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

"Capitalism and technological innovation have brought a higher standard of living and greater health to the people of the world. That's inarguable. That's absolutely true. It's a combination of capitalism, imperialism, and technological innovation that have raised all boats in their way and increased standards of living and so on. People like Stephen Pinker make this argument. There are various kinds of Just So Stories about how we're all better off now because of capitalism and technological development than humans were in 1784. The thing that all these stories ignore, however, is two things. One is that this trendline parallels various other trend lines that measure our devastation and exploitation of the earth. This trendline is real, right? In terms of human wealth and general quality of life as measured in numerical terms. The costs for that are also manifest and have largely been externalized."Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We’re Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He’s an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative.http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info

Roy Scranton, is the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and We’re Doomed. Now What? He has written for the NYTimes, Rolling Stone, The Nation, and other publications. He was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing, has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and other honors. He’s an Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and is director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative."Capitalism and technological innovation have brought a higher standard of living and greater health to the people of the world. That's inarguable. That's absolutely true. It's a combination of capitalism, imperialism, and technological innovation that have raised all boats in their way and increased standards of living and so on. People like Stephen Pinker make this argument. There are various kinds of Just So Stories about how we're all better off now because of capitalism and technological development than humans were in 1784. The thing that all these stories ignore, however, is two things. One is that this trendline parallels various other trend lines that measure our devastation and exploitation of the earth. This trendline is real, right? In terms of human wealth and general quality of life as measured in numerical terms. The costs for that are also manifest and have largely been externalized."http://royscranton.netNotre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative sites.nd.edu/ehum www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.infoPhoto by Ola Kjelbye

"All of the technologies necessary to solve a great deal of problems have already been done. The issue is having the political will to make them actually happen. Capital won't do that because it's more advantageous financially to have the problem continually move and then just kind of fix it here and then move it over there and then fix it over there and then move it back over here.”David A. Banks is the Director of Globalization Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY and the author of the forthcoming book The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America published by University of California Press. He is also a delegate to the Troy Area Labor Council and the co-host of the podcast Ironweeds.www.davidabanks.orgwww.e-flux.com/architecture/software/337954/where-do-you-live/ https://reallifemag.com/true-ish-grit/ www.reallifemag.com/new-haunts/ The attention economy of authentic cities https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1882947https://ironweeds.podbean.com

David A. Banks is the Director of Globalization Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY and the author of the forthcoming book The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America published by University of California Press. He is also a delegate to the Troy Area Labor Council and the co-host of the podcast Ironweeds."All of the technologies necessary to solve a great deal of problems have already been done. The issue is having the political will to make them actually happen. Capital won't do that because it's more advantageous financially to have the problem continually move and then just kind of fix it here and then move it over there and then fix it over there and then move it back over here.”www.davidabanks.orgwww.e-flux.com/architecture/software/337954/where-do-you-live/ https://reallifemag.com/true-ish-grit/ www.reallifemag.com/new-haunts/ The attention economy of authentic cities https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2021.1882947https://ironweeds.podbean.com

"There's actually an entire subfield of degrowth scholarship that's called degrowth and technology, which looks at technology's role in these sociological transformations pursued by degrowthers.My master's research focuses on looking at social media through a degrowth lens. Specifically, I'm using concepts in the literature called "conviviality", which was first formulated by Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born priest, critic, and philosopher who wrote a number of texts in the 1970s that sharply analyzed industrial ways of life...I collected data on six social media, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Decidim, Mastodon, and iNaturalist, and I'm using this lens of conviviality to analyze the different components of social media.”KC Legacion is a Master of Environmental Studies candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. His research presents a reimagined understanding of social media through the lens of degrowth—this project will culminate in a short film set to premiere in September of this year. Outside of their research, KC is a team member of the web collective degrowth.info and a member of a nascent housing cooperative in West Philadelphia.www.degrowth.infowww.kclegacion.comwww.decidim.orgwww.joinmastodon.orgwww.iNaturalist.orgwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

KC Legacion is a Master of Environmental Studies candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. His research presents a reimagined understanding of social media through the lens of degrowth—this project will culminate in a short film set to premiere in September of this year. Outside of their research, KC is a team member of the web collective degrowth.info and a member of a nascent housing cooperative in West Philadelphia."There's actually an entire subfield of degrowth scholarship that's called degrowth and technology, which looks at technology's role in these sociological transformations pursued by degrowthers.My master's research focuses on looking at social media through a degrowth lens. Specifically, I'm using concepts in the literature called "conviviality", which was first formulated by Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born priest, critic, and philosopher who wrote a number of texts in the 1970s that sharply analyzed industrial ways of life...I collected data on six social media, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Decidim, Mastodon, and iNaturalist, and I'm using this lens of conviviality to analyze the different components of social media.”www.degrowth.infowww.kclegacion.comwww.decidim.orgwww.joinmastodon.orgwww.iNaturalist.orgwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

