The Future of Everything

Women face many roadblocks to careers in data science and other STEM disciplines. One Stanford professor is out to change perceptions and realities for women in these fields. It was in 2015 when Margot Gerritsen was asked to speak at a data conference with not a single other woman on the program that she knew that something had to be done to get women into the field. As then-director of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME), Gerritsen knew more than a thing or two about data science and became determined to change the male-dominated culture. This determination led to the creation of the wildly popular “Women in Data Science Conference.” In putting the first agenda together, she was insistent that the conference be not about the problematic state of women in the field, but on the exceptional science of the attendees. Now into its fifth iteration, with more than 100,000 participants worldwide, online and at satellite events spreading into six continents, Gerritsen and her co-directors of the conference have inspired women across the planet to enter the sciences and provided a platform for them to highlight their work. In addition to the conference, WiDS now includes a datathon, a podcast that Gerritsen hosts, and ongoing education programs. The results have been, quite literally, life changing for many. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine. Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

How do new technologies and techniques for altering DNA get used? And who gets to use them? In recent years, the development of inexpensive genetic sequencing and easy gene editing technologies has given rise to a community of non-academic, amateur researchers who like to refer to themselves, only half-jokingly, as “biohackers.” But, says Mildred Cho, a research professor who has published frequently about bioethics, such communities are not bound by traditional “first-do-no-harm” ethical norms that professional biologists and physicians adhere to. There is, for instance, a group of such do-it-yourself researchers pursuing a low-cost insulin substitute that is free of patent protection; they hope to bring that life-saving medicine to millions who cannot afford it. On the flip side, Cho says, there are also bio-hobbyists who like to do things “just for fun” that could present considerable danger to society. “Would you want your neighbor recreating polio in his garage?” she asks, rhetorically, adding that these deep and challenging concerns are better addressed sooner rather than later. Join bioethicists Mildred Cho and The Future of Everything host Russ Altman for a provocative discussion about the shifting landscape in the ethics of biological research. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

An expert on air quality talks about the hidden dangers inside our homes and offers some helpful tips on what you can do to reduce your exposure. We all know about the decades-long battle to improve air quality outdoors, but Stanford environmental engineer Lynn Hildemann says that while much progress has been made in that regard, it may have caused us to look past the pollutants in our own homes. Hildemann, who studies air pollution and its effects inside and outside the home, says that chemicals and microparticles from cooking, furniture, carpets, cleaning products and good-old household dust represent the latest air quality battleground. She says it’s such a big concern because most Americans spend some 90 percent of their lives indoors. Hildemann offers a few small steps we can all take to improve air quality at home. Using the ventilation hood when cooking is a great first step. Opening the windows whenever possible is another. And, opting for easily cleanable hardwood floors over carpet can help, too. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

A mechanical engineer explains how more and better data is helping to create new prosthetics unlike any before. For years prosthetic limbs were merely functional devices, but recent advances in robotics and neuroscience are transforming the very meaning of the word "prosthetic." Steve Collins is a mechanical engineer who is helping to lead that transformation to the benefit of people who've had an amputation, stroke or battlefield injury. The field has come a long way since the days of strap-on wooden legs. Collins says that, rather than trying to merely mimic what the body does, he's working on new ways of discovering prosthetic limb designs that outperform unimpaired bodies. His team uses advanced robotic systems that record and analyze the wearer's response, continually tuning their mechanical assistance to optimize performance and make them better than ever before. Join host Russ Altman and Steve Collins for a glimpse into the changing world of prosthetics on the latest episode The Future of Everything radio show. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine.Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Russ Altman: Today, on The Future of Everything, the future of the microbiome. Now, the microbiome has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years. Now, what is a microbiome? I guess we will learn more, but for the purposes of this discussion, it’s the full set of microbial organisms, chiefly bacteria, but maybe others, that live in different niches within our body. Our mouth, nasal cavity, skin folds, everywhere that has contact with the outside world. The gut microbiome is one of those microbiomes and it’s the community of bacteria living in our digestive system, not necessarily related to disease, but as a normal part of our physiology. We have long known that there is a lot of bacteria in our digestive tract and we know, for example, that they help us digest our food. That’s what we were taught in medical school many decades ago when I was in medical school. We also know that when we treat infections with antibiotics, it can alter these species because these species are sitting in your gut and they also can be very susceptible to antibiotics. So when I treat a patient for urinary tract infection or for pneumonia, not only am I killing the bacteria, hopefully, that’s causing the infection, but I’m probably altering the microbiome of that patient in ways that might lead to some symptoms. They might have some digestive issues that are associated with that antibiotic. Now, it’s become clear that the bacteria living in our gut have much more complicated relationship with our health and with our disease. They seem to be involved in our immune system. They seem to be changing sometimes in both acute and chronic disease. The idea has even emerged that there’s a healthy microbiome, the set of bacteria that you would love to have and host in your bowel and that there might be treatments for some diseases that involve changing the microbiome to get it to be more healthy, so to speak. This has gotten probably the most publicity in the idea of fecal transplants. Yes, if you’re not familiar with that, you heard correctly. This is the idea where poop, forgive the terminology, the technical terminology, poop from healthy people is introduced into the digestive tract of people with disease in order to help them normalize their microbiome to hopefully get it back into a healthy state. So this is getting serious. Ami Bhatt is a Professor of Medicine and Genetics at Stanford University. She has a medical specialty of hematology and studies the human microbiome, mostly in the gut, and has developed new ways to measure the presence of bacteria in the human body and ways to interpret these for health and disease. Ami, you specialize in hematology, the study of blood and blood diseases. How does a hematologist get interested in bacteria that live in the gut? Ami Bhatt: So, thanks a lot for having me, Russ. It’s a pleasure to be here. I actually first became interested in the bacteria viruses and fungi that live in and on us, as I think many young people did which was by watching a TV show. I remember being about, I don’t know, nine or ten years old, and I was left at home for the first time, for like ten minutes by myself or something like that, and so I turned on the TV. My younger brother and I were watching a television show about germs and, they showed these horrifying microscopic images of all of the bacteria that are squirming around everywhere. And I thought, “Wow, this is fantastic and also very gross, and we should really learn more about this.” If you fast forward many years later, part of the reason I became interested as a hematologist and oncologist in viruses and bacteria was because I learned that viruses can cause cancers in some cases. And as you well know, there are viruses that cause well-known cancers like liver cancer. Liver cancer is caused, in some cases, by a hepatitis virus. We know that the human papilloma virus causes cervical cancer and other cancers. And I thought, “Wow, there are all of these relatively simple organisms. They don’t have many genes.” You know, a virus can’t even live by itself. It requires a human cell in these cases in order to replicate. It’s amazing that such simple organisms can alter the biology of such complex organisms like us. That was how I ended up getting interested in bacteria viruses and fungi that live in and on us. Of course, first I learned about them as kind of bad guys but there are trillions of microorganisms that live in and on us and most of them are probably not bad guys. Many of them are probably actually quite helpful and so I’ve taken a more holistic view of what bugs mean to us. Russ Altman: So tell me, what are we finding when we look at the microbiome? How many of these are old friends that we’ve known for years and how many surprises are there where we’re saying, “Wow, we had no idea that this bacteria species was living in us.” And then how do we figure out what they’re doing, good or bad? Ami Bhatt: Yeah, this is an incredibly complex question in part because we don’t even know most of the microbes that live within us. Despite the fact that now, there have been tens of thousands of papers published on the gut microbiome of humans, for example, we know relatively little about who these organisms are. The classical ways of studying microorganisms was by taking them, culturing them, looking at them under the microscope. Russ Altman: Right, give them a little sugar and they’ll grow. Ami Bhatt: Exactly. Describing them based on what they grow on, so what they like to eat, what color they stain, what shape they are. But now what we’re understanding is organisms that look really similar under the microscope, and have very similar growth characteristics, for example, can have totally different genomes which means that they can probably do totally different things. So one of the things that we’re learning in the field is that we know relatively little about the organisms even within our own guts. And so a lot of effort has been put into trying to better enumerate who’s there and what they’re doing. Russ Altman: I also know that these bacteria often, you can’t just grow them on sugar and salt, they actually need each other to live so it’s like a very highly interlinked environment. Is this idea of a healthy microbiome, is that an oversimplification or is it in fact true that you could look at a sample of somebody’s poop and say, “That looks pretty good,” versus, “Oh, we have a problem here.” Ami Bhatt: You know, I think in general we’re coming to a consensus that for the gut microbiome, at least based on the individuals who’ve been studied to date, having a more diverse community is better. And so having a larger variety of different types of organisms is probably better than the alternative, which is having a handful of organisms that are present at a high abundance. But in general, what we think we know now is that there isn’t just one healthy microbiome. There isn’t that golden poop out there that we should fecal transplant into everyone and then we’ll all look like a Kardashian and live for 250 years. Russ Altman: I know a young man in Boston whose name will not be mentioned who’s actually made several thousand dollars donating his poop to research and to microbiome stuff for the last couple of years so he’s in the money. Ami Bhatt: Yeah, oh yeah. It’s a great way to, you know, turn poop into cold, hard cash. Russ Altman: Poop into cash. Okay, that was a very distracting idea. So there are many healthy microbiomes. And how can a patient or a person who’s listening, how can they figure out what the state of their microbiome is? You know, it’s interesting. I think if I talk to most laypeople or my patients or family members who aren’t in medicine and I ask them, “How’s your gut health?” Most people can actually tell you. Most people have a very good sense of how their gut is functioning based on their daily bowel movement or bowel movements, how they feel, do they feel bloated, etc. And so I would say most people who don’t have gastrointestinal symptoms, I’m talking about diarrhea, constipation, nausea, vomiting, bloating, those are people who probably have fairly healthy gut microbiomes. Russ Altman: So that’s good news ’cause that means you can use your normal life experience to kind of self-diagnose if there’s a problem and if things are going well both literally and figuratively, then we’re okay and then there’s no need to worry. So what are the impacts… Well, this is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with Ami Bhatt about microbiomes and healthy and diseased ones. What about when you take antibiotics? This is a huge insult to the system. Do we know what happens to the gut microbiome and does it bounce back or does it then change forever? Where are we in that knowledge? Ami Bhatt: Absolutely. So, you know, I liken antibiotic exposure to a forest fire. You’re basically getting rid of the vast majority of life that exists in the gut microbiome. And you don’t get rid of everything because even the most broad-spectrum antibiotics that we use don’t kill off every single microorganism in our gut. Russ Altman: And that’s also true of the forest fires where those few species come back right away. Ami Bhatt: Absolutely, absolutely. So it’s very, very similar of a situation. Some of the best work that we have in the field focusing on how antibiotics affect the microbiome have actually come here from Stanford from a colleague named David Roman. He and his colleagues did some really transformative early work in the early 2010s on the exposures of antibiotics to the gut microbiome in healthy individuals. They took a handful of individuals, gave them antibiotics, and studied what happened to their microbiomes. What they found was that, there was definitely a simplification of the microbiomes when people were exposed to antibiotics. Russ Altman: That loss of the diversity you were talking about. Ami Bhatt: Exactly, that’s loss of diversity and then basically after the people stop the antibiotics assuming they were living a healthy lifestyle, which they were, they regained their diversity, mostly. Russ Altman: So that’s good news. Ami Bhatt: Good news. On repeated exposures to antibiotics, what people have observed is that there may be a point at which you can’t quite get back to your normal and every time you’re exposed to antibiotics, you may be readjusting to a new normal. Russ Altman: Does the microbiome run in families? Can I assume that my wife and I, our kids are outta the house. That’s a whole different story, and I know nothing about their microbiomes. But do my wife and I have the same microbiome probably because we’re spending a lot of time together or could they be very different even in that home situation? Ami Bhatt: Yeah, so we call the scientific jargon for this is cohabitating adults. Russ Altman: That’s what I do with my wife. Ami Bhatt: Yes, so you and your cohabitating adult, your lovely wife, you probably do have some shared species and strains. So research has suggested that cohabitating adults do share some strains. There has been some limited work to show exciting results that people who own pets, for example dogs, may actually even share a few strains with their pets. Now this is really exciting because as you know, there’s this hygiene hypothesis out there and the idea that we’ve become too clean as a society that’s why we have, like, asthma and allergies and eczema that are increasing. Russ Altman: We need more exposures as youths. Ami Bhatt: Exactly, and we know that people who have animals when they’re young or who live on farms when they’re young actually have a decreased incidence of these diseases. So one question that has arisen is, is it because we’re actually getting microbes from these animals around us? Russ Altman: That raises an issue that I really, I did wanna get to so I’m glad that you’ve raised this, which is, the role of the gut microbiome with the immune system. In fact, you would think they might be at battle with one another but I think it’s much more complicated and I know you’ve looked into this. So, how should I think about the relationship of my gut bacteria with the health of my immune system? Ami Bhatt: Yeah, so we know that animals that can be reared without microbes, we call these germ-free animals. Russ Altman: So like the bubble boy but they’re the bubble cow or the bubble. Ami Bhatt: Yeah, bubble mouse. All kinds of bubble animals. Russ Altman: That’s probably easier than the bubble cow. Ami Bhatt: Yes, but you know, even bubble fish have been generated. You can generate these animals without really any measurable microbes and what we know about them, surprisingly, is that their immune systems are really messed up. That observation actually suggests that the immune system is really dependent on microbial exposures in order to mature properly. We also know, interestingly, and this is more of a correlational relationship, that the immune system develops over the first three years of life. You know, that’s why a lot of kids and babies get their immunizations or vaccinations in that early period of time. That’s actually also when the microbiome develops. So we know that the vast majority of microbiome and immune system development happens in those first three years of life. That suggests that just like having, you know, a sparring