The Futurists

What’s next in robotics with Marc Theermann, the Chief Strategy Officer of Boston Dynamics. Known as "the Bell Labs of robotics”,  this firm is famous for its mechanical menagerie of legged robots that includes Spot, Atlas, Stretch.  These autonomous robots can go anywhere a human can go, and to many places humans cannot, including mine fields. And now they are equipped with artificial intelligence. Autonomous robots are beginning to develop a semantic model of the world.

Mark Pesce returns to The Futurists with a report about weird and wonderful discoveries at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show. Every year, 200,000 people converge at CES in Las Vegas to get a glimpse of the near future. Mark pushes far beyond mainstream press coverage to tell us about bleeding-edge progress in memristor chips, brain-computer interfaces, long-range drones, olfactory sensors, and the emerging category of “age-tech”.  If you are interested in knowing where the puck is going next, this episode is for you!

2023 was the hottest year on record in terms of temperature. ESG, sustainability, clean tech / green tech and corporate responsibility have been hot topics. Are we at war with climate? This week we feature Brett King’s recent sit down in Bangkok, Thailand with former banker, fintech investor and now venture capitalist, Paul Ark, with The Radical Fund, an early-stage VC fund investing in founders who are delivering climate resilience for Southeast Asia. Where are investment dollars going? Climate mitigation (how to prevent the world from getting warmer) and climate adaptation (dealing with a warmer world) and what it means for infrastructure resilience and food insecurity, to name some areas of concern, are top of mind. Climate is a complex systemic issue and requires a buffet of technologies to address, improve and help us reclaim our environment. It’s an enlightening conversation with The Futurists!

Are you certain that every attendee in your Zoom meeting is the person they claim to be? Deep fakes have improved. VFX expert Carl Bogan demonstrates to The Futurists how easy it is to fabricate a persuasive fake persona. Politics and remote work will never be the same again.

Boaz Ashkenazy is the CEO and founder of Simply Augmented. He’s on a mission to equip small and medium sized companies with AI superpowers. Boaz talks to the Futurists about the prospect of fully automated corporations, digitally augmented workforce, and how every company can get started on the process of AI reinvention.

Tech entrepreneur Byron Reese has a pragmatic approach to the future. He has launched several startup companies, exiting three via M&A and two via IPO. He’s also the author of several books, including his newest, Agora. Byron spoke to the Futurists about superintelligence, collective intelligence, super organisms, and emergence. What can human organizations learn from bee hives?  The conflict between AI Doomers and the Accelerationists. Why humanity is going to be all right!

In this weeks episode we are joined by Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at John Hopkins - Dr Sabine Stanley - to talk planetary science and her new book. We take a tour though the solar system and then get into the numerous surprises that have unfolded with our recent discoveries of exoplanets outside our solar system. We explore what we might find in a stellar backyard, but more importantly we talk about what we yet might learn about the earth and how planetary systems themselves work.

In this episode, journalist, technologist and entrepreneur Marshall Kirkpatrick joins hosts Brett and Brian to discuss the way AI might change our lives, thinking and philosophy as a species. Marshall dives deep into the way we are learning to integrate AI into our conscious processes, and where it might be useful, and where it might be contentious. In the midst of arguments about the safety of AI and the role it will play in our society, this is a fascinating debate on how your personal AI might change your world.  Bio https://marshallk.com/about-me

Tracey Follows, the author and podcaster of The Future of You, explains how your digital identity will evolve. Custodial or self-sovereign? Centralized or Web3? Big Brother-style surveillance capitalism or liberty? What do we mean by digital identity when there is no government-issued credential?

The hosts of the #1 Futurist Podcast THE FUTURISTS are back to talk emerging Artificial Intelligence regulation from Biden's latest executive order, the UK and EU positions, and China's take on AI. We also discuss Marc Andreessen's TechnoOptimist Manifesto and why the Tech Giants aren't necessarily the best people to be defining AI regulation.