Michael F. Robinson's Blog

Part I of my interview with Julian Togelius, who talks about the history of machine learning, the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and the difficulties AI researchers have in defining exactly what intelligence is. Togelius is an associate professor of Computer Science at New York University. Togelius is the author of Artificial General Intelligence, published recently by MIT Press.

Meredith Small talks about the city of Venice and its importance to the history of travel and exploration. Small is professor emerita of at Cornell University and visiting scholar in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s the author of Inventing the World: Venice and the Transformation of Western Civilization

Dr. Giada Arney talks about the Habitable Worlds Observatory, a space telescope that, when it’s built and launched into space, will be able to image planets in other solar systems directly, focusing on planets that may support life. Arney is a Research Space Scientist in the Planetary Systems Laboratory at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She’s also the interim project scientist for the Habitable Worlds Observatory and the Deputy Principal Investigator of the DAVINCI mission to Venus.

In the late 1500s, Dutch navigator William Barrents sailed north in search of a Northeast Passage to Asia. This expedition and a second one both suffered hardships, but they were mild in comparison with the horrors of the third expedition. Andrea Pitzer talks about the Arctic voyages of William Barents and their impact on Europe for centuries to come. Pitzer is a journalist and author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World.

Claire Isabel Webb talks about the Europa Clipper mission and NASA’s broader agenda to find life on other worlds. Webb is a historian of science and directs the Future Humans program at the Berggruen Institute. Her opinion piece, “Can We Please Just Find the Aliens Already,” was published by the New York Times in October, 2024

Steven Johnson talks about the British pirate Henry Every and his improbable capture of the Mughal treasure ship, Gunsway. Johnson is the author of twelve books, including Enemy of All Mankind, Farsighted, Where Good Ideas Come From, and The Ghost Map. He’s also the host of the PBS series How We Got To Now and the podcast American Innovations.

Steven Johnson

Célia Abele talks about Wolfgang von Goethe, the French writer Chateaubriand, and the German physicist Georg Lichtenberg. These writers became fascinated in the Alps and volcanoes such as Vesuvius. Abele is an assistant professor of French at Boston College. She’s the author of “Mountain Time: Tense Futures and Present Pasts in the Alps and Vesuvius around 1800.”

Ed Armston-Sheret returns to Time to Eat the Dogs to talk about British geographical expeditions and the labor that made them possible, specifically the labor of local peoples that is frequently omitted from explorer accounts. Armston-Sheret is a Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He’s the author of On the Backs of Others: Rethinking the History of British Geographical Exploration. A 40% off coupon for the book is available below.

David Kaiser talks about the history of twentieth-century physics and the forces that have shaped it as a scientific discipline. Kaiser is a Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is also a Professor of Physics. He’s the author of Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World.

David Kaiser

Dane Kennedy talks about Mungo Park’s troubled expeditions in West Africa and the rescue expeditions that set off to find him. Kennedy is an emeritus professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. He has written eight books including Mungo Park’s Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa