180I_Ben Vass, senior research engineer

Are you interested in city consciousness? What do you think about knowledge and knowledge-creation? How can we remove bad stuff to improve the good stuff?

Interview with Ben Vass, senior research engineer. We talk about his vision for the future of cities, space and time, threshold for bad experiences, opportunities in tools for improvements, and many more.

Ben Vass is a senior research engineer, graph shaman and data magician, and the kind of person who wants to build a Dyson swarm and explore the stars, while in the meantime wants to understand how this consciousness thing works. He is always standing between 2 worlds and trying to connect them. Due to his strange brain, he sees everything as a network of networks, and tries to find the next intellectual thrill. In the past he had worked on swarm intelligence projects, spectral graphs, fraud detection, and GNNs to name a few, and he contributes to Open Source whenever he can. Ben currently works on upgrading the world’s financial infrastructure to make it more transparent and verifiable. Everything is a network, you just don't see it yet, according to him. Ben’s voice can be very familiar because he is the voice in the intro. And he is my partner in crime.

Find out more about Ben through these links:

Ben Vass on LinkedIn;
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Network State Conference on YouTube
TokCast by Brett Hall
The Expanse series
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
The beginning of infinity by David Deutsch
The Anthology of Balaji by
New material list by AI
Starlink website
zero-knowledge proof

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

No.021R - Antifragile (book summary)
No.182 - Interview with Ted Baillieu about Australian building habits
No.222 - Interview with Adam Dorr about technological disruptions

What wast the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Let me know on Twitter ⁠⁠⁠⁠@WTF4Cities⁠⁠⁠⁠ or on the ⁠⁠⁠⁠wtf4cities.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ website where the ⁠⁠⁠⁠shownotes⁠⁠⁠⁠ are also available.

I hope this was an interesting episode for you and thanks for tuning in.

Music by ⁠⁠⁠⁠Lesfm ⁠⁠⁠⁠from ⁠⁠⁠⁠Pixabay⁠