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

How do we navigate ambiguity and uncertainty? Moving beyond linear thinking into instinct and intuition, we might discover other sources within ourselves that lie beyond the boundaries of science and reason.Rupert Sheldrake is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. His many books include The Science Delusion, The Presence of the Past, and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work. At Cambridge University, Dr. Sheldrake worked in developmental biology as a fellow of Clare College. From 2005 to 2010,  he was director of the Perrott Warrick Project for research on unexplained human and animal abilities, funded by Trinity College Cambridge. He was among the top 100 global thought leaders for 2013, as ranked by the Duttweiler Institute."The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change.All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural."www.sheldrake.orgwww.amazon.com/Science-Delusion/dp/1529393221/?tag=sheldrake-20www.amazon.com/Science-Set-Free-Paths-Discovery/dp/0770436722/?tag=sheldrake-20

"So we get to a certain stage in Western society, I'd never call it a culture, but a society trying to figure out its birth and how to become mature. Whatever it's doing it has slowed down natural relationships. It took us out of the land, put us into factories, put us into institutions where you can learn a trade. It kept giving you jobs that had nothing to do with Earth. And so if you're living, you're working in this box called a factory, and the farmers out there are becoming less and less. Even the farming, the ideas of farming are foreign. And I think that when the technical language came out, we dropped another natural umbilical cord to and with Earth. And so we severed that relationship. So you can see this gradual severing of relationships to Earth with Earth, that now we have to have retreats to learn empathy again. We do all these Westernized versions of piecing ourselves back together and as Indigenous folks where we're getting that way now, but a lot of traditional people don't need that. We don't need environmental movements. You know, Wild Earth is a foreign concept. There are a lot of words that organizations use to rationalize why we need to teach how to be human beings. So you see technology, the Industrial Machine Age taught us this language of disconnection, taught us things like plug-in, get connected. You know, all these words that came along to fill that information that could be controlled by authority now in the Western process. John Gatto, who won the New York State Teacher of the Year award in 2008, upon his retirement, specifically said, 'It takes 12 years to learn how to become reflexive to authority.' And who is the authority? Who is controlling information? Who's controlling education? Who's controlling knowledge? And now they want to control Wisdom, and all wisdom means is common sense.”Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”) for the last 31 years in New York City and Seattle/Olympia, Washington. In 2016, he received a Nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from the International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy. Other recent recognitions include: Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Fellowship in Music (2016), National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship Nominee (2017), Indigenous Music Award Nominee for Best Instrumental Album (2019) and National Native American Hall of Fame Nominee (2018, 2019). He also was recently nominated for “Nominee for the 2020 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities”. He is the Founder of Akantu Intelligence.https://firstvoicesindigenousradio.org/ https://akantuintelligence.orgwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastSongs featured on this episode are “Butterfly Against the Wind” And from the album Somewhere In There “Spatial Moon” and “Sunrise Moon” Composed by Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Alex Alexander Music on this episode is courtesy of Tiokasin Ghosthorse.

How can we learn to speak the language of the Earth and cultivate our intuitive intelligence?Tiokasin Ghosthorse is a member of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota and has a long history with Indigenous activism and advocacy. Tiokasin is the Founder, Host and Executive Producer of “First Voices Radio” (formerly “First Voices Indigenous Radio”) for the last 31 years in New York City and Seattle/Olympia, Washington. In 2016, he received a Nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize from the International Institute of Peace Studies and Global Philosophy. Other recent recognitions include: Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Fellowship in Music (2016), National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship Nominee (2017), Indigenous Music Award Nominee for Best Instrumental Album (2019) and National Native American Hall of Fame Nominee (2018, 2019). He also was recently nominated for “Nominee for the 2020 Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities”. He is the Founder of Akantu Intelligence."So we get to a certain stage in Western society, I'd never call it a culture, but a society trying to figure out its birth and how to become mature. Whatever it's doing it has slowed down natural relationships. It took us out of the land, put us into factories, put us into institutions where you can learn a trade. It kept giving you jobs that had nothing to do with Earth. And so if you're living, you're working in this box called a factory, and the farmers out there are becoming less and less. Even the farming, the ideas of farming are foreign. And I think that when the technical language came out, we dropped another natural umbilical cord to and with Earth. And so we severed that relationship. So you can see this gradual severing of relationships to Earth with Earth, that now we have to have retreats to learn empathy again. We do all these Westernized versions of piecing ourselves back together and as Indigenous folks where we're getting that way now, but a lot of traditional people don't need that. We don't need environmental movements. You know, Wild Earth is a foreign concept. There are a lot of words that organizations use to rationalize why we need to teach how to be human beings. So you see technology, the Industrial Machine Age taught us this language of disconnection, taught us things like plug-in, get connected. You know, all these words that came along to fill that information that could be controlled by authority now in the Western process. John Gatto, who won the New York State Teacher of the Year award in 2008, upon his retirement, specifically said, 'It takes 12 years to learn how to become reflexive to authority.' And who is the authority? Who is controlling information? Who's controlling education? Who's controlling knowledge? And now they want to control Wisdom, and all wisdom means is common sense.”https://firstvoicesindigenousradio.org/ https://akantuintelligence.orgwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcastSongs featured on this episode are “Butterfly Against the Wind” And from the album Somewhere In There “Spatial Moon” and “Sunrise Moon” Composed by Tiokasin Ghosthorse and Alex Alexander Music on this episode is courtesy of Tiokasin Ghosthorse.

