The Future of Everything

One of the tradeoffs of modern medicine is that technology that allows physicians to save more lives also drives them closer than ever to the frontlines so they can administer care as quickly as possible. They do so at great personal risk, says Stanford pediatrician Paul Wise. Wise began his career caring for children during Guatemala’s brutal decades-long civil war and recently returned from service during the siege of Mosul, which forced out ISIS but took a tremendous toll on Iraq’s second-largest city. His latest project is using custom apps to gather malnutrition data in rural Guatemala to bring care to the most-needy kids and to drive policy changes at the national level within that nation's Ministry of Health. In the Future of Everything radio show, Wise and host Russ Altman explore the challenges of wartime pediatrics. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

While billions scroll their merry ways through Facebook and Twitter each day, behind the scenes are legions of reviewers scanning photos and video to prevent graphic content from making the newsfeeds of unsuspecting users. Elsewhere, the faceless armies of the gig economy are making movies, building homes, driving Uber and working piecemeal to caption innumerable images for people too busy to do it for themselves. Welcome to the future of crowdsourcing. While the collective actions of those on the frontlines of crowdsourcing save millions of others from drudgery and from psychological trauma, the ascension of automation is raising questions that human society has never had to deal with before. These are the “wicked problems” — questions in which success cannot be determined with certainty or where multiple, mutually exclusive goals must be delicately balanced to create an optimal outcome. These are questions that Stanford's Michael Bernstein, an assistant professor of computer science and an expert on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), grapples with on a daily basis. What is the optimal organizational structure for such crowdsourcing communities? What are the ethical implications of the gig economy? And, who are the right people to answer these questions? On The Future of Everything radio show, host Russ Altman and Bernstein discuss those question and explore what our increasingly automated future will look like. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Heart attacks, burns, strokes, disease and just plain-old aging can devastate human tissues. But, emboldened by new understandings about the building blocks of life, engineers are applying their unique skill sets to creating replacement parts for the body. It sounds like magic, says host and bioengineer Russ Altman, but it’s anything but. From synthetic mortars holding the biobricks of life together to new heart muscle, brain matter and skin tissue, bioengineering is on the precipice of a new age. In this episode of The Future of Everything podcast and radio show, Altman and Sarah Heilshorn, associate professor of materials science, discuss the technical and ethical challenges of engineering new human tissues. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

As the digital world grows, the sheer amount of video and audio in our lives has become overwhelming. It is easy to shoot and record, but few have the patience to endure the tedium of editing all that content into cogent stories. But, says Maneesh Agrawala, Forest Baskett professor of computer science, all that is about to change. Agrawala is director of the Brown Center for Media Innovation at Stanford and says that advances in software and in artificial intelligence are making the editing of sound and images more like editing words with a word processor. Soon, the drudgery of the rough cut will be relegated to the past, empowering the storytellers to tell more, and better, stories. In this episode of The Future of Everything radio show and podcast, Russ Altman and Agrawala talk about the coming age of multimedia editing. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

Manu Prakash is a bioengineer, a physicist and an inventor, who has developed a $1.50 foldable microscope and the 20-cent “paperfuge” that are democratizing biosciences in parts of the world where resources are scarce and electricity is nonexistent. Prakash’s passion flows from his deep love and understanding for how physics operates in the microscopic realm, in which bacteria, parasites and viruses thrive. In this episode of The Future of Everything, he joins fellow bioengineer Russ Altman for an expansive discussion of the passions and the payoffs of the physics of our biological world from how certain biological systems self-assemble to the way inanimate droplets of water on a glass slide communicate with one another. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

For years, cancer treatment was confined to three flawed strategies. You could cut it out with a scalpel, you could burn it out with radiation, or you could kill it with chemicals. “Today, we are amid a renaissance in cancer treatment,” says Stanford bioengineer Jennifer Cochran. “We are creating designer proteins and using them to deliver drugs or to harness the immune system to help stop this killer dead in its tracks.” On this episode of The Future of Everything radio show, Cochran and host, fellow bioengineer Russ Altman, explore the very latest in the science of cancer treatment. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

David Relman, infectious disease expert, discusses his studies of the mouths of dolphins, revealing unknown bacteria. The discussion covers topics like biosecurity, microceuticals, and DIY fecal transplants.

As a founding member and former chair of the Department of Bioengineering, possibly no one has enjoyed a better purview on the recent remarkable advances in biotechnology than Stanford's Russ Altman. From genome editing to synthetic biology to cloning, the ethical challenges of the field are almost as great as the therapeutic upsides, and advances often outpace our ability to contend with the ethical aftermath. Listen in as host Russ Altman and policy expert and bioengineer Megan Palmer, of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford, discuss the challenges that arise when biotechnology is used to solve one problem, but creates others in the process. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

The vast distances and extreme conditions of outer space make the prospects for remote control of exploratory vehicles extremely challenging, if not impossible. Stanford professor of aeronautics and astronautics, Marco Pavone, says the solution is to apply what we’ve learned about autonomous vehicles here on Earth to the mysterious reaches of space. From vehicles that hop to swarms of robots to Gecko-inspired grippers, Pavone and host Russ Altman explore how autonomy is shaping the future of space exploration. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook

On the eve of the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, medical doctor and bioengineer Russ Altman and Stanford anesthesiologist Audrey Shafer reflect on the enduring relevance of the book many call the first science fiction novel. From artificial intelligence to stem cells, climate change to organ transplantation, Frankenstein’s monster seems more relevant than ever before as a mirror on the moral and ethical implications of modern science and its creations. Learn more on this episode of the Future of Everything radio show. Connect With Us:Episode Transcripts >>> The Future of Everything WebsiteConnect with Russ >>> Threads / Bluesky / MastodonConnect with School of Engineering >>>Twitter/X / Instagram / LinkedIn / Facebook