelligence won't necessarily be nice.

He said, we steer the future not because we're the fastest or the strongest creature, but because we're the most intelligent.

And you said that you've been a filmmaker and you've made documentaries about biblical tombs.

You mentioned that you got fired for wanting to make one about the hoaxes of UFOs and they wanted you to make it about UFOs as though they were real.

And you mentioned that you talked with Arthur C. Clarke, who died sometime around 2008, I think.

So you go back away in this career with the ways you've expressed this interest.

There were not that many of them, I think like eight or nine, but he had the whole thing and I read through the whole thing.

You know, I read Ringworld, your classic SF, Arthur C. Clarke.

I love Rendezvous with Rama.

It actually inspired elements of the novel I will be telling you about later on.

So I wonder if that, just like the hell AI computer, was an indication of foreknowledge of what was going to come next.

in these times, you know, a few decades on and that Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke who co-wrote that movie with him and the production designer and other key staff were privy to it because it's all about futuristic society, the way it's going to be controlled by AI where human consciousness is going to go.

And I just think it's too much of a coincidence that the dimensions of that monolith are similar to that of a mobile phone.

And also the dimensions of the simple screen itself on which the film was shown back in the day are similar to those of a smartphone as well.

Where did things go wrong and how might they go better? For Founders Fund, this manifesto recalls something called the Ford Nucleon, which was a 1958 concept car that was meant to run on a small nuclear reactor.

Then it recalls 10 years later, the author Arthur C. Clarke imagining in 1968 that we would soon be booking commercial flights into space.

And all of those dreams seemed reasonable at the time, the Founders Fund insists, but that somewhere along the way we lost our nerve.

And the reason that we don't have a car that's running on a nuclear reactor right now is that we weren't bold enough, we weren't brazen enough, we lost our way.

And women and men then gathered at Seneca Falls to adopt a declaration of sentiments.

It borrowed words from the Declaration of Independence and changed them to read, all men and all women are created equal.

What that manifesto shared was that their authors had almost no formal power.

None of the women at Seneca Falls could vote, but they decided and articulated that they had a voice.