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

Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist, a professor and the Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan. Before moving to Saskatchewan, he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA...

"And you can make extremely intelligent computations and very complex computations, but you don't get a mind out of it. You don't get consciousness out of it. You get a computer, and that's what's driving my hands waving around, driving my lips and my tongue, and all that kind of stuff, it's a computer; it's our non-conscious mind. But on top of that, we have the stuff we're aware of, and that's w...

Johnjoe McFadden is the author of Life is Simple, How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. He obtained his PhD at Imperial College London and went on to work on human genetic diseases and then infectious diseases, at the University of Surrey. Professor McFadden has specialised in examining the genetics of microbes such as the agents of tuberculosis and meningitis. His other book...

"Scott [aka Kid Cudi] sees music in color, so what the visuals of music meant to him. So he wanted to create a new experience and that alongside Kenya Barris and ideating what it could be led to Entergalactic, which essentially Scott wrote an original album, which is his 10th Studio album, and pieced those songs in before the creation of this love story, which runs 90 minutes from start to fi...

Karina Manashil is the President of Mad Solar Productions. She began her career in the mailroom at WME (William Morris Endeavor) where she became a talent agent. She represented notable clients including Scott Mescudi, known by his stage name, Kid Cudi, and built her career taking talent into new arenas. In 2020, she partnered with Mescudi and Dennis Cummings to launch Mad Solar, which is backed b...

"I remember in the early 2000s, we had so much hope for the internet that it was going to democratize the distribution of music, especially when file sharing started. We said, Oh, wow. This is great. At that time, there were five major record companies, and then they conspired with MTV to give MTV all this free, big production content, and you couldn't really sell a lot of records unless...

Lee Jaffe, a cross-disciplinary visual artist, musician, and poet, took photos of his friend, Jean-Michel Basquiat, when they traveled abroad in 1983. As a photographer, Jaffe had a connection to Basquiat, and their time spent together resulted in an archive of imagery that captured one of the art world’s true legends through an unfiltered and authentic lens. “For me, watching him [Jean-Michel] pa...

"I admit to being just a dyed-in-the-wool kind of techno-optimist. I don't know why that is, but I'm just very hopeful and optimistic about the future. And I know people are scared of like superintelligence taking over and everything. I just don't think that we're close to anything like that yet. It's not impossible, and it's something that I think we should take very seriously, but I really see A...

Philip Fernbach is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Center for Research on Consumer Financial Decision Making at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Leeds School of Business. He’s published widely in the top journals in cognitive science, consumer research and marketing, and received the ACR Early Career Award for Contributions to Consumer Research. He’s co-author with S...

"For a very long time, the tech industry was publishing their numbers year after year, and the numbers stayed very much the same. And they were throwing their hands in the air and saying, 'Well, okay, we are measuring. We are publishing the numbers, numbers look bad. There's nothing we can do about it.' So there was transparency, but there was not the accountability of yes, there is something we c...

Aniela Unguresan is Co-founder of EDGE Certification, the leading global assessment methodology and business certification standard for gender equality. Launched at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in 2011, EDGE Certification measures where organizations stand in terms of gender balance across their pipeline, pay equity, and effectiveness of policies and practices to ensure equitable...

"The field of synthetic biology, which is known by some as extreme genetic engineering – that's a name mostly used by people who don't like it - amounts to a set of tools that humans have developed to be able to very precisely and accurately change the genetic code, the DNA of living organisms in order to get those organisms to do things that humans want. So the applications in medicine are predom...

Kent H. Redford is a conservation practitioner and Principal at Archipelago Consulting established in 2012 and based in Portland, Maine, USA. Archipelago Consulting was designed to help individuals and organizations improve their practice of conservation. Prior to Archipelago Consulting Kent spent 10 years on the faculty of University of Florida and 19 years in conservation NGOs with five years as...

"We are the extreme animal. We're certainly, technologically speaking, there's no comparison to what humans can do among all the animals that make some tools, even though we should keep in mind that for close to 200,000 years, humans who were essentially identical to us had no tools that were more complicated than a bow and arrow. I think the most crucial thing is that while we are such extraordin...

Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals. Safina is the inaugural hol...

"I think what we really face is an even more profound change into this condition where human nature becomes plastic in the sense of malleable, and we then have to think more from the ground up - What is it that ultimately brings value to the world? If you could be literally any kind of being you chose to be, what kind of being would you want to be? What constraints and limitations and flaws would...

Nick Bostrom is a Swedish-born philosopher with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is the most-cited professional philosopher in the world under the age of 50. He is a Professor at Oxford University, where he heads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. He is the author of some 200 publi...

“Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third...

Dr. Mona Sarfaty is the Executive Director and Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, comprised of societies representing 70% of all U.S. physicians. She founded the Communication in 2016 in conjunction with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change. Under her leadership, the Consortium has grown into a nationwide coalition of societies, organizations, and adv...

"I'm an educator, and I'm interested in educating people about what dinosaurs were really like. One of the ways to do that is through working on exhibits for museums, working with some of these other companies  that make things like exhibits, working with them to try to update their ideas of what dinosaurs were like. Modern exhibits oftentimes have a lot of VR in them and a lot of computer gr...

Jack Horner is a severely dyslexic, dinosaur paleontologist. He attended the University of Montana for 14 semesters without receiving a degree. He has since received two honorary doctorates of science and a plethora of awards including a MacArthur Fellowship. Jack was Curator and Regent’s Professor of Paleontology at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana for 34 years. He has more than 300 p...

"It's one of our more popular experiences at the GRAMMY Museum. We have something called Mono to Immersive, which actually takes a Bruno Mars and Cardi B performance at the GRAMMY Awards, and we put guests/listeners into a room, and they watch this performance. And we had Grammy-winning engineers mix these performances. What would that Bruno Mars and Cardi B performance sound like if it were mono...

The GRAMMY Museum believes that music is a gateway to learning. Their mission is to explore and celebrate the enduring legacies of the creative process behind all forms of music through immersive and interactive exhibits and essential music education programs. Michael Sticka serves as President/CEO. He’s responsible for the creation of the Museum's growth and sustainability as an independent nonpr...

"Cities are certainly a great place to start because the way that we do them - you can see it if you go up in an airplane and look down - you can see that they're built against nature. You can see it in the color of the city. It's interesting. We reflect it in our maps. Cities are gray, and the rest of the world is green. We build them against the natural world, and the way that we do it - concret...

Designer, author, educator and artist Bruce Mau is a brilliantly creative optimist whose love of thorny problems led him to create a methodology for life-centered design. Across thirty years of design innovation, he’s collaborated with global brands and companies, leading organizations, heads of state, renowned artists and fellow optimists. Mau became an international figure with the publication o...