Dr. James Hardt on Technology, Healing, and Taking It to the World (Interview)

Toward the close of our conversation, I asked James Hardt whether there was a fund people could contribute to for his patents, something listeners might find on his website. He was candid: no such thing exists yet. He'd only just returned from the Singularity Summit in Seville, Spain, where the ideas of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding were new to him. A month earlier, he said, he wouldn't have even floated the notion that people could chip in to help secure patents across a wider set of countries. But his goal now is to push the technology out into the world at speed, and he welcomes whatever help comes his way.

I mentioned that there might be angel investors tuning in, people who could back his work and carry it to the next stage. I offered to point anyone curious back to his site, especially those encountering him and his research for the first time. He thanked me warmly.

When I asked if there was anything else he wanted to cover, Hardt didn't hold back. He admitted he loves talking about this work, and loves doing it. Getting out of bed comes easily to him, he said, even on two or three hours of sleep, because the point is to contribute to other people's awakening and to the ending of their suffering.

People carry trauma in countless forms, he went on, and what the technology does, almost as if by sleight of hand, is undo it. He reached for Arthur C. Clarke here, the science fiction writer who observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That framing let Hardt say, without hesitation, that the results he sees amount to magical degrees of healing, with real science sitting underneath.

We wrapped up there. I thanked him for joining The Psychology of the Future, the online summit, and he called it a delight. I told him it was a genuine honor, and that we were eager to introduce his work to communities who hadn't come across it before. We would place a link to his site below the video, and the two of us agreed to touch base again once the call ended. He thanked me a final time.