AGL 376: The Dystopian Utopia with Carl M.A. Arden

A Geek Leader Podcast - inspiring technical and creative leaders around the world

About Carl

Carl is a Swedish-born author with a background in business and international relations. He studied economics at the University of Oxford and completed an MBA at the London Business School. He worked as a diplomat in Moscow and completed one tour of peacekeeping in Kosovo before moving into different roles in investment banking and corporate finance. His main interests are in future trends, disruptive technologies, socio-political and economic systems, risks and uncertainty, sustainable development, and all creative arts. Carl is interested in alternative history novels and realistic books about the near and far future. Despite, or probably because of, his background in economics and finance, he does not believe in single trajectory forecasts, but rather in base-case and outlier scenarios that open our eyes to how the future could unfold. He believes in chaos, in the sense that small changes to our current situation can have a large impact on future development. He is also interested in world-crafting books that describe carefully designed and internally consistent worlds. Carl is interested in the nature of man and in our creative and destructive potential. As a result, he is a keen reader of books on different utopias and dystopias. He tries to follow research institutes like the Future of Life Institute at MIT and the Center for the Study of Existential Risks at Cambridge, which he believes do very important work on what he would refer to as the meta-sustainability of our species. Among non-fiction authors that he finds insightful, Carl would mention Yuval Harari, Toby Ord, William MacAskill, Jared Diamond, David Wallace-Wells, and Nassim Taleb. Among fiction authors that inspire him, he would mention George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Frank Herbert. There are of course many more. *The Dystopian Utopia* is Carl’s first book. It is a work of speculative fiction about one (of infinitely many) possible futures for humanity. He is married with two children, lives in Sweden, and enjoys sports and nature.

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Today We Talked About

• Background
• The Title
• Be a Hero
• A.I.
• Dystopia
• Why?
• What’s next for Humans
• Virtual Dreams
• Finding Purpose

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Connect With Carl

• Book

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