What influence do billionaires have on politics, journalism, and the technology that shapes our lives? What drives people to seek absolute power, and how can we hold them accountable?Darryl  Cunningham is a cartoonist and author of Science Tales, Psychiatric Tales, The Age of Selfishness, and Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful. Cunningham is also well-known for his comic strips, which have been featured on the websites Forbidden Planet and Act-i-vate collective, among others. others. His more recent work includes a graphic novel on Elon Musk, titled Elon Musk: Investigation into a New Master of the World.“It's far too early to say how AI is going to shake out. A lot of it will come to nothing, like many new technologies. VR came along, and people thought it would be a big thing, but it became a niche for a few kinds of people. AI might find a place ultimately, but it has to come from people. We have to make choices. Will people be happy with processed movies done with a few keywords, or will they want to hear the actual voice of a human being? In the end, it's up to the audience, and that's us. We will shape it.”Episode Website with Feature Articlewww.creativeprocess.info/podInstagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

“I think a lot of joy comes from helping others. One of the things that I've been really focusing on is finding that balance in life, what’s real and what’s true and what makes you happy. How can you help other people feel the same and have a happier life? I think whatever that takes. So if that's charity, if that's photography, if that's documentary, if that's music, and I can do it, then I'm going to do it.From traveling, especially in Ethiopia, Kenya, and even South America, we just see these scenarios and situations where they don't have enough support or finances. Anything I’m involved in, a good percentage goes to The White Feather Foundation. From what I witnessed, I just wanted to be able to help. My best teacher ever was Mum because I watched her live through life with dignity, grace, respect, and empathy. To me, those are some of the key things that are most important in living life. I think you have to love everybody and yourself. Respect is a real key issue, not only for people but for this world that we live in, Mother Earth. It's of key importance that we honor and respect this beautiful little blue ball that we live on.”Julian Lennon is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and NYTimes bestselling author of the Touch the Earth children’s book trilogy. This autumn, Whispers – A Julian Lennon Retrospective is being presented at Le Stanze della Fotografia, culminating in the publication of Life’s Fragile Moments, his first photography book. It features a compilation of images that span over two decades of Lennon's unique life, career, adventures, and philanthropy. He founded The White Feather Foundation in 2007, whose key initiatives are education, health, conservation, and the protection of indigenous cultures. He was the executive producer of Kiss the Ground and other environmental documentaries and was named a Peace Laureate by UNESCO in 2020.www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastPhoto credit: © 2024, Julian Lennon. All rights reserved.Life’s Fragile Moments, published by teNeues, www.teneues.com, August 2024. 27,5 x 34 cm |10 5/6 x 13 3/8 in., 240 pages, Hardcover, approx. 200 color photographs, texts English & German ISBN: 978-3-96171-614-2

“So, syncopation is now the big thing. It will induce people to groove and to like your music more. So let's have a lot of syncopation inside your music and you'll sell a lot. By chasing superficial beauty, which is what AI gives us at the moment, it aims for perfect outcomes. Not that anything these models produce is perfect, because how do you evaluate perfection? But they are based on the data that most people want to see again. That's extremely important to bear in mind. When you say 'cluttered mind,' it's actually also a cluttered brain in terms of the neurotransmitters out and about. As we strive for that perfect coding and external beauty, our brain releases dopamine signals. Dopamine is good; it's a learning signal to the brain, but we need to know how to use it. Constantly swiping our phone and getting this beauty into our brain via our eyes or via the syncopations in the music teaches our mind to seek that all the time because that's a dopamine signal. It's a learning signal. So, striving after these shapes and sound cues repeatedly clutters your brain. That's why your mind is full.”Dr. Julia F. Christensen is a Danish neuroscientist and former dancer currently working as a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Germany. She studied psychology, human evolution, and neuroscience in France, Spain and the UK. For her postdoctoral training, she worked in international, interdisciplinary research labs at University College London, City, University London and the Warburg Institute, London and was awarded a postdoctoral Newton International Fellowship by the British Academy. Her new book The Pathway to Flow is about the science of flow, why our brain needs it and how to create the right habits in our brain to get it.https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-julia-f-christensen-36539a144https://www.instagram.com/dr.julia.f.christensen?igsh=cHZkODgxczJqZmxlwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How is economic inequality undermining our democratic systems? In what ways is social media reshaping political landscapes and democracy? Can we design political institutions that adapt to rapid social and technological changes while remaining stable? How is journalism critical for the health of our democracies?Arash Abizadeh is the R.B. Angus Professor of Political Science at McGill University. His research has focused on democratic theory, including topics such as immigration and border control. Abizadeh also specializes in 17th and 18th century philosophy and has recently published the book Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics. He is currently working on a book about social and political power and is the Associate Editor of Free & Equal: a Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs.“There's a tension between what democracy needs for a public sphere in order to sustain our democratic institutions and our liberties over the long run and what for-profit commercial corporations need to do to maximize people's time on social media to increase their profits. We know that some of the algorithms that, for example, Facebook was using tend to make prominent posts that engage people the most, often appealing to a sense of outrage, fear, or anger. This can affect the health of the deliberative public sphere.”https://abizadeh.wixsite.com/arashwww.cambridge.org/core/books/hobbes-and-the-two-faces-of-ethics/B565348CE9B53945F4F962784A5842C2https://freeandequaljournal.orgwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“The running theme in all of my work has been technology. The first book that I co-authored with my dad was published in 2015. The second book I wrote was A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond, published in 2020, just before the pandemic began. My new book Growth: A Reckoning is about growth, but also technological progress, because what drives growth is technological progress—we have a choice to change the nature of growth, and the same is true of our technological progress. To reach a dynamic economy capable of generating ever more ideas about the world, we need to use the technologies we have to generate new ideas about the world. One of the technologies I've been particularly excited by was AlphaFold, developed by DeepMind to solve protein folding problems in biology. Essentially, understanding the 3D shape of proteins is important for understanding disease and designing effective treatment, but incredibly difficult to figure out, and Alpha fold has solved this problem by providing the 3D structures of millions of proteins. As the only economist in The Institute for Ethics in AI, I’ve always found the moral, ethical side of technology interesting. I often get asked, “What can machines do, and what can they not do?” But I think one of the most troubling, but also one of the most fascinating things about technology is it is forcing us to ask the question “What does it really mean to be human? What is humanity?” For a long time, many people thought the core of what it means to be a human being is to be a creative thing. But with the arrival of generative AI in the last few years, I think that that has been really called into question. These AI systems are particularly good at creative tasks—coming up with original, novel text, images, and video. In fact, I actually use these AI systems to generate bedtime stories with my children—getting the kids to craft a good prompt is quite a fun, intellectually demanding exercise, and these technologies now give my children a storytelling capability that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. So, one of the interesting philosophical consequences of technologies is that it's challenging some of the complacency and deep-rooted assumptions about what it really means to be a human being.”Daniel Susskind is a Research Professor in Economics at King's College London and a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University. He is the author of A World without Work and co-author of the bestselling The Future of the Professions. Previously, he worked in various roles in the British Government - in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street, and in the Cabinet Office. His latest book is Growth: A Reckoning.www.danielsusskind.comwww.penguin.co.uk/books/446381/growth-by-susskind-daniel/9780241542309www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“I'm one of the people who believe that anything that we as human beings can imagine will eventually happen. So, if somebody has raised the question possibility of having brain implants that augment the brain and generate additional functions, I feel like it will eventually happen. There are a lot of private companies, like Elon Musk's Neuralink and others, that are busy designing these interfaces and planning these devices. Of course, nothing is available or even close to completion right now. The next step, of course, would be to modulate them. Just like any other thing in medicine, it will start or has already started with pathological states which we've talked about and people looking for potential interventions through TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). It doesn't necessarily have to be invasive, but of course the next step, especially when we're talking about the brain is to intervene and generate additional functions or to improve the way the brain functions. Many people are working on trying to generate memory augmentation, navigation augmentations, and a lot of other functions. I assume eventually it will reach a point where we'll be able to pick and choose what we want to augment about our own brains.  I assume that the technology will be there eventually. And this is something that will be a part of the natural evolution of the human race.”Dr. Ben Shofty is a functional neurosurgeon affiliated with the University of Utah. He graduated from the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Medicine, received his PhD in neurosurgical training from the Israeli Institute of Technology, and completed his training at the Tel Aviv Medical Center and Baylor University. He was also an Israeli national rugby player. His practice specializes in neuromodulation and exploring treatments for disorders such as OCD, depression, and epilepsy, among others, while also seeking to understand the science behind creativity, mind-wandering, and the many complexities of the brain.https://healthcare.utah.edu/find-a-doctor/ben-shoftyhttps://academic.oup.com/brain/advance-article/doi/10.1093/brain/awae199/7695856www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“The way we understand the world and how the world actually works is just not mapped perfectly. That kind of leads to problems because we don't know exactly what we're doing in the world. We can't see all the repercussions of the things we create until later on. One silver lining about the technologies we're creating is that technologies like AI could be used to help us with this issue, with the fact that our mental models aren't exactly in line with how the world works. AI is actually very good at predicting and modeling outcomes. It could be used to understand climate change better so that we're able to understand it in a way that allows us to act. It could also help us predict the impacts of the things that we're making. So there's a bit of a silver lining in here, even though it can feel scary to be in a situation where your mental model and how the world works are not in line.”“I worry that AI is changing my thoughts and can control my thoughts, and that used to sound really far-fetched and now seems sort of middle of the road. I guarantee in a year's time that will sound like a very normal concern. Social listening is very sophisticated. All of the data in the websites that we visit, the data trails that we leave out in the world, are tracking us—our locations, our behaviors, and our habits such that there are many sites out there that can predict exactly what we're thinking and feeling and feed us advertising content or things that aren't even advertising content that can change what our next behaviors are. I think that's getting more and more sophisticated. We have already seen our political elections affected by mass attacks on our social media. When that comes down to our individual agency and behavior, I think that's something we do need to be concerned about. The way that we as individuals can combat it is to be aware that it's happening. Really start to notice the unnoticed, and I still feel optimistic amongst this concern.”Scott Doorley is the Creative Director at Stanford's d. school and co author of Make Space. He teaches design communication and his work has been featured in museums and architecture and urbanism and the New York Times. Carissa Carteris the Academic Director at Stanford's d. schooland author of The Secret Language of Maps. She teaches courses on emerging technologies and data visualization and received Fast Company and Core 77 awards for her work on designing with machine learning and blockchain.  Together, they co authored Assembling Tomorrow: A Guide to Designing a Thriving Future.www.scottdoorley.comwww.snowflyzone.comhttps://dschool.stanford.edu/www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/623529/assembling-tomorrow-by-scott-doorley-carissa-carter-and-stanford-dschool-illustrations-by-armando-veve/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“We have an onslaught of information the moment we open our eyes. We evolved to deal with an onslaught of information, and we are masters at focusing and ignoring vast amounts of information. Now, AI in this digital age is a relatively new stream of information, which is man-made, so we make it more salient.  So, yes, it's harder to ignore it, but people can learn to ignore it, and indeed, it's a learning process. I think it will also require learning how to teach our children. I mean, we're raising generations of kids who will take AI and the digital world as a given. To them, it will be no different than a chair and a table were to us. So they will learn to not be so distracted by chairs and tables.”Dr. Jacqueline Gottlieb is a Professor of Neuroscience and Principal Investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. Dr. Gottlieb studies the mechanisms that underlie the brain's higher cognitive functions, including decision making, memory, and attention. Her interest is in how the brain gathers the evidence it needs—and ignores what it doesn’t—during everyday tasks and during special states such as curiosity.www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

The planet’s well-being unites us all, from ecosystems to societies, global systems to individual health. How is planetary health linked to mental health? Charlie Hertzog Young is a researcher, writer and award-winning activist. He identifies as a “proudly mad bipolar double amputee” and has worked for the New Economics Foundation, the Royal Society of Arts, the Good Law Project, the Four Day Week Campaign and the Centre for Progressive Change, as well as the UK Labour Party under three consecutive leaders. Charlie has spoken at the LSE, the UN and the World Economic Forum. He studied at Harvard, SOAS and Schumacher College and has written for The Ecologist, The Independent, Novara Media, Open Democracy and The Guardian. He is the author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future.https://charliehertzogyoung.mehttps://footnotepress.com/books/spinning-out/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How is being an artist different than a machine that is programmed to perform a set of actions? How can we stop thinking about artworks as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences? In this conversation with Max Cooper, we discuss the beauty and chaos of nature and the exploration of technology music and consciousness.Max Cooper is a musician with a PhD in computational biology. He integrates electronic music with immersive video projections inspired by scientific exploration. His latest project, Seme, commissioned by the Salzburg Easter Festival, merges Italian musical heritage with contemporary techniques, was also performed at the Barbican in London. He supplied music for a video narrated by Greta Thunberg and Pope Francis for COP26.In 2016, Cooper founded Mesh, a platform to explore the intersection of music, science and art. His Observatory art-house installation is on display at Kings Cross until May 1st.“As technology becomes more dominant, the arts become ever more important for us to stay in touch the things that the sciences can't tackle. What it's actually like to be a person? What's actually important? We can have this endless progress inside this capitalist machine for greater wealth and longer life and more happiness, according to some metric. Or we can try and quantify society and push it forward. Ultimately, we all have to decide what's important to us as humans, and we need the arts to help with that. So, I think what's important really is just exposing ourselves to as many different ideas as we can, being open-minded, and trying to learn about all facets of life so that we can understand each other as well. And the arts is an essential part of that.”https://maxcooper.nethttps://osterfestspiele.at/en/programme/2024/electro-2024https://meshmeshmesh.netwww.kingscross.co.uk/event/the-observatoryThe music featured on this episode was Palestrina Sicut, Cardano Circles, Fibonacci Sequence, Scarlatti K141. Music is from Seme and is courtesy of Max Cooper.www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast