Last December, at the Humanity+ event in San Francisco, I sat down with filmmaker Adam Ford for an extended interview on a wide variety of subjects, including the participatory panopticon, the possibilities around AI, geoengineering, even the role of art in human evolution.

Art doesn't just mean representational pictures. It means being able to ascribe meaning to something that doesn't have an intrinsically obvious meaning. To be able to construct a narrative and to tell a story that someone who wasn't involved in whatever you're illustrating can come up and see what you're painting and understand what you mean, and get something from it beyond simply "well that's a splotch of red on the wall that looks like a buffalo."

If you look at the course of human civilization, the emergence and development of human civilization, it's driven yes very much by the tools that we make, but it's also driven by the meaning we are trying to create.

It's actually not a bad interview, and I manage to refrain from doing too many goofy gestures. Mostly (please ignore 36:50-52).

Adam is now working on something called "Future Day," set for March 1st. Worth checking out (I do wish they talked about "futures" in the plural, and had photos on the site of more than conventionally attractive white people, but these are fixable problems).