"With the speed and the precision of the AI, make no mistake, we are becoming creators of something that is far more advanced than humans. Is this a bad thing? I see it as a very bad thing, but I also see it as a natural evolution. We are becoming creators and in our evolution process, we are evolving ourselves to something much more advanced. It's what the world, what the universe, what nature wants us to become: stronger so we reach our limit in terms of biological capacity. So this is the fascinating thing, the creation and evolution go hand in hand. It's a circle that feeds into each other."Dr. Melvin M. Vopson is Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Portsmouth, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Chartered Physicist and Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Information Physics Institute, editor-in-chief of the IPI Letters and Emerging Minds Journal for Student Research. He is the author of Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe. Dr. Vopson has a wide-ranging scientific expertise in experimental, applied and theoretical physics that is internationally recognized. He has published over 100 research articles, achieving over 2500 citations.https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/melvin-vopsonhttps://ipipublishing.org/index.php/ipil/RRwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Are we living in a Simulated Universe? How will AI impact the future of work, society & education?Dr. Melvin M. Vopson is Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Portsmouth, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Chartered Physicist and Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Information Physics Institute, editor-in-chief of the IPI Letters and Emerging Minds Journal for Student Research. He is the author of Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe. Dr. Vopson has a wide-ranging scientific expertise in experimental, applied and theoretical physics that is internationally recognized. He has published over 100 research articles, achieving over 2500 citations."With the speed and the precision of the AI, make no mistake, we are becoming creators of something that is far more advanced than humans. Is this a bad thing? I see it as a very bad thing, but I also see it as a natural evolution. We are becoming creators and in our evolution process, we are evolving ourselves to something much more advanced. It's what the world, what the universe, what nature wants us to become: stronger so we reach our limit in terms of biological capacity. So this is the fascinating thing, the creation and evolution go hand in hand. It's a circle that feeds into each other."https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/melvin-vopsonhttps://ipipublishing.org/index.php/ipil/RRwww.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"Meta reaches between three and four billion people every day through their platforms, right? That's way more people than any government legitimately can claim to govern. And yet this one company with four major platforms that many of us use is able to reach so many people and make decisions about content and access that have real consequences. It's been shown they fueled genocide in multiple places like in Ethiopia and Myanmar. And I think that's exactly why human rights matter because human rights are obligations that states have signed on for, and they're supposed to protect human values. And I think from a human rights perspective, it's important to argue that we shouldn't be collecting certain types of data because it's excessive. It's violating autonomy. It starts violating dignity. And when you start violating autonomy and dignity through the collection of data, you can't just go back and fix that by making it private.”Does privacy exist anymore? Or are humans just sets of data to be traded and sold?Wendy H. Wong is Professor of Political Science and Principal's Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of two award-winning books: Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights and (with Sarah S. Stroup) The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs. Her latest book is We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age.www.wendyhwong.comhttps://mitpress.mit.edu/author/wendy-h-wong-38397www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Does privacy exist anymore? Or are humans just sets of data to be traded and sold?Wendy H. Wong is Professor of Political Science and Principal's Research Chair at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of two award-winning books: Internal Affairs: How the Structure of NGOs Transforms Human Rights and (with Sarah S. Stroup) The Authority Trap: Strategic Choices of International NGOs. Her latest book is We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age."Meta reaches between three and four billion people every day through their platforms, right? That's way more people than any government legitimately can claim to govern. And yet this one company with four major platforms that many of us use is able to reach so many people and make decisions about content and access that have real consequences. It's been shown they fueled genocide in multiple places like in Ethiopia and Myanmar. And I think that's exactly why human rights matter because human rights are obligations that states have signed on for, and they're supposed to protect human values. And I think from a human rights perspective, it's important to argue that we shouldn't be collecting certain types of data because it's excessive. It's violating autonomy. It starts violating dignity. And when you start violating autonomy and dignity through the collection of data, you can't just go back and fix that by making it private.”www.wendyhwong.comhttps://mitpress.mit.edu/author/wendy-h-wong-38397www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

