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

How can we better educate young people about the future & the planet? How can we address eco-anxiety while providing students with climate optimism, hope, and solutions? Bryce Coon is the Director of Education at EarthDay. ORG, a nonprofit that champions climate education for all students and is the global driving force behind Earth Day. Previously, Coon was a high school teacher for 11 years...

How can we reimagine a world without plastic? How can we push governments and companies to admit what they know about the health impacts of plastics and change public policy? Kathleen Rogers is the President of EARTHDAY.ORG. Under her leadership, it has grown into a global year-round policy and activist organization with an international staff. She has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns...

Microplastics and nanoplastic pollution are currently blanketing the planet. They are in the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink, infiltrating our bodies and even brains and human embryos. Coca-Cola alone sells 100 billion+ single-use plastic bottles each year, ending up in landfills and the ocean. Earth’s population will reach 9.8 billion people by 2050. Two-thirds of humans w...

Ed Zwick is a writer, director, and producer who's been active in the film industry for over 40 years. He has been nominated for two Golden Globes for directing the films Glory and Legends of the Fall and received an Academy Award as one of the producers of Shakespeare in Love. Zwick continues to work with his longtime friend and partner, Marshall Herskovitz, at their company Bedford Falls, where...

Ed Zwick is a writer, director, and producer who's been active in the film industry for over 40 years. He has been nominated for two Golden Globes for directing the films Glory and Legends of the Fall and received an Academy Award as one of the producers of Shakespeare in Love. Zwick continues to work with his longtime friend and partner, Marshall Herskovitz, at their company Bedford Falls, where...

"I'm optimistic about education. There will likely be more traffic between technology and the arts. The tech world needs more creative-minded people and less literal people who have some understanding of how things work. With Jony Ive, you've got someone who designed the iPhone and was very interested in photography himself. We were talking about doing a portrait. He mentioned that he'd been fasci...

How can the arts help cultivate our intuitive intelligence? What does visual art teach us about consciousness and the human condition?    Jonathan Yeo is one of the world’s leading figurative artists and portrait painters. From celebrated figures such as Sir David Attenborough, peace activist Malala Yousafzai, the Duke of Edinburgh, Nicole Kidman, and Tony Blair, sitting for a portrait w...

"AI is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It promises both enormous potential and capability from helping with medical diagnosis and catching cancer early or removing a lot of tedium and repetitive nature of many jobs. It can make a lot of great contributions. It's how we control that technology by making active decisions that can be the pathway to the future. There's been a lot of doomsd...

How have our psychology and cognitive biases altered the course of human history? What would you do if you had to rebuild our world from scratch? Lewis Dartnell is an author, researcher, and holds the Professorship in Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He researches astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. He also works as a scientific consultant for the media a...

"My TED Talk and work are really about figuring out how, right now, AI is using resources like energy and emitting greenhouse gases and how it's using our data without our consent. I feel that if we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable, we can help future generations so that AI will be less of a risk to society.  And so really, artificial intelligence is not&n...

What are the pros and cons of AI’s integration into our institutions, political systems, culture, and society? How can we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable? Dr. Sasha Luccioni is a leading scientist at the nexus of artificial intelligence, ethics, and sustainability, with a Ph. D. in AI and a decade of research and industry expertise. She spearheads research, co...

"So, geoengineering has its champions, and there are people who say we shouldn't be doing anything, but I think we cannot foreclose any options because, as you said a few minutes ago, how far are we from 1.5 or even 2 degrees of change? I think we really need to have work done on all of these things, but when it comes to applying them, we need to be far more prudent and be far more effective with...

How do urbanization and rural development impact communities differently? How can we make public policy and enlightened self-interest advance climate action? Dr. Shiv Someshwar is a Development Clinician, diagnosing development of cities and nation states. A Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York and at Sciences Po, Paris, he was the founder chair-holder of the European Chair for Sust...

“The wealth of learning that can come from our collective awareness that essentially AI is a fancy-sounding way of saying computers can learn from the collective wisdom that exists throughout the Internet. And if we can empower the local stewards of biodiversity, local landowners, farmers indigenous populations with all of that wealth of information in a smart way, it can be incredibly empowering...

Although they comprise less than 5% of the world population, Indigenous peoples protect 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. How can we support farmers, reverse biodiversity loss, and restore our ecosystems? Thomas Crowther is an ecologist studying the connections between biodiversity and climate change. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, chai...

"I have very mixed feelings about AI, and I think its future and our future with it is very much up for grabs. And here's the reason why. At the moment, these extraordinary achievements like ChatGPT, I mean literally mind-boggling achievements, are completely indifferent to truth. They crawl around in the web and learn how words go together, and so they produce coherent meaningful strings of words...

Does having too many choices make us unhappy? How can we learn practical wisdom? Dr. Barry Schwartz is the Dorwin P. Cartwright Professor Emeritus of Social Theory and Social Action in the psychology department at Swarthmore College. He is the author of many books, including Why We Work, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, and co-author of Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing...

"The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we r...

How do we navigate ambiguity and uncertainty? Moving beyond linear thinking into instinct and intuition, we might discover other sources within ourselves that lie beyond the boundaries of science and reason. Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. His many books include The Science Delusion, The Presence of the Past, and Ways to Go Beyond...

"So we get to a certain stage in Western society, I'd never call it a culture, but a society trying to figure out its birth and how to become mature. Whatever it's doing it has slowed down natural relationships. It took us out of the land, put us into factories, put us into institutions where you can learn a trade. It kept giving you jobs that had nothing to do with Earth. And so if you're living,...

How can we learn to speak the language of the Earth and cultivate our intuitive intelligence? Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”) for the last 31 years in New York City a...

"With the speed and the precision of the AI, make no mistake, we are becoming creators of something that is far more advanced than humans. Is this a bad thing? I see it as a very bad thing, but I also see it as a natural evolution. We are becoming creators and in our evolution process, we are evolving ourselves to something much more advanced. It's what the world, what the universe, what nature wa...

Are we living in a Simulated Universe? How will AI impact the future of work, society & education? Dr. Melvin M. Vopson is Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Portsmouth, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Chartered Physicist and Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Information Physics Institute, editor-in-chief of the IPI Letters and Eme...

"Meta reaches between three and four billion people every day through their platforms, right? That's way more people than any government legitimately can claim to govern. And yet this one company with four major platforms that many of us use is able to reach so many people and make decisions about content and access that have real consequences. It's been shown they fueled genocide in multiple plac...

Does privacy exist anymore? Or are humans just sets of data to be traded and sold? Wendy H. Wong is Professor of Political Science and Principal's Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of two award-winning books: Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights and (with Sarah S. Stroup) The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of Interna...