AI & The Future of Humanity: Artificial Intelligence, Technology, VR, Algorithm, Automation, ChatBPT, Robotics, Augmented Reality, Big Data, IoT, Social Media, CGI, Generative-AI, Innovation, Nanotechnology, Science, Quantum Computing: The Creative Process Interviews

"So everyone should probably throw their smartphones in a river, myself included. And I think that it is hard. There's never going to be a version where you get the right answer, and suddenly your life falls into place, and everything's perfect. And that's not what it's supposed to be for anyway. And I think there is a tendency in self-care circles that once we solve our demons and figure out our path in life, we are in touch with the vibes of the universe. Like suddenly, we're going to be wealthy and healthy and happy and have the perfect marriage. And I think the questions of philosophical inquiry are about how to live a good life, but that's not the same thing as assuming, as so much of contemporary wellness culture assumes, that a normatively successful life will come to us by virtue of doing the right things."Tara Isabella Burton is the author of the novels Social Creature, The World Cannot Give, and Here in Avalon, as well as the nonfiction books Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is currently working on a history of magic and modernity, to be published by Convergent in late 2025. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic,  Granta, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications.www.taraisabellaburton.comwww.simonandschuster.com/books/Here-in-Avalon/Tara-Isabella-Burton/9781982170097?fbclid=IwAR30lnvlXMrDJtCq_568jUM3hvzr6yUz_GUUZSkbR2RarreOF6PMcvhabBgwww.amazon.com/dp/B07W56MQLJ/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=strange+rites+tara+isabella+burton&qid=1565365017&s=gateway&sr=8-1-fkmr0www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How can we reimagine a world without plastic? How can we push governments and companies to admit what they know about the health impacts of plastics and change public policy?Kathleen Rogers is the President of EARTHDAY.ORG. Under her leadership, it has grown into a global year-round policy and activist organization with an international staff. She has been at the vanguard of developing campaigns and programs focused on diversifying the environmental movement, highlighted by Campaign for Communities and Billion Acts of Green. Prior to her work at EARTHDAY.ORG, Kathleen held senior positions with the National Audubon Society, the Environmental Law Institute, and two U.S. Olympic Organizing Committees. She’s a graduate of the University of California at Davis School of Law, where she served as editor-in-chief of the law review and clerked in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. EARTHDAY.ORG’s 2024 theme, Planet vs. Plastics, calls to advocate for widespread awareness of the health risks of plastics, rapidly phase out all single-use plastics, urgently push for a strong UN Treaty on Plastic Pollution, and demand to end fast fashion. Let's build a plastic-free planet for generations to come."The world recognizes that plastics have imperiled our future. Many environmentalists, myself included, view plastics as on par with, if not worse than, climate change because we do see a little light at the end of the tunnel on climate change. Babies vs. Plastics is a collection of studies, and we particularly focused on children and babies because their bodies and brains are more impacted than adults by the 30, 000 chemicals that assault us every day.We have histories littered with dozens of stories and court cases of malfeasance where companies knew for years before we, the public, did about the impacts. Climate change is a perfect example because we know Exxon scientists knew in 1957 that burning fossil fuels was creating climate change and that eventually, the temperature of the planet would heat up, and they hid it from us for 50-plus years. And more and more reports are coming out every day about what companies and some governments know. Tobacco companies knew tobacco caused cancer for decades before our scientists did. And so we have the same problem with plastics.”Planet vs. Plastics www.earthday.org Sign The Global Plastic Treaty Petition https://action.earthday.org/global-plastics-treaty Toolkits: https://www.earthday.org/our-toolkits NDC Guide for Climate Education https://www.earthday.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/NDC-GUIDE-Final.pdfwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastPhotos courtesy of EARTHDAY.ORG