The more the science of intelligence (both human and artificial) advances, the more it holds the potential for great benefits and dangers to society.Max Bennett is the cofounder and CEO of Alby, a start-up that helps companies integrate large language models into their websites to create guided shopping and search experiences. Previously, Bennett was the cofounder and chief product offi­cer of Bluecore, one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., providing AI technologies to some of the largest companies in the world. Bluecore has been featured in the annual Inc. 500 fastest growing com­panies, as well as Glassdoor’s 50 best places to work in the U.S. Bluecore was recently valued at over $1 bil­lion. Bennett holds several patents for AI technologies and has published numerous scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals on the topics of evolutionary neuro­science and the neocortex. He has been featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list as well as the Built In NYC’s 30 Tech Leaders Under 30. He is the author of A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains."One of the crowning achievements of humanity is self-delusion. We like to convince ourselves that the thing that's best for us is also the best for everyone else. So it doesn't mean that people are inherently being bad, but whenever someone comes and says you should regulate thing ABC, and it just so turns out that if you do ABC, it will enrich that individual and their company.We should just be somewhat skeptical to make sure that is in fact the best way to regulate it. So in terms of the regulations themselves, I think a lot of them are really good ideas. I think Yann LeCun has some of my favorite philosophies on this at Meta. Where I do think we should not be regulating is research. And I think we should absolutely be supporting open source. And I do think it's much more reasonable to regulate products. So this is a very important distinction. Regulating research is effectively telling scientists they're not allowed to look into certain forms of AI. They're not allowed to test certain forms of AI. I think this is. Or at least, if we do regulate research, we should have a higher burden of proof for restraining research."www.abriefhistoryofintelligence.com/ www.alby.com www.bluecore.com www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

How can we resolve conflicts without compromising our ethics and moral vision? Each year, wars are being fought in our name or with our support that citizens never get an opportunity to vote on. How can we make our voices heard?“Warism, taking war for granted as morally acceptable, even morally required, is the primary obstacle to peace.” Duane L. Cady is a philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Hamline University. He was nominated for the 1991 Grawemeyer World Order Award, was named Outstanding Educator of the Year by the United Methodist Foundation for Higher Education, and a festschiff in his honor was published in 2012. Cady is best known for his works on pacifism, including Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking, and From Warism to Pacifism: A Moral Continuum.https://duanelcady.comwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

"We live on the one hand in very exciting times with technological development, but on the other hand, we should also be careful. And I've seen studies showing the effects of screen time on brain development that are worrisome, in my opinion.So as a mother, I continuously engaged in a battle to minimize screen time for my children. Not always successfully because I also understand that the world that we live in requires a lot of screen time. I think that social media in particular and again, I can't take this interview out of context, I am continuously exposed to hatred in social media from all sides. People are scared. People are afraid. People are angry and that finds its way into social media. And I read things on (now it's called X) Twitter. and I'm horrified and disappointed and saddened. So did I disconnect? No, I'm also a part of the system, but I also want to raise a critical voice concerning that."How we think, feel, and experience the world is a mystery. What distinguishes our consciousness from AI and machine learning?Liad Mudrik studies high level cognition and its neural substrates, focusing on conscious experience. She teaches at the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel Aviv University. At her research lab, her team is currently investigating the functionality of consciousness, trying to unravel the depth and limits of unconscious processing, and also researching the ways semantic relations between concepts and objects are formed and detected.https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/mudriklabhttps://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/mudriklab/people/#gkit-popupwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgIG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast