YANSS 044 – James Burke on the Coming Age of Scarce Scarcity and Abundant Abundance

Episode 44 is a rebroadcast of two interviews from episode 20 which was all about how we are very, very bad at predicting the future both in our personal lives and as as a species.

Thanks to your support on Patreon, you can now read a transcript of my interview with James Burke from that episode. More transcripts are on the way. I hope to add about four a month. This is a link to the James Burke transcript.

DownloadiTunesStitcherRSSSoundcloud – Transcript

This episode is brought to you by The Great Courses. Order Your Deceptive Mind or another course in this special offer and get 80% off the original price.

JamesBurkeSmallJames Burke is a legendary science historian who created the landmark BBC series Connections which provided an alternative view of history and change by replacing the traditional “Great Man” timeline with an interconnected web in which all people influence one another to blindly direct the flow of progress. Burke is currently writing a new book about the coming age of abundance, and he continues to work on his Knowledge Web project. In the interview, James Burke says we must soon learn how to deal with a world in which scarcity is scarce, we are more connected to our online communities than our local governments, and home manufacturing can produce just about anything you desire.

mattnovakWe also sit down with Matt Novak, creator and curator of Paleofuture, a blog that explores retro futurism, sifting through the many ways people in the past predicted how the future would turn out, sometimes correctly, mostly not.

Together, Burke and Novak help us understand why we are to terrible at predicting the future and what we can learn about how history truly unfolds so we can better imagine who we will be in the decades to come.

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Links and Sources:

The Episode: DownloadiTunesStitcherRSSSoundcloud – Transcript

Transcript of interview with James Burke

Previous Episodes

Boing Boing Podcasts

Cookie Recipes

Connections DVD

Connections Book

James Burke’s Knowledge Web

Paleofuture at Gizmodo

Paleofuture Original Site