"There will come a time when AI will have consumed and devoured all the works of all the great filmmakers. And you'll be able to say, I want you to cut this scene as if it was in an Antonioni film. Or I want you to cut this scene as if it was in a Sam Peckinpah film. And it will do the work of the edit. So the finishing touches will probably always be human, but the amount of creative work that's going to be able to be offloaded to AI is something that we don't fully comprehend yet."Alan Poul is an Emmy, Golden Globe, DGA, and Peabody Award-winning producer and director of film and television. He is Executive Producer and Director on the Max Original drama series Tokyo Vice, written by Tony Award-winning playwright J.T. Rogers and starring Ansel Elgort and Ken Watanabe, as an American journalist in Japan and his police detective mentor. Poul is perhaps best known for producing all five seasons of HBO's Six Feet Under, all four of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City miniseries, My So-Called Life, The Newsroom, Swingtown, and The Eddy, which he developed with director Damien Chazelle. His feature film producing credits include Paul Schrader's Mishima and Light of Day, and Ridley Scott's Black Rain.https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0693561 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2887954/www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

“With AI, I do think it is our societal responsibility to be aware of how it can be used to harm animals. For instance, there's the worry that the same types of ways that AI might help, for instance, protect against poachers, that same technology can also be used to find the animals to poach or to damage wildlife, not only protect wildlife. So there's that concern. There's a concern about factory farming and how animals are already wholly disregarded in that process. And AI could even further automate that process to where there's no consideration of the animals at all, even worse than what goes on today. At the same time, AI can be and already is starting to be used for things like doing way better than what we're able to do in terms of determining how well a drug might behave or how a chemical might react by way of looking at all of the data together that exists and drawing a conclusion way better than a human being can do. There are ways that AI is already being used to reduce how animals are used in the laboratory setting. There's a lot of research going on right now about deciphering what animals are saying. The question is, are we going to listen to those animals?”Poorva Joshipura is PETA U.K. Senior Vice President. She is the Author of Survival at Stake: How Our Treatment of Animals is Key to Human Existence and For a Moment of Taste: How What You Eat Impacts Animals, the Planet and Your Health.https://usw2.nyl.as/t1/24/2jdwp5ogezjqb5wxg76eqfqeq/0/14474d94f4e832cd573ffc39be471e57616314b12314a26ca7dd9c2bbf559ac0www.harpercollins.com/products/for-a-moment-of-taste-poorva-joshipura?variant=39399505592354www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"I'm optimistic about education. There will likely be more traffic between technology and the arts. The tech world needs more creative-minded people and less literal people who have some understanding of how things work.With Jony Ive, you've got someone who designed the iPhone and was very interested in photography himself. We were talking about doing a portrait. He mentioned that he'd been fascinated by self-portraiture as a kid, so much so that when he was doing his industrial design degree, he wrote his thesis on artists' self-portraits. Fast forward a few years, and we are all taking photos every day and learning really fast how to compose images and read images and why they've been cropped in a certain way. All these things, which were probably the preserve of artists and art historians in the past, are suddenly things that kids are thinking about because it's the way they communicate with each other. So I think that that shift is interesting.Painting is a two-dimensional thing. You're basically taking real, three-dimensional things and making them into fake, two-dimensional ones. When you get into the 3D space, some of those distinctions aren't there anymore. I remember when I showed David Hockney the VR project I'd been working on a few years ago, and he put his finger on this quite well. Most art is about perspective. Certainly, for what he is interested in. As soon as you see something in 3D, whether it's a physical sculpture or a virtual object, that's not there anymore because you're in the space with whatever's being shown, so you're in a very different place."Jonathan Yeo is one of the world’s leading figurative artists and portrait painters. From celebrated figures such as Sir David Attenborough, peace activist Malala Yousafzai, the Duke of Edinburgh, Nicole Kidman, and Tony Blair, sitting for a portrait with Yeo is a provisional necessity for any 21st century icon. His work, which has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, is the subject of several major mid-career retrospectives in the UK and internationally. Yeo’s course on portrait painting is available now on BBC Maestro.www.jonathanyeo.comwww.bbcmaestro.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastImages courtesy of Jonathan Yeo