partner, someone who urges you. Russ Altman: Keeps you sharp. Ami Bhatt: Yeah, absolutely. I think the microbes keep the immune system sharp and I think the immune system keeps the microbes sharp. Russ Altman: Okay, so we should be rooting for a certain amount of healthy competition between the bacteria and the immune system and it’s part of developing this robust immune system. Taking that idea and combining with your earlier comments about there’s many healthy microbiomes, you’ve made a study of the cultural and geographic diversity of the microbiome including even in places like Africa where I imagine that the lifestyle, the diet, many things are different from the West Coast of the United States. Why are you doing that work and what are we finding? Ami Bhatt: The reason we’re doing this work which is really trying to broaden our understanding of all of the different types of healthy and diseased microbiomes that exist around the world, is that we know, unlike human genetics, like your human genome doesn’t really change over the course of your life, we know that the microbiome can change over life and that the microbiome is pretty much controlled by your lifestyle and your environment. For example, if you, Russ, were to move to Greenland and take up a diet that was entirely of fish and seals, your microbiome would change dramatically. And that suggests that the variety of lifestyle choices and environmental exposures that people have can really affect their microbiomes and they affect their microbiomes way more than their personal genetics do. Russ Altman: So it’s the environment that is playing a huge role. Even though I’m the same Russ, after six weeks in Greenland, I’m a different microbiome Russ. Ami Bhatt: Absolutely, absolutely. So one of the challenges in research has been that we tend to, in my opinion, overstudy kind of the same people over and over, in part ’cause they’re convenient. Honestly, if I was to do a study of a thousand people’s microbiomes, it’d be a lot easier for me to do the study here at Stanford and just to recruit, you know, the incoming freshman class. Russ Altman: It would be very diverse. It would be both Facebook employees as well as Google employees. Ami Bhatt: There you go, yeah. And then throw in like a little bit of Apple just for the fun. Russ Altman: There’s your diversity. Ami Bhatt: We know that many of these people are gonna have very, very consistent lifestyles. And so we thought that it was really important to broaden our understanding of all of the different types of microbiomes that can exist in the world, both for the purpose of better enumerating what is normal, normal can be a variety of things, but also because, not only should genetic research be done all over the world, we wanna make sure that genetic researchers are being encouraged all over the world. We started this collaboration with a really impressive consortium called the H3 Africa Genomics Consortium. They do a lot of human genetic work and as you know, life originated in Africa, there’s a huge amount of human genetic diversity there and we, being kind of a one-trick pony said, “Hey, we should collect poop and we’ll sequence it and we’ll learn about the microbiomes of these individuals.” Thankfully we have collaborators who are game for that and we’ve been studying the microbiomes of individuals in urban township settings and rural areas and trying to understand how they’re similar and different to each other and similar and different to us. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with Dr. Ami Bhatt about the microbiomes in Africa and fascinating because of the diversity and the history of Africa, it is possible that there will be more diversity of the microbiomes in Africa than there is in the rest of the world or certainly it will be more diverse than what we’re seeing in local areas as you described. And I also totally buy your argument that if there are gonna be in the future treatments of the microbiome, we really need to understand the range of normal so that we don’t start treating people in Africa with microbiomes that are irrelevant or even damaging. So let me ask that, we hear a lot about when people migrate from one place to another, after a certain amount of time they start getting the diseases of the local milieu. So, you know, we hear about people from China who come to the U.S. They have a certain diet and lifestyle in China, and after a couple of generations, they start getting the same heart disease that has been plaguing all of the U.S. Could there be a microbiome connection to this? Is it that changing your geography is not just the lifestyle and the McDonald’s and dietary considerations, but that you’re also now being exposed to microbiomes that might change your disease risk? Ami Bhatt: I absolutely believe so. One of the things that we don’t know is whether or not a healthy adult can actually acquire new microbes easily from the environment, but certainly the idea that changing someone’s lifestyle can change their microbiome is well established. There have been migration studies where immigrants have been studied over the course of time. I absolutely think this is related to disease. One of the things I’m really fascinated about is this observation that my parents, for example. My parents came over from India to the United States for school. They were born and raised in India. They could eat all of the delicious street food that is there. But when we used to go back to visit when I was a kid, my parents would say, “Absolutely no street food for you,” and absolutely no street food for them, because we would get terrible diarrhea, to be honest. Why is that so? My parents have been exposed to that. Russ Altman: They’ve grown up on it. Ami Bhatt: Yeah, they’ve grown up on it. Presumably their immune systems have gotten used to it, so why could they suddenly not eat these foods anymore? And I really do think part of it might be that their microbiomes had shifted over time. Russ Altman: Fantastic. This is The Future of Everything, I’m Russ Altman. More with guest Dr. Ami Bhatt about the microbiome and its significance for both health and disease, next on Sirius XM Insight 121. Welcome back to The Future of Everything, I’m Russ Altman. I’m speaking with Ami Bhatt about the microbiome. And in the last segment we had a great discussion about health and disease and immune system. People like to manipulate their microbiome and there’s been a lot of popular press about yogurts and probiotics. Is that all real? How should people think about the opportunities for manipulating or improving their bowel health by ingesting foods that modify it? Ami Bhatt: I think it’s natural for us to wanna improve our bowel health. I think almost every one of us has done this. By the time we’re an adult, we know that there are certain foods we don’t tolerate, certain foods that actually work out better for us. I think many people learn, for example, in their 20s and their 30s that they don’t tolerate lactose anymore, for example. Russ Altman: Right, so milk is out. Ami Bhatt: Milk is out. And probiotics are an interesting opportunity for us to try and change that microbiome. Russ Altman: Can you tell me what is the definition of a probiotic? Because I think there’s even confusion about that. It sounds great. Pro, biotic, I mean what could be wrong with it? Ami Bhatt: Yeah, it’s a fantastic thing, but, it is actually a moving target, also. So, the idea of a probiotic is it’s live microbial therapy. Right? It’s a compound, not a compound, but organisms that you can ingest or put on you if they’re skin probiotics. Russ Altman: Oh, so there are skin probiotics? Ami Bhatt: There are skin probiotics now, too. So you can ingest or put these things on you and that they will somehow improve your health. They can come in a variety of “flavors.” On one extreme, while fecal microbiota transplantation is not technically considered a probiotic, it is one of the most complex live microbial therapies we can administer. Russ Altman: Yeah, it’s a definitely cousin idea because you’re introducing bacteria on purpose to help. Ami Bhatt: Exactly. Most probiotics come in either pill form, so you can go to, often like the natural foods store and you’ll find an area where they have a bunch of bottles that are labeled with different complicated Latin and Greek names. Those are probiotics. Alternatively you can have things like foods that actually contain live bacteria or sometimes fungi. Russ Altman: On purpose. Ami Bhatt: On purpose. Turns out, this has actually been an important part of cooking for millennia. Bread, for example, is obviously fermented by yeast. In the classical way, it was not just fermented by yeast but also by bacteria that are present in the air and on the grains of wheat. Russ Altman: I believe that’s part of the sourdough magic is that it’s not just the yeast but a complex. My son teaches me about the complex bacteria required for high-quality sourdough. Ami Bhatt: Absolutely, so we consume bacteria in these ways. Of course, when we bake bread, the bacteria die but there are things like yogurt. Yogurt is made by actually culturing milk with bacteria, and we can buy live active culture food. Russ Altman: Now, will yogurt automatically come with bacteria or is it a special type of yogurt that would have bacteria? ’Cause I know that people often think, “I love my yogurt, it’s giving me good probiotics.” I don’t know if that’s true. Ami Bhatt: The majority of commercial yogurts that are available, the bacteria have been killed. So if you want to go to the store and buy a live active culture yogurt, meaning a yogurt that still has living organisms in it, you’ve gotta look for that. They usually say, “live active culture,” and if you turn the container around to the back, you can actually see the names of the organisms that are included. Russ Altman: The list of Latin names. Lactobacillus and things like that. Ami Bhatt: Exactly, exactly. Also if you make it at home, of course, you would also be live active culture. So there are other types of foods that are live active culture. Sauerkraut, kimchi, in fact, almost every culture has some sort of fermented food that’s an important part of their culture and their cuisine. Russ Altman: Yes, we’re overloading the word culture. Every culture has their favorite bacterial culture. Here’s the big question. Is there evidence for health benefit? Ami Bhatt: This is really where it gets kind of tricky. It gets tricky because there have been some big studies done on pills, like probiotic pills, used in the medical setting to do things, specific things, like, prevent antibiotic associated diarrhea. For example, many of our listeners have probably gone to the doctor, gotten an antibiotic for a bacterial infection, and have been told by either their doctor or friend, "Hey, eat some yogurt while you’re having this." In that concept there is, we know that antibiotic is killing a lot of the bacteria in your gut, maybe some of these bacteria from the yogurt will fill in the gaps, and prevent you from having the diarrhea that’s associated with having low diversity microbiomes. Russ Altman: And does that indeed happen? Ami Bhatt: You know, so, there are studies that say it does, there are studies that say it doesn’t. And I think really, the jury is out. It’s a really complicated topic. As a physician, I would say, there is really limited evidence for the utility of probiotics in the health setting, and in disease management. Russ Altman: So as a physician, it kind of falls into the, well, I don’t think it’s doing any harm, so I’m not gonna tell you not to do it, but I wouldn’t bet the farm that it’s gonna solve the problem. Ami Bhatt: Absolutely. And I would say in some extreme circumstances of health, like, you know, for example, there have been studies showing that, immunotherapy, which is a type of treatment that’s used to treat cancer patients, immunotherapy may depend on what the microbiome contains. We know that there may actually be risks associated with taking probiotics when you’re on an immunotherapy agent. Russ Altman: So that’s a big deal, because now we’re talking about risks. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Ami Bhatt: Yeah. Russ Altman: Sounds like it’s new. Ami Bhatt: It’s really new. I think none of these data are published yet. But at conferences, at scientific conferences, people have been talking about observations that cancer patients on immunotherapy who are taking probiotics, may actually respond worse than those who are not. Which really begs the question of, you know, could we potentially be doing harm by giving people probiotics. Russ Altman: So that’s something we’ll have to keep a close eye on. And I’m sure that oncologists will pay close attention, because they don’t wanna undermine their treatments by saying, “Oh, it can hurt,” when in fact, maybe it can hurt. So that’s an important one. Ami Bhatt: Absolutely. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with Dr. Ami Bhatt, about the microbiome. And I wanted to move to the issue of the microbiome over time and in aging, folks, which we all are. I think you made a reference to this, that it doesn’t stay the same. What do we know about the process of aging? And is there things that elderly people should be thinking about in terms of their microbiome? I was struck when you were talking about the immune system, you were very convincing that people have a good sense of how their bowel is doing when you ask them. I’m not sure people have a good sense of their immune system when you ask them in the same way, maybe they do. So it’s all confounded together in my mind as the aging process, the immune system, what do we know about that? And what should people be thinking about as they age? Ami Bhatt: Yeah, so it’s interesting, there’s been a lot of focus on the microbiome and the immune system in early life, lots of studies on those first three years. And what we think is that, for the adult period, people to tend to be pretty stable in both of those things until later on in life, and our group and others are actually starting to study, the microbiome of aging individuals. From animal studies, it’s actually been demonstrated in the African killifish fish model. Russ Altman: Killifish? Ami Bhatt: Killifish. Yeah. These are really cool, short lived fish. They’re actually the, I believe the shortest live vertebrate animals. Russ Altman: So what are we talking? Ami Bhatt: Months. Russ Altman: Months of life. Ami Bhatt: Months of life. Russ Altman: So they really have to go for it. Ami Bhatt: Yeah, they gotta go big, go big and then they have to go home. So, an interesting study was done, where they took poop from young fish, and then transplanted it into old fish. And they actually find that the old fish can swim faster when they have young poop in them. Russ Altman: Am so glad you’ve mentioned this, ’cause I’ve heard about these kind of studies, and also like old mice giving their poop to young mice, and vice versa. So yeah, so what’s going on there? Ami Bhatt: You know, it suggests that there is something within the gut microbiome of these young individuals that can actually alter the biology of these animals, older animals, either through their immune system. Russ Altman: They are swimming faster. Swimming faster. The older fish. So now we just have to figure out what would that mean for a human, and when do I ask for my young colleague’s, well, I don’t even wanna say it. How do we approach this issue? And do we think that there’s a real hope now for therapies? I mean, are people now thinking about a future, where in addition to the pills that you’re getting from your doctor, they’ll be interventions to try to spruce up your microbiome? Ami Bhatt: Yeah, I think that there is a great opportunity here. In part because we know that there is this association between the alteration of the microbiome and diminishment of the immune system. I think in the future, although there are no data to support this yet, that older individuals will get things like, microbial therapies or fiber cocktails that will help keep their microbiome healthy, and maybe prevent them from getting things like shingles, you know, a reactivation of a viral infection, maybe that’s related to our gut microbiome, who knows? Russ Altman: And you’ve made a really important point here, it’s not just introduction of the bacteria, but you need them to be happy, so to speak, and to live. And so you mentioned fiber, because that might be one of the substrates upon which these bacteria live, in order to stay in your bowel after they’ve been introduced. Ami Bhatt: Absolutely. We can’t just put them there, we’ve got to feed them as well. And so, since fiber is what a lot of these healthy microbes eat, then we’ve got to feed them. Russ Altman: So when we think about high fiber diets, part of the reason we’re recommending this to patients is not just for the bulk and to help them the musculature of their bowel, it’s also to have a good relationship with the underlying microbiome. Ami Bhatt: Absolutely. Russ Altman: Thank you for listening to The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Solomon. If you missed any of this episode, listen anytime on demand with the Sirius XM app. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Once the core American curriculum meant reading, writing and arithmetic, but Stanford professor Mehran Sahami says we might soon have to add a fourth skill to that list, “coding.” Sahami thinks deeply about such matters. He’s the leading force behind recent changes in Stanford’s computer science curriculum. He notes that it may not be surprising that more students are choosing to major in computer science than ever before, but what might turn heads is the changing face and intellectual landscape of the field. With concerted effort, more women and minorities, and even students from traditional liberal arts and sciences backgrounds, are venturing into computer science. Sahami says coding has become more than just videogames, social media and smartphone apps. The field is an intellectual endeavor taking on the biggest issues of our day. And in pursuit of tackling big issues, computer professionals also need to be aware of ethical issues that arise, such as the implications of data-driven decision making, respect for personal privacy, the long-term impacts of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, and the role of large platforms like Google, Facebook and Apple on free speech issues. Sahami says that computers and algorithms are now part of the fabric of everyday life and how the future plays out will depend upon realizing more cultural and gender diversity in computer science classrooms and encouraging multidisciplinary thinking throughout computer science. Join host Russ Altman and expert in computer science education Mehran Sahami for an inspiring journey through the computer science curriculum of tomorrow. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine. Connect With Us: Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything Website Connect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / Mastodon Connect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Russ Altman: Today, on The Future of Everything the future of Silicon Valley. Periodically, in human history every now and then there is an unusual mix of opportunity, capital, talent, technology in a geographical region that concentrates this and creates perhaps an unusual period of creativity, invention and sometimes great impact on a global scale. Far beyond, what you might expect from that local geography. I like to think about the Italian Art Renaissance in the 15th and 16th century, focused in Florence. So, removed from Rome, the seat of Italian power and the church power. The Medici family and others provided capital. There was a network of business connections there was a good supply of marble, and paint supplies. And, things were advancing, and then a few masters Giotto, da Vinci, Michelangelo emerged from this pool of kind of opportunity as masters. They integrated the lessons from the past, they added their own vision and there was this revolution in art that seemed to advance from static 2-D depictions, mostly of bible scenes to dynamic three-dimensional art that many people, even today are captivated by. Books have been written about Florence. Why then? Why there? We’re not gonna do that today. But I love that it is related to the Bubonic plague. And the fact that one-third of European people died from this terrible disease. But that took pressure off the farmers who could then produce extra food. Yadda yadda yadda. Now, we have the growth of Silicon Valley. Now, I don’t wanna push this too hard. This was not an art, and it’s not clearly about art, or about cultural things. But there was digital technologies and there’s a somewhat parallel story. Removed from the seats of power in Washington D.C and New York. The power and influence. There was this West Coast place which actually even 50 years ago was mostly fruit farms. But companies arose, Hewlett Packard, Intel. There was this University, Stanford University. Disclaimer: I’m an employee of Stanford University that provided a growing technological work force in both engineering and science. These masters weren’t artists — far from it. Although, well we could discuss that. But they were industrialists. You had Hewlett and Packard, you had the Gordon Moore, and the Intel founders. Steve Jobs and then of course Jerry Yang from Yahoo!, Sergey Brin, Larry Page. And recently now we know about the founders of Facebook, Uber, Twitter, etc. A remarkable concentration of talent, opportunity, technology. Creating a singularity, you could argue that in this area that was just a fruit farming area. So, Silicon Valley perhaps has helped usher in an era of AI, machine learning and the gig economy. Now, as I said I don’t want to oversell this analogy and let’s also remember what happened to Florence. It did not maintain its preeminence in art. Wars and important changing trade patterns reduced the available capital, reduced it as the center of the world in many ways. The reformation changed the religious dynamics. The Catholic church had various reactions against humanism. The pendulum and perhaps the luck of Florence ran out. And Florence became once again a local geographic region. It’s great to visit, it’s great to eat there but it is not really particularly, the center of anything right now. What does the future hold for Silicon Valley? John Markoff is a fellow, former fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences. He’s a current fellow and research affiliate at the Human-centered Artificial Intelligence Institute at Stanford. He has been a science writer at the New York Times for more than 20, 30 years. He’s covered the general computer industry, Silicon Valley in particular during this time that I just described of great innovation and disruption both in good and bad ways. John, you have written that Silicon Valley may be over optimistic, both at the rate of expected future progress, and also the benefits that that progress will bring to society. Perhaps it’s peddling some things. How do you see this manifesting? And is it a byproduct of hyperbolic marketing, purely? Or does it indicate potentially the beginning of the end for this period of Silicon Valley flourishing innovation. John Markoff: Boy, I love your analogy to Florence. Because I think about that a lot and I think about it particularly in the context of fragility. How fragile is the Valley. Nothing lasts forever. Clearly the arc of technological innovation in the last couple of centuries has been from east to west. There’s always the implication that it may continue to go west perhaps to China. You know, the question of where Silicon Valley came from is a really interesting one as well — you brought that up — what’s new, I mean I always thought there’s a lot of serendipity. I mean Shockley came here — Russ Altman: Right. John Markoff: — famously because his mother was here. What if his mother had been in Iowa? Russ Altman: Exactly. John Markoff: And then there’s this wonderful thing that David Brock who’s the staff historian at Computer History Museum recently discovered, Shockley didn’t come here to build the transistor. He created a transistor company, but when he left Bell labs in the early 50s he was super — there was an automation phase. It’s kind of an interesting thing considering where we are today. Russ Altman: Yes, yes. John Markoff: An automation fad, and he came here to build a robot. He got money from Beckman, who was his investor. And it devolved down, first, into a company whose first intent was to build a company to build a robot eye. Because he wanted to build an automated factory. So, Silicon Valley’s roots are actually in robotics and AI. Which I think is not known, largely. Russ Altman: No, that is not generally appreciated. John Markoff: And it’s just a wonderful sort of — it devolved down into transistor company and then of course the traders left and they went to Fairchild. Russ Altman: Right, right. John Markoff: And all of that happened. But then — so, I guess you know when I was a reporter in 2006 I was spending a lot of time in Europe. And it looked like innovation in mobile software was moving to Europe. Nokia, and Sion were there. Russ Altman: Yes. John Markoff: And I had this sense, that the ball was moving overseas in that direction. And then the iPhone happened. In 2007, the mobile platform came to the Valley. Russ Altman: You’re right, we all had Nokia phones in 2005, 2006. John Markoff: At some point. That’s right. Russ Altman: And it was like where the heck is Nokia. Why don’t I see signs on it when I drive down 101. John Markoff: Yeah. Absolutely. Russ Altman: It was not a thing from Silicon Valley. John Markoff: So, the way I think about it, there are a couple things. It’s really interesting to me to think about where the next IT platform might come from. Will it come from Silicon Valley? It’s not guaranteed. I mean, there’s lots of speculation it might be augmented reality, it might be speech. There clearly will be something after, if you walk down the street in San Francisco half the population is looking at the palm of their hand. Russ Altman: Yes. John Markoff: That can’t be the end of user interface. There has to be something after that. So what’ll it be? John Markoff: The sooner — the other thing I have to say is the visionaries are almost always wrong. It’ll surprise us. It’ll come out of left field. It might come from China. Russ Altman: So what about this idea, where does it, where does this idea come from that the marketing from Silicon Valley in terms of the pace of progress has been a little bit misleading and perhaps the data doesn’t support — John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: The looking back at how fast things have been and how fast they’re going to be. John Markoff: I can’t tell you in my career how many press releases I’ve gotten that have the word “revolution” in them. Russ Altman: Yeah. John Markoff: And in fact I think the reality of Silicon Valley is there have been a couple of big ideas. Personal computing, networks, ubiquitous computing, and then there’s been a lot of great engineering. This is an engineering center. But big ideas that actually break paradigms only come along, every once in a while. We had a free ride for 50 years on Moore’s law. What I would argue is because not only did things get exponentially faster, but cost fell exponentially as well. And that drove the creation of new markets at regular intervals. It was kind of a free ride. Russ Altman: Very interesting. John Markoff: Computing, went through these different stages, mobile phones in a sense happened because of cost and other related factors. Not because of brilliant innovation often. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with John Markoff about innovation in the last couple of decades. How much of it, I guess, how much of it was designed and deserves credit, so let’s — and, how much of it was free luck and a free ride. So let’s dig a little bit deeper. So Moore’s law, in what sense — First of all for those who are not familiar Moore’s law is the general idea that computing every 18 months, computing power roughly doubles. In a remarkable turn of events for the last 20 or 30 years, that actually has been true. There is a profound concern now that engineers will not be able to maintain that. And that that will lead to putting the brakes on a lot of things. I guess what you mean by we’ve, they’ve been lucky and been getting a free ride is that they didn’t have to worry about being particularly clever in their software or even in their hardware because they could count on Moore’s law giving them vastly greater computer power very soon. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: But what is the world like when that flattens out? John Markoff: Well — Russ Altman: Is that the concern? John Markoff: Yeah. That’s the concern, so basically the cost of Silicon stopped falling at an exponential rate around 2015 because we’d hit that wall we all knew was coming. And that’s not to say it’s over; there may be some way around or some new acceleration. But for the moment things have slowed down dramatically. So we’re in this new era. And I had this wonderful moment about two and half years ago it was actually Engineering School Industrial Partners Program here. Everybody was wringing their hands about how we’d hit the wall. I ran into this Harvard computer architect and he was just wild with enthusiasm. Because he said “Now it’s our turn.” Russ Altman: Interesting. John Markoff: You’ll make, and that’s in fact what we’ve seen. What we’ve seen is new architectural designs most of them in terms of chips that do AI kinds of algorithms better but that’s where the innovation has been. So, that is — we’re not saying that innovation is over but it’s not in the lock step acceleration model of Moore’s law. It’s based on human ingenuity. Russ Altman: And this could be one of the changes that opens up the world and allows other places, other institutional structures to kind of take over in the innovation leadership. John Markoff: Absolutely, for example lets hypothetically, everything in AI is now about big data. So that argues that those with most data win. Google, Amazon, Apple, China. Russ Altman: Yes. John Markoff: As in a nation-state. But what if there is an algorithmic that break through that works off of small data. That changes the entire playing field. Russ Altman: Right. John Markoff: So it could — there’s interesting stuff happening in AI approaches that may not be based on the current state of the art neuro-nets and deep learning. Russ Altman: Fantastic. So okay, so you’ve written a lot about, you know I love — I love that you’re a journalist. I should say as a disclaimer to anybody listening I am not a journalist. My mother sometimes calls, My mother is only person I know, for sure listens to this show. Hi mom, I know you’re listening. She’ll call me every now again and said “You let that guy off the hook. You’re a bad journalist.” And I had to say mom, I’m an enthusiast. I’m not a journalist. But as a journalist, I love you’re trained to look at situations and kinda cut the B.S. from what’s really happening. And you’ve looked for example at AI and jobs. What’s your impression, there are a lot technologists saying Well, don’t worry about this, we’re gonna everybody will adapt. And they’re forging ahead. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: When you look at it from your journalistic trained eye, what do you see as the reality? John Markoff: Okay. Couple of things. I had to come around to that view. I was part of that, in fact I helped create that current sort of period of anxiety that we’re in about jobs and technology. I began writing about the impact of AI and white collar around 2010, 2011. And I was in that camp. Then I had an important sort of interaction with Danny Kahneman, who is the behavioral economist. Russ Altman: Very famous. John Markoff: I was on this rant about how automation would come to China and It would lead to disruption because of the loss of jobs. And he stopped me and he said you don’t get it. He said, in China they’ll be lucky if the robots come just in time. And I said what do you mean? He walked me through the demography of modern China. I began looking around the world. And all of sudden I realized that the most important things happening in the world today are demography not technology. Russ Altman: Ah. John Markoff: All over the world except for Africa and the Middle East, the world is aging at a rapid rate. And he’s really right. The issue is care and dependency. So I changed the question I asked as a journalist. I used to ask when will there be self driving cars? Not anymore. I ask when will there be an robot that can safely give a shower to an aging human? And nobody has a good answer. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with John Markoff who just changed the question. This is great. So, demography is driving technology is kinda the core concept that you just alluded to. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: Does that change our level of optimism? Should we now think, well, self-driving cars and AI for care of elderly? I think what you implied is not only should we be rooting for that we need for it to come soon or we for example might not have the work force to — John Markoff: That’s right Russ Altman: — to take care of our parents and ourselves in the next 20 to 30 years. John Markoff: Absolutely. I mean Rod Brooks, who’s a pioneering roboticist, says with a bit of humor, that self-driving cars will be the first elder care robots. Which actually may be true. And if you think about that, if self-driving cars did show up, they could give people who are sort of bound to home new mobility. And that would be a very great thing. Russ Altman: I Just had a very good friend say that their parents are driving and they don’t think they’re safe, and how people all over, certainly all over the country and probably all over the world, are trying to decide how do you have these tough conversations about many issues — John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: — where there is a very important and difficult loss of autonomy associated with aging. You want to obviously support the elderly in a caring, loving way. But, they can be a danger to themselves and to others. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: And this is not a solved problem. And its only getting worse. John Markoff: The world is gonna look so different in a half century. Already, more people in the world as a whole are older than 65 , than under five. By the middle of the century the number of people over 80 globally will double and will go up seven fold by the end of the century. That’s the most important factor in the world. Russ Altman: So as you look at this, do you now worry so now I’m flipping my perspective a little bit. Do you worry that with this challenge to Moore’s law and the difficulty in getting that next doubling every 18 months that this is happening at kind of a perfect storm of just when we need Moore’s law the most, because were not, we do not have robots to help take care of my parents. John Markoff: Exactly. Russ Altman: Or to drive them around. I need them to exist soon. And now at the same time were having some technological resets. Is this a potential crisis? John Markoff: Well, I think that the — there is a crisis, I think, in elder care. We do have to think about that as a society. The other question about markets and sort of the work force. The work force is not gonna change as fast as some people worry because of this slowing down. How many job categories, census job categories, have gone away in the last three decades? One. Elevator operators. The kind of rapid change. In 1995 when Jeremy Rifkin wrote the End of Work, the American economy grew more than it ever had grown in history in the next decade. Russ Altman: Right. John Markoff: The whole thing about jobs going away here we are in a full employment economy. We’ve had a half century of the micro-processor and a decade of deep learning. So something else is going on. It’s a more, and I think what the deal is, it’s very easy to point to jobs that might go away. It’s much more difficult to look at jobs that might be created. We have a very difficult time understanding what the future is gonna look like. Russ Altman: I hate to be Mr. Renaissance, but I have spent time in Florence. And in fact the thing I was saying about the Bubonic plague. The farmers said we’re in big trouble now because there’s nobody to eat our food but they did not suffer because this middle class emerged of merchants, and people who created jobs and industries and guilds that didn’t even exist a hundred years before. There was plenty of economic churn to support these folks. It’s an exactly the example that you’re referring to. Actually amazingly good things in many ways happened when you had some free time. So I’ve often wondered is the AI, robotic revolution if it ever happens. Is that actually gonna free up people to do things that we’ve had on our to-do list for a long time, that really society needs. Fantastic. We should now talk about the work force. You referred to that a little bit. What is the challenge in training young people for the future that is hard to predict? John Markoff: Boy, let’s see if there are good examples. You know, the nature of education has changing in interesting ways. Sebastian Thrun and others at Stanford predicted that were gonna have this new kind of education and universities would go away. Universities don’t appear— Russ Altman: The MOOC, the massive — John Markoff: That’s right, online classroom. And MOOCs exist now, and universities are still thriving. The visionaries are always wrong. Russ Altman: We don’t know. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, more with John Markoff about the future of technology and computing, next on SiriusXM insight 121. Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, I’m speaking with John Markoff, about technology, history of technology and computation and the future of technology and computation. John, you’re currently working on a biography about Stewart Brands, who was associated with the he was a Stanford graduate student and he’s associated with the Whole Earth Catalog. I think you believe this to be a critical, kind of historical moment in time. So tell us about the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brands, and why we should care. John Markoff: Yeah, okay. First of all, Stewart was a Stanford student. He studied biology here in the 1950’s. He’s associated with a couple of very important events, that were instrumental in creating what I think of as a California perspective or world view, ideology. One of them was the Whole Earth Catalog. Before that there was something called the Trips Festival. Which was the most visible and most successful of these things that Ken Kesey organized called the acid tests. Russ Altman: Ken Kesey was a famous LSD guy. John Markoff: He participated in these experiments in Menlo park. They were financed by the CIA. Then the drug kinda leaked out into the surrounding community. And people like Stewart began experimenting with it. Some formally, and some recreationally. My generation experienced LSD as a recreational drug. But it was part of a cultural shift. And the Trips Festival which happened in January of 1966 in San Francisco at the Longshoremen’s Hall. It was organized by Stewart was important because it was the moment that the 10,000 hippies in the Bay area realized that there were 10,000 hippies. It created a community. There was a direct line to Haight-Ashbury and to the counter culture. It also led directly — Russ Altman: Into the summer of 1968. John Markoff: Summer of love, that’s right. All of that grew out of that moment, in a very direct sense. They hired to help organize it, this guy who had been a publicist for the Mime Troupe by the name of Bill Graham. Russ Altman: Pretty famous guy. John Markoff: He became famous, Bill Graham at that moment realized that there was money in music and the day after the Trips Festival he went out and leased the Filmore. So it led also directly to the San Francisco music scene. So it was the spark. So dial the clock forward a couple of years— Russ Altman: What, just one quick question. What did they do at the Trips Festival? Was it a discussion, was it music? John Markoff: It was all — it was several things. Stewart showed this multi-media slide show he’d produced called “America Needs Indians.” Which was important in the creation of the American environmental movement of the 1970’s. He showed that for the last time. But then a couple of rock groups like Big Brother before Janice, the Grateful Dead, not the Warlocks, let’s see who else played — three different rock groups played. And it was really the sort of the moment that you know the rock, the San Francisco rock concerts — Russ Altman: By any chance was it Jefferson Airplane? John Markoff: No, Jefferson Airplane wasn’t there they played before at the Family Dog — Russ Altman: Okay they were a favorite of mine. John Markoff: Favorite of mine too. As a matter of fact, I used them to title a book that I wrote. Yeah, so all that sort of happened the culture sort of emerged. But by that time, Stewart who was the bridge between the beat culture, which had been in North Beach in the 50’s and early 60’s and hippe culture. He was done with that. He moved down the peninsula he came down here to help organize an education conference festival that never really happened. And after that failure, this is sort of Silicon Valley cultural thing about fail fast. He had a mentor his name was Dick Raymond, who had something called the Portola Institute was just up the road here in Menlo park and Stewart got this idea, and it was largely because his friends were going off to communes. That he would create a catalog, perhaps a little bit like the Sears robot catalog. Russ Altman: Which was a dominant thing in the 60’s and 70’s. John Markoff: That’s right there was no Google. Russ Altman: I remember spending hours in the Sears catalog. John Markoff: That’s right. And there was no Google. How could you find interesting things? So he came up with this notion of a catalog of tools. And his idea was a truck store, that he would drive around to the communes. And he would sell them stuff they need. Well, he did that about two times and then he realized that communes had no money. So that wasn’t gonna work. So he pivoted, in a classic kind of Silicon Valley way Russ Altman: This is great. John Markoff: And he created this catalog that went from 1,000 copies in the fall of 1968, to winning the national book award in 1972. It really became the bible of my generation. And I can’t tell you how many people I’ve run into, that said you know I saw something in the catalog, and my life took a right hand turn, or a left hand turn. That it really changed people’s lives. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman. I’m speaking with John Markoff about the Whole Earth Catalog. Okay so tell us more. How did it impact the world? Does it connect at all to the Silicon Valley that then emerged? John Markoff: Okay, it’s super complicated. And I’m now writing Stewart’s biography, I’m trying to — Russ Altman: Take your time because we have at least four minutes. John Markoff: So in 1962, Stewart’s had just gotten out of the army and he was visiting the computer center at Stanford. And he saw something that really stuck with him. He saw these two kids sitting in front of a graphical computer display. Remember they didn’t exist at that point. Russ Altman: This is very experimental. John Markoff: Having what he thought of as an out of body experience and what they were doing is they were playing a game called Space War. Which was the first video game. That had been invented by at MIT and had been imported to Stanford and I would argue that that was the first inkling of a something called “cyber space.” Stewart saw it first. And he kept that in the back of his mind. In 1972 he shut down the Whole Earth Catalog, and he was sort of becoming a journalist. He wrote this really important article for Rolling Stone which dealt with the two laboratories on both sides of Stanford campus. One was the Stanford Artificial Intelligence laboratory and the other was Xerox Park, which had just opened. And that was the first window, that people like me had that there was this thing called the internet coming and there was this thing called personal computing coming. Stewart saw it first. And he alerted the world to it. So he was sort of playing the role of a journalist at that point. But you sort of dial the world even farther forward and he set up this thing called The Well in 1985 in Sausalito, and there too, it’s complicated. Because there was this explosion of what do you call it sort of digital utopianism. And he was part of that digital utopian movement. Russ Altman: So he bought in. John Markoff: Absolutely. Russ Altman: So he moved from the counter culture, beats, hippies he came literally south 20 miles started seeing computers, starting thinking about the future and that is a direct connection then. And does that spirit? Maybe you’ve written this, and I apologize. I’ve read that the Whole Earth Catalog embodied a spirit that is still traceable to current Silicon Valley utopianism. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: Is that an overstatement? John Markoff: It is a debated statement. There are two recent books this is where Stewart becomes kinda Rashomon. Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind” — so there’s a Zeitgeist shift that’s happened. In 2016 Silicon Valley went from being able to do no wrong, to being able to do no right. Russ Altman: It was an amazing turnaround. John Markoff: Just turned. And the two books that best sort of capture this are Foer’s book. And he goes right back to Stewart and sort of — Stewart is patient zero. I think he gets it wrong. Russ Altman: Okay that might’ve been what I — John Markoff: And then there’s Johnathan Taplan’s book. It’s called “Move Fast and Break Things.” Very similar book, but he has a more sophisticated understanding of what happened. He goes back to the digital utopians and Stewart was one of them. But there was a second wave and those are the digital libertarians. And it went from utopianism to libertarianism and I think that’s the sort of arch. Stewart started as sort of sympathetic with Ayn Rand but he ended up in the middle of the 1970’s working in Jerry Brown’s administration — first administration. And he came away with this sense of the value of good government. So it’s just wrong to think of Stewart as a complete libertarian. Russ Altman: I see. John Markoff: That’s not what he is. Russ Altman: So there’s another trail that says were gonna build this utopia. And you guys are preventing us from doing it. We are now libertarians because we want to be able to just build it. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: He wasn’t necessarily part of that strand — John Markoff: No. Russ Altman: But responsible, maybe, I don’t wanna overstate it, responsible use of — what would be the word — stewardship of this technology in an advancing — John Markoff: He was very optimistic but Stewart was always someone who saw nuance and paradox. He is seen as the person who said information wants to be free. That’s not what he said. At the first hackers conference — Russ Altman: Aha. John Markoff: What he said was, information wants to be free and information wants to be very expensive. That’s Stewart. Understanding the nuance — Russ Altman: That’s interesting because that information wants to be free you can trace directly to statements of the Google founders and the Facebook founders. That’s one of their mantras. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: And as we know, they have not always been led well by that mantra. And they’ve gotten themselves into very sticky, thorny situations because you need to moderate that with other considerations. John Markoff: And Stewart is an optimist. He was particularly an optimist about technology having an important role and impact on the world. There’s this arc — the first sentence of Whole Earth Catalogs was “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it.” Russ Altman: Wow. John Markoff: So 20 years ago with Danny Hillis, who’s this computer scientist, he set up this organization called the Long Now foundation to build a clock. A mechanical clock to run for 10,000 years as a demonstration of long-term thinking. It’s almost finished. Jeff Bezos picked up the tab, it exists. It’s in Texas. Russ Altman: So were building it. Is it a pendulum? John Markoff: It is not a pendulum — is it a pendulum? Let me think. Is it a pendulum? Yes. It’s a pendulum. Russ Altman: It’s a physical device. It’s not like an atomic clock. We’re not counting cesium vibrations. John Markoff: No, it will run from air flow and being wound by people for millennia. We hope. But Stewart now has got this de-extinction group called Revive and Restore. Which is sort of him trying to sort of deliver on that original vision of we are as gods. This notion of sort of humans and technology. And they’re trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. Or more importantly — Russ Altman: These are like the seed banks and the DNA banking so that we can track species that are either extinct or going extinct. John Markoff: Or modifying species like Coral to make them more resilient in endangered niches in the environment. Russ Altman: It’ll be a great book. It’s coming out I’m sure as soon as you can finish it. Thank you for listening to The Future of Everything. I’m Russ Altman, if you missed any of this episode listen any time on demand with the SiriusXM app. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Computers are everywhere and humans are engaging with them in nearly everything they do. Knowing this, the question becomes: How do we design a world around us so that technology makes life better, not worse? James Landay, an expert in human-computer interaction, says the key to thoughtfully integrating humans with digital technology is to put people first. This perspective draws on a philosophy known as human-centered or user-centered design. Within this approach, the first priority is to understand the problem vexing a particular population by observing, interviewing, and working with that population. Only once the problem is clear does the development of a solution begin. Typically, engineers and technologists have done the opposite. They’ve worked to develop the coolest technology they can think of, and then once it’s ready look around for a way to use it. With human needs at the forefront, Landay’s research focuses on finding ways to use artificial intelligence technology to augment human performance. His current projects range from leveraging technology to encourage positive behavior change, to enabling kids to stay engaged in their education, to helping professionals stay healthy while feeling more connected to their co-workers and workplace. Tune in to this episode of The Future of Everything to hear more about how Landay draws on user-centered design to develop technology that supports human needs. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Biomedical data scientist Sylvia Plevritis is an expert in computational modeling of cancer risk and treatment options hidden in the remarkable quantity of data available today. Rarely is a tumor made up of a single mutation, she says, but more commonly of a mix of different mutations. Such heterogenous tumors may require complex combinations of drugs to produce the most effective treatments. That’s where computers can help. Using mathematical simulations, Plevritis is helping patients and their doctors understand the genetic makeup of a given cancer for the purpose of identifying drug combinations that stand a better chance of success. Some of the models Plevritis works with can be run in an hour or less and yet return invaluable guidance that can save a patient’s life. Plevritis says these computational approaches can even help those without cancer understand their inherent genetic risks to assess whether and when additional screening or risk-reducing interventions are warranted. Join host Russ Altman and biomedical data scientist Sylvia Plevritis as they dive into the promising intersection of computers and cancer care. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Political scientist Jeremy Weinstein has worked at both the White House and the United Nations. In both jobs, he encountered the ethical and policy concerns that new technologies can present to policymakers. As one example, he points to the fierce debate between Apple and national security experts over end-to-end encryption and the challenges investigators faced in accessing data on the iPhones of the perpetrators of a terrorist attack in San Bernardino in 2015. He wants universities, like Stanford, to educate a new breed of engineer that he refers to as a “civic-minded technologist.” These engineers would consider ways in which technological advances could serve the public good, while also thinking critically about the impacts of new technologies on society. In this spirit, Weinstein and two Stanford colleagues, Rob Reich and Mehran Sahami, have begun teaching a new course on the ethics and policy of technology to a large number of undergraduate CS majors. He says it’s critical that these nascent technologists learn from the start to think about the larger implications of their work – even before they write a single line of code. This is because code itself is not value neutral, and technologists must be able to recognize what values are being encoded in the programs they write as well as the competing values that might be traded off. This kind of preparation, he says, will help us as a society to more effectively realize the benefits and minimize the potential harms inherent in new technologies. In his own research, Weinstein is applying his unique perspective to challenges of global poverty and human migration, where, he says, advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are changing our understanding of two of society’s fundamental problems. Join host Russ Altman and political scientist Jeremy Weinstein for an in-depth look at the ethical and political implications of technology. You can listen to The Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, Spotify, Stitcher or via Stanford Engineering Magazine. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook