Text by Corey DeVos
In this episode of the Daily Evolver, Jeff and David recap the major stories of the week, focusing first on President Obama’s historic announcement supporting same sex marriage—the very first president in United States history to do so.
Obama talks about his own evolution on gay marriage, and in a way, he uses it as a stand-in for the evolution of the culture in general.
They then have a fascinating discussion about the sale of Edvard Munch’s iconic painting “The Scream”, exploring what it represented in the late 19th century as an expression of the emergence of the modern age. They finish with two stories about the future of technology—first, the announcements by James Cameron, Google founders, and the X Prize creator that they are going to begin a concentrated effort to mine asteroids for water and minerals, and second, that the State of Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles has approved Google’s plan for putting computer-driven vehicles on the streets.
The conversation gets pretty interesting at this point. While discussing the story of the driverless car, Jeff maintains that these sorts of movements toward technological automation and the increasing transparency of personal information is actually an evolutionary push toward a kinder, gentler, and safer world. David takes exception with this view and pushes back with his own concern that things like our current reliance on pilotless combat drones and the mining of personal data by Google and Facebook raises some serious questions about how much of our freedom and privacy we are willing to give up in order to be part of a global society. What ensues is a lively conversation about technology as a transformational catalyst that forces us to continuously redefine our relationship with our privacy, autonomy, and identity.
Listen to an excerpt below. The full audio is here on integrallife.com.
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