How can the arts help cultivate our intuitive intelligence? What does visual art teach us about consciousness and the human condition?   Jonathan Yeo is one of the world’s leading figurative artists and portrait painters. From celebrated figures such as Sir David Attenborough, peace activist Malala Yousafzai, the Duke of Edinburgh, Nicole Kidman, and Tony Blair, sitting for a portrait with Yeo is a provisional necessity for any 21st century icon. His work, which has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world, is the subject of several major mid-career retrospectives in the UK and internationally. Yeo’s course on portrait painting is available now on BBC Maestro."I'm optimistic about education. There will likely be more traffic between technology and the arts. The tech world needs more creative-minded people and less literal people who have some understanding of how things work.With Jony Ive, you've got someone who designed the iPhone and was very interested in photography himself. We were talking about doing a portrait. He mentioned that he'd been fascinated by self-portraiture as a kid, so much so that when he was doing his industrial design degree, he wrote his thesis on artists' self-portraits. Fast forward a few years, and we are all taking photos every day and learning really fast how to compose images and read images and why they've been cropped in a certain way. All these things, which were probably the preserve of artists and art historians in the past, are suddenly things that kids are thinking about because it's the way they communicate with each other. So I think that that shift is interesting.Painting is a two-dimensional thing. You're basically taking real, three-dimensional things and making them into fake, two-dimensional ones. When you get into the 3D space, some of those distinctions aren't there anymore. I remember when I showed David Hockney the VR project I'd been working on a few years ago, and he put his finger on this quite well. Most art is about perspective. Certainly, for what he is interested in. As soon as you see something in 3D, whether it's a physical sculpture or a virtual object, that's not there anymore because you're in the space with whatever's being shown, so you're in a very different place."www.jonathanyeo.comwww.bbcmaestro.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastImages courtesy of Jonathan Yeo

"AI is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It promises both enormous potential and capability from helping with medical diagnosis and catching cancer early or removing a lot of tedium and repetitive nature of many jobs. It can make a lot of great contributions. It's how we control that technology by making active decisions that can be the pathway to the future. There's been a lot of doomsday talk about artificial general intelligence and the Terminator-type outcome, and it's certainly not impossible, but I don't personally believe that is a probable outcome from where we are now.I think one of the things that AI is very good at is churning through and processing vast amounts of data, assuming that you've got your machine learning system set up correctly and trained properly and you're using it in the way that it was intended to be used. Machine learning and AI techniques are incredibly powerful in pulling out the important information in a sea of data, but to convert that information into new understanding, that is the role of humans in that process. And it will remain the role of humans in understanding what is important and how to implement that information once you've fished out this sea of data."How have our psychology and cognitive biases altered the course of human history? What would you do if you had to rebuild our world from scratch?Lewis Dartnell is an author, researcher, and holds the Professorship in Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He researches astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. He also works as a scientific consultant for the media and has appeared in numerous TV documentaries and radio shows. Dr. Dartnell has won several awards for his science writing and outreach work. He has published five books, including The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch; Origins: How the Earth Made Us; and Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History. http://www.lewisdartnell.comhttp://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb/2013/11/the-knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratchwww.penguin.co.uk/books/433955/origins-by-lewis-dartnell/9781784705435www.penguin.co.uk/books/442759/being-human-by-dartnell-lewis/9781847926708www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastPhoto credit: Shortlist/Paul Stuart

How have our psychology and cognitive biases altered the course of human history? What would you do if you had to rebuild our world from scratch?Lewis Dartnell is an author, researcher, and holds the Professorship in Science Communication at the University of Westminster. He researches astrobiology and the search for microbial life on Mars. He also works as a scientific consultant for the media and has appeared in numerous TV documentaries and radio shows. Dr. Dartnell has won several awards for his science writing and outreach work. He has published five books, including The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch; Origins: How the Earth Made Us; and Being Human: How Our Biology Shaped World History. "AI is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. It promises both enormous potential and capability from helping with medical diagnosis and catching cancer early or removing a lot of tedium and repetitive nature of many jobs. It can make a lot of great contributions. It's how we control that technology by making active decisions that can be the pathway to the future. There's been a lot of doomsday talk about artificial general intelligence and the Terminator-type outcome, and it's certainly not impossible, but I don't personally believe that is a probable outcome from where we are now.I think one of the things that AI is very good at is churning through and processing vast amounts of data, assuming that you've got your machine learning system set up correctly and trained properly and you're using it in the way that it was intended to be used. Machine learning and AI techniques are incredibly powerful in pulling out the important information in a sea of data, but to convert that information into new understanding, that is the role of humans in that process. And it will remain the role of humans in understanding what is important and how to implement that information once you've fished out this sea of data."http://www.lewisdartnell.comhttp://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb/2013/11/the-knowledge-how-to-rebuild-our-world-from-scratchwww.penguin.co.uk/books/433955/origins-by-lewis-dartnell/9781784705435www.penguin.co.uk/books/442759/being-human-by-dartnell-lewis/9781847926708www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastPhoto credit: Shortlist/Paul Stuart