“I guess the work that we're doing here at the Climate Hazards Center is trying to build out the science to cope with a two-degree world. And I think that we can do that. It's not going to be easy, but I think that's definitely within our capabilities, and it is already making human beings be smarter together in very empowering ways. And these are examples of people in Boulder, Colorado getting ready for the next big flood event and having conversations between the National Weather Service and local communities, or me on a zoom call at seven in the morning with my friends in East Africa as they're getting ready to cope with the next extreme. There are great examples of radio clubs in Niger who are working with their meteorological agencies and local farming communities that are pulling data that we're producing here in Santa Barbara, precipitation estimates, but then using them to decide whether they should fertilize their millet crops or not. And so there are ways that we can counter climate hazards and weather hazards by being smarter.”Chris Funk is the Director of the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at UC Santa Barbara. He works with an international team of Earth scientists to inform weather and famine-related disaster responses. Chris studies climate and climate change while also developing improved data sets and monitoring/prediction systems. He’s the author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes and co-author with Shrad Shukla of Drought Early Warning and Forecasting. While his research interests are quite diverse, a central theme uniting Chris’ work is developing both the technical/scientific resources and the conceptual frameworks that will help us cope with increasingly dangerous climate and weather extremes.www.chc.ucsb.eduwww.chc.ucsb.edu/people/chris-funkDrought, Flood, Fire: www.cambridge.org/core/books/drought-flood-fire/96E0EB1519F5175B68079D294D0B0E93www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info

Chris Funk is the Director of the Climate Hazards Center (CHC) at UC Santa Barbara. He works with an international team of Earth scientists to inform weather and famine-related disaster responses. Chris studies climate and climate change while also developing improved data sets and monitoring/prediction systems. He’s the author of Drought, Flood, Fire: How Climate Change Contributes to Recent Catastrophes and co-author with Shrad Shukla of Drought Early Warning and Forecasting. While his research interests are quite diverse, a central theme uniting Chris’ work is developing both the technical/scientific resources and the conceptual frameworks that will help us cope with increasingly dangerous climate and weather extremes.“I guess the work that we're doing here at the Climate Hazards Center is trying to build out the science to cope with a two-degree world. And I think that we can do that. It's not going to be easy, but I think that's definitely within our capabilities, and it is already making human beings be smarter together in very empowering ways. And these are examples of people in Boulder, Colorado getting ready for the next big flood event and having conversations between the National Weather Service and local communities, or me on a zoom call at seven in the morning with my friends in East Africa as they're getting ready to cope with the next extreme. There are great examples of radio clubs in Niger who are working with their meteorological agencies and local farming communities that are pulling data that we're producing here in Santa Barbara, precipitation estimates, but then using them to decide whether they should fertilize their millet crops or not. And so there are ways that we can counter climate hazards and weather hazards by being smarter.”www.chc.ucsb.eduwww.chc.ucsb.edu/people/chris-funkDrought, Flood, Fire:www.cambridge.org/core/books/drought-flood-fire/96E0EB1519F5175B68079D294D0B0E93www.oneplanetpodcast.org www.creativeprocess.info

“We're trying to help the world's forestry organizations collectively plant a trillion trees in the next decade and cover 3 billion acres of net new forest. That's a very, very large number. Some of the very largest tree-planting organizations in the world collectively plant something like half a billion to three-quarters of a billion trees per year. And even that number sounds large, too, but then you realize that's actually three full orders of magnitude smaller than the actual number we need to hit in the next decade. So we actually need to take all of the world's largest forestry organizations as a group and multiply by a thousand their efforts. So that's a very large undertaking, and I just can't underscore enough the scale at which we as a human species seeks to operate when we talk about tree-planting and forestry operations.”Terraformation builds and deploys tools to tackle the largest bottlenecks to mass-scale reforestation. Its technology includes off-grid seed banks that process and store millions of seeds, tracking and monitoring platforms to enable project transparency, solar-powered desalination and more. Its current partner network spans five continents, including in South America, East Africa and Central Asia, and includes public- and private-sector landowners and organizations. Terraformation’s goal in 2022 is to establish the world’s largest decentralized native seed banking network.www.terraformation.orgPhoto credit @pkworldwidewww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

Yee Lee was the first employee at Terraformation, dedicated to restoring the planet’s forests to solve climate change. He is a serial technology entrepreneur and angel investor from Silicon Valley, having invested in over 100 technology startups. Prior to Terraformation, Yee was an early team member at PayPal and Slide. He founded four venture-backed ecommerce and financial technology startups with M&A exits to Google and TaskRabbit (now part of IKEA). In his capacity as Chief of Growth at Terraformation, Yee supports Business Development, Sales, Capital Markets, and Terraformation Foundation teams.Terraformation builds and deploys tools to tackle the largest bottlenecks to mass-scale reforestation. Its technology includes off-grid seed banks that process and store millions of seeds, tracking and monitoring platforms to enable project transparency, solar-powered desalination and more. Its current partner network spans five continents, including in South America, East Africa and Central Asia, and includes public- and private-sector landowners and organizations. Terraformation’s goal in 2022 is to establish the world’s largest decentralized native seed banking network.www.terraformation.orgwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info