Tech, Innovation & Society - The Creative Process: Technology, AI, Software, Future, Economy, Science, Engineering & Robotics Interviews

"Are we looking at intelligence wrong? There are an awful lot of people who have graduated from top schools who become leaders who are worse than incompetent. They make their countries worse rather than better. And the conclusion I came to is that we made a mistake, in that intelligence was originally defined by the founders of the field Alfred Binet, David Wechsler, and others, as the ability to...

Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Human Development at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is a past winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, and the William James and James McKeen Cattell Awards of the Association for Psychological Science. Sternberg has served as President of the American Psychological Association, and the F...

Today's complex problems demand a radically new way of thinking — one in which art, technology, and science converge to expand our creativity and augment our insight. Creativity must be combined with the ability to execute; the leaders and innovators of the future will have to understand this balance and manage such complexities as climate change and pandemics. The place of this convergence is THE...

Julio Ottino is an artist, researcher, author, and educator at Northwestern University. He is the author, with Bruce Mau, of The Nexus: Augmented Thinking for a Complex World - The New Convergence of Art, Technology, and Science. He was the founding co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2008, he was listed in the “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era”. In 2017, he was...

"Technology has very much changed the way we read and take in information and shortened it into quick bursts and attention spans. We're living in a new world, for sure. And how do we communicate in this new world? Not just in a way that gets the reach, because there are whole industries aimed at what do I do to get the most likes or the most attention, and all of that, which I don't think is very...

Max Stossel is an Award-winning poet, filmmaker, and speaker, named by Forbes as one of the best storytellers of the year. His Stand-Up Poetry Special Words That Move takes the audience through a variety of different perspectives, inviting us to see the world through different eyes together. Taking on topics like heartbreak, consciousness, social media, politics, the emoti...

"I'm so happy that I did not grow up with a phone. I talk about this all the time. I did not have a cellphone growing up. We did not have the internet. I feel for children going through that. I think it's a really challenging time. Technology. I struggle with it now, people having so much access to us. People expecting, because I have a phone right next to me, that I'm going to respond to them. Wh...

Debra J. Fisher is a writer, producer, and director. She currently serves as the showrunner, writer, and executive producer of the Netflix series Ginny & Georgia.  Season one of the hit series was watched by over 52 million subscribers in its first month on the platform, gathering a devoted fan base. The highly anticipated second season premiered on January 5th. Ginny & Georgia is Deb...

 "So there are different parts of the brain responsible for liking and wanting. So wanting is unbelievably robust in the brain. In other words, the neural connections are very robust, and wanting is what drives most addictive behavior. It's when you really want something, like you want a cigarette, you want alcohol, a drug, whatever it is, that's your poison. And actually, screens for some pe...

Adam Alter is a Professor of Marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the Robert Stansky Teaching Excellence Faculty Fellow. Adam is the New York Times bestselling author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, and Drunk Tank Pink, which investigates how hidden forces in the world around us shape our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. He has...

"So right now the world is fueled by the burning of oil, gas, and coal, and a lot of people are making a lot of money out of that. Whereas with things like renewable energy, you can put solar panels on your rooftop, and all of a sudden you're not paying anything in terms of an electricity price. If you happen to live in a sunny country like Australia, you end up getting your electricity for free f...

Dr. Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist and writer at the Australian National University. She served as a lead author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report and is the author of Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia. Joëlle has also contributed chapters to The Climate Book...

“So one of the main arguments in the book is that digital technology is important to how organizations campaign, and it's not a matter of campaigning online or offline, right? Often people hear the title of my book and they go, ‘Oh, it's all just slacktivism.’ You know, whatever you do online is slacktivism. Luckily the academic debates move past that because most advocacy groups operate both onli...

Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor in International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Europe). She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance, where she published her first book Displacement, Development, and Climate Change: International Organizations Moving Beyond their Mandates? Her latest book is Transnational Advocacy in the Digital...

“So, as much as I would love to take the credit, Google Ads was a big team, and I was fortunate to be brought in as a director that managed the team. And I would also like to say the idea of attaching ads to searches, anybody could have had it. In fact, it was the most obvious thing. Just like on television, if you watch a car race, then it makes sense to have ads about cars. So I think the reason...

Alberto Savoia was Google’s first engineering director and is currently Innovation Agitator Emeritus, where, among other things, he led the development and launch of the original Google AdWords. He is the author of The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed, a book that provides critical advice for rethinking how we launch a new idea, product, or business, and gives in...

"So shooting for one planet just means you would be totally dominant, and leave no space for other species. Ecologists say to maintain 85% of preindustrial biodiversity, it would take about at least half the planet left on its own. That would mean getting to half-planet. And now we use at least 1.75. I say at least because our assessments with about 15,000 data points per country in a year are bas...

Mathis Wackernagel is Co-founder and President of Global Footprint Network. He created the Ecological Footprint with Professor William Rees at the University of British Columbia as part of his Ph. D. in community and regional planning. Mathis also earned a mechanical engineering degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Mathis has worked on sustainability with governments, corporation...

"We have to solve three problems. We have to create a low-waste society through incentives to change individual behavior from consumer to user through loss and waste prevention, and intelligent resource management. We also have to create a low-carbon society by preserving the water, electricity, and CO2 emissions embodied in physical assets or through innovation in green electricity and circular e...

Walter R. Stahel is the Founder-Director of the Product-Life Institute (Switzerland), the oldest established consultancy in Europe devoted to developing sustainable strategies and policies. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Circular Economy Research Centre, Ecole des Ponts Business School and Visiting Professor in the Department of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey. He is a...

"Better than mindfulness, curiosity and the willingness to be open to other perspectives and reveal diversion of perspectives, it's linked with more innovation, it leads to willingness for greater social support for your ideas. So you're talking about finding allies more work, family integration, less burnout, more engagement, and then a greater tendency to experience flow where you lose yourself...

Todd B. Kashdan, Ph. D., is professor of psychology at George Mason University, and a leading authority on well-being, curiosity, courage, and resilience. He has published more than 220 scientific articles, his work has been cited more than 35,000 times, and he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. H...

"There's a ton of work now looking at how we can re-engineer or patch the AI that's currently sort of driving these interfaces to make it easier for people to manage their consumption. But so far there's not a lot of evidence that it's working. So the time management things, unfortunately, people just tend to override those or not want to look at the amount of time that they're spending on their d...

Dr. Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations, has testified before various committees in the U...

"The research that I've done with these NASA satellites - they’re called the Grace Mission, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Mission, and they're really unusual in that they're able to weigh, using small variations in the pull of gravity that water exerts on the satellites. Satellites are like a scale. They move up and down in the sky depending on how much water there is on the ground. So w...