“My TED Talk and work are really about figuring out how, right now, AI is using resources like energy and emitting greenhouse gases and how it's using our data without our consent. I feel that if we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable, we can help future generations so that AI will be less of a risk to society. And so really, artificial intelligence is not artificial. It's human intelligence that was memorized by the model that was kind of hoovered up, absorbed by these AI models. And now it's getting regurgitated back at us. And we're like, wow, ChatGPT is so smart! But how many thousands of human hours were needed in order to make ChatGPT so smart?The US Executive Order on AI still does need a lot of operationalization by different parts of the government. Especially, with the EU and their AI Act, we have this signal that's top down, but now people have to figure out how we legislate, enforce, measure, and evaluate? So, there are a lot of problems that haven't been solved because we don't have standards or legal precedent for AI. So I think that we're really in this kind of intermediate phase and scrambling to try to figure out how to put this into action.”What are the pros and cons of AI’s integration into our institutions, political systems, culture, and society? How can we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable?Dr. Sasha Luccioni is a leading scientist at the nexus of artificial intelligence, ethics, and sustainability, with a Ph.D. in AI and a decade of research and industry expertise. She spearheads research, consults, and utilizes capacity-building to elevate the sustainability of AI systems. As a founding member of Climate Change AI (CCAI) and a board member of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Sasha is passionate about catalyzing impactful change, organizing events, and serving as a mentor to under-represented minorities within the AI community. She is an AI Researcher & Climate Lead at Hugging Face, an open-source hub for machine learning and natural language processing.https://www.sashaluccioni.comhttps://huggingface.co/http://www.climatechange.aihttps://wimlworkshop.org

What are the pros and cons of AI’s integration into our institutions, political systems, culture, and society? How can we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable?Dr. Sasha Luccioni is a leading scientist at the nexus of artificial intelligence, ethics, and sustainability, with a Ph.D. in AI and a decade of research and industry expertise. She spearheads research, consults, and utilizes capacity-building to elevate the sustainability of AI systems. As a founding member of Climate Change AI (CCAI) and a board member of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Sasha is passionate about catalyzing impactful change, organizing events, and serving as a mentor to under-represented minorities within the AI community. She is an AI Researcher & Climate Lead at Hugging Face, an open-source hub for machine learning and natural language processing."My TED Talk and work are really about figuring out how, right now, AI is using resources like energy and emitting greenhouse gases and how it's using our data without our consent. I feel that if we develop AI systems that are more respectful, ethical, and sustainable, we can help future generations so that AI will be less of a risk to society. And so really, artificial intelligence is not artificial. It's human intelligence that was memorized by the model that was kind of hoovered up, absorbed by these AI models. And now it's getting regurgitated back at us. And we're like, wow, ChatGPT is so smart! But how many thousands of human hours were needed in order to make ChatGPT so smart?The US Executive Order on AI still does need a lot of operationalization by different parts of the government. Especially, with the EU and their AI Act, we have this signal that's top down, but now people have to figure out how we legislate, enforce, measure, and evaluate? So, there are a lot of problems that haven't been solved because we don't have standards or legal precedent for AI. So I think that we're really in this kind of intermediate phase and scrambling to try to figure out how to put this into action.”https://www.sashaluccioni.comhttps://huggingface.co/http://www.climatechange.aihttps://wimlworkshop.org