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

"We have to solve three problems. We have to create a low-waste society through incentives to change individual behavior from consumer to user through loss and waste prevention, and intelligent resource management. We also have to create a low-carbon society by preserving the water, electricity, and CO2 emissions embodied in physical assets or through innovation in green electricity and circular energy. And the third challenge, which is probably the biggest, we have to create a low anthropogenic mass society by preserving these existing stocks of infrastructure, buildings, equipment, vehicles, and objects. The only strategy I know that can fulfill these three challenges is a circular industrial economy.Now the last point, low anthropogenic mass society is simply because some years ago, the rapidly growing anthropogenic mass has become bigger than the world's biomass. And that of course means we are destroying the biomass because we have a limited planet, and we are destroying biodiversity and replacing it with synthetic manmade materials and objects. And this in the long term means we are killing ourselves, so we have to stop producing anthropogenic mass, except in countries that don't yet have sufficient infrastructures for education, health, living, and sufficient food to feed the population."Walter R. Stahel is the Founder-Director of the Product-Life Institute (Switzerland), the oldest established consultancy in Europe devoted to developing sustainable strategies and policies. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Circular Economy Research Centre, Ecole des Ponts Business School and Visiting Professor in the Department of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey. He is also a full member of the Club of Rome. He was awarded degrees of Doctor honoris causa by the University of Surrey, l’Université de Montréal, and the 2020 Thornton Medal of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. He is the author of The Circular Economy: A User’s Guide.www.product-life.orgwww.routledge.com/The-Circular-Economy-A-Users-Guide/Stahel/p/book/9780367200176www.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast

Walter R. Stahel is the Founder-Director of the Product-Life Institute (Switzerland), the oldest established consultancy in Europe devoted to developing sustainable strategies and policies. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Circular Economy Research Centre, Ecole des Ponts Business School and Visiting Professor in the Department of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey. He is also a full member of the Club of Rome. He was awarded degrees of Doctor honoris causa by the University of Surrey, l’Université de Montréal, and the 2020 Thornton Medal of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. He is the author of The Circular Economy: A User’s Guide."We have to solve three problems. We have to create a low-waste society through incentives to change individual behavior from consumer to user through loss and waste prevention, and intelligent resource management. We also have to create a low-carbon society by preserving the water, electricity, and CO2 emissions embodied in physical assets or through innovation in green electricity and circular energy. And the third challenge, which is probably the biggest, we have to create a low anthropogenic mass society by preserving these existing stocks of infrastructure, buildings, equipment, vehicles, and objects. The only strategy I know that can fulfill these three challenges is a circular industrial economy.Now the last point, low anthropogenic mass society is simply because some years ago, the rapidly growing anthropogenic mass has become bigger than the world's biomass. And that of course means we are destroying the biomass because we have a limited planet, and we are destroying biodiversity and replacing it with synthetic manmade materials and objects. And this in the long term means we are killing ourselves, so we have to stop producing anthropogenic mass, except in countries that don't yet have sufficient infrastructures for education, health, living, and sufficient food to feed the population."www.product-life.orgwww.routledge.com/The-Circular-Economy-A-Users-Guide/Stahel/p/book/9780367200176www.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info Instagram @creativeprocesspodcast

"Better than mindfulness, curiosity and the willingness to be open to other perspectives and reveal diversion of perspectives, it's linked with more innovation, it leads to willingness for greater social support for your ideas. So you're talking about finding allies more work, family integration, less burnout, more engagement, and then a greater tendency to experience flow where you lose yourself in your work in the workplace. And there's these wide-ranging benefits that occur. And what you find is the two dimensions of curiosity that are the most beneficial in the workplace, one is called joyous exploration. And that's really just this pure pleasurable sense of wonder that there's a lot of interesting things in the world, and I just know less than I think I do, and I want to be exposed to that novelty. The second one gets less attention. It's what we call stress tolerance. It's that when you have the lure of the novel, the divergent, and you know, the mysterious and complex, there's always a level of anxiety. You are moving away from the knowns and the own unknowns, and you are going into the face of acknowledging there's uncertainty, and you don't know how things are going to turn out. The people that can better tolerate that without trying to close and reach an answer quickly, they're the ones that are more likely to be creative, more likely to be innovative."Todd B. Kashdan, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at George Mason University, and a leading authority on well-being, curiosity, courage, and resilience. He has published more than 220 scientific articles, his work has been cited more than 35,000 times, and he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively, Curious? and The Upside of Your Dark Side, and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. His research is featured regularly in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time, and his writing has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, National Geographic, and other publications. He is a keynote speaker and consultant for organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Prudential, General Mills, The United States Department of Defense, and World Bank Group. https://toddkashdan.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690674/the-art-of-insubordination-by-todd-b-kashdan-phd/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgInstagram @creativeprocesspodcast

Todd B. Kashdan, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at George Mason University, and a leading authority on well-being, curiosity, courage, and resilience. He has published more than 220 scientific articles, his work has been cited more than 35,000 times, and he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively, Curious? and The Upside of Your Dark Side, and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. His research is featured regularly in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Time, and his writing has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, National Geographic, and other publications. He is a keynote speaker and consultant for organizations as diverse as Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Prudential, General Mills, The United States Department of Defense, and World Bank Group. "Better than mindfulness, curiosity and the willingness to be open to other perspectives and reveal diversion of perspectives, it's linked with more innovation, it leads to willingness for greater social support for your ideas. So you're talking about finding allies more work, family integration, less burnout, more engagement, and then a greater tendency to experience flow where you lose yourself in your work in the workplace. And there's these wide-ranging benefits that occur.And what you find is the two dimensions of curiosity that are the most beneficial in the workplace, one is called joyous exploration. And that's really just this pure pleasurable sense of wonder that there's a lot of interesting things in the world, and I just know less than I think I do, and I want to be exposed to that novelty. The second one gets less attention. It's what we call stress tolerance. It's that when you have the lure of the novel, the divergent, and you know, the mysterious and complex, there's always a level of anxiety. You are moving away from the knowns and the own unknowns, and you are going into the face of acknowledging there's uncertainty, and you don't know how things are going to turn out. The people that can better tolerate that without trying to close and reach an answer quickly, they're the ones that are more likely to be creative, more likely to be innovative."https://toddkashdan.comwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690674/the-art-of-insubordination-by-todd-b-kashdan-phd/www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.orgInstagram @creativeprocesspodcast

"There's a ton of work now looking at how we can re-engineer or patch the AI that's currently sort of driving these interfaces to make it easier for people to manage their consumption. But so far there's not a lot of evidence that it's working. So the time management things, unfortunately, people just tend to override those or not want to look at the amount of time that they're spending on their devices. So I'm not seeing a lot of encouraging stuff there. And basically what you have is you have a fundamental structural problem. These technologies are engineered literally to keep us clicking and swiping. You can't ask them...in a way, it's very difficult for them to have their product that's not engaging. Now there's a big push to do this, to see, Okay, well what if we get rid of the likes, or what if we eliminate the bottomless scrolls? Or what if we get rid of the alerts and the push notifications, or what if we go to grayscale and make the images...? And I think all those can work as nudges and be helpful, but I think we also need to start looking more proactively at having time where we literally are just not touching our device. Distance from the actual device itself. And so I think there's some movement in that direction as well."Dr. Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations, has testified before various committees in the United States House of Representatives and Senate, keeps an active speaking calendar, and maintains a thriving clinical practice. Dr. Lembke explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine overloaded world in her NYTimes bestselling book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Her previous book Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop was highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic.www.annalembke.comhttps://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/patient_care/addiction.htmlwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624957/dopamine-nation-by-anna-lembke-md/www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/11360/drug-dealer-mdwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Dr. Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. A clinician scholar, she has published more than a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations, has testified before various committees in the United States House of Representatives and Senate, keeps an active speaking calendar, and maintains a thriving clinical practice. Dr. Lembke explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine overloaded world in her NYTimes bestselling book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Her previous book Drug Dealer, MD – How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It’s So Hard to Stop was highlighted in the New York Times as one of the top five books to read to understand the opioid epidemic."There's a ton of work now looking at how we can re-engineer or patch the AI that's currently sort of driving these interfaces to make it easier for people to manage their consumption. But so far there's not a lot of evidence that it's working. So the time management things, unfortunately, people just tend to override those or not want to look at the amount of time that they're spending on their devices. So I'm not seeing a lot of encouraging stuff there. And basically what you have is you have a fundamental structural problem. These technologies are engineered literally to keep us clicking and swiping. You can't ask them...in a way, it's very difficult for them to have their product that's not engaging. Now there's a big push to do this, to see, Okay, well what if we get rid of the likes, or what if we eliminate the bottomless scrolls? Or what if we get rid of the alerts and the push notifications, or what if we go to grayscale and make the images...? And I think all those can work as nudges and be helpful, but I think we also need to start looking more proactively at having time where we literally are just not touching our device. Distance from the actual device itself. And so I think there's some movement in that direction as well."www.annalembke.comhttps://med.stanford.edu/psychiatry/patient_care/addiction.htmlwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624957/dopamine-nation-by-anna-lembke-md/www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/11360/drug-dealer-mdwww.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

"The research that I've done with these NASA satellites - they’re called the Grace Mission, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Mission, and they're really unusual in that they're able to weigh, using small variations in the pull of gravity that water exerts on the satellites. Satellites are like a scale. They move up and down in the sky depending on how much water there is on the ground. So we can map out these places that are gaining or losing water on a monthly basis. And you know, now the satellites have been flying for 20 years, so we can see these trends.""So there's lots of interesting stuff that's happening out there. Technology that helps industry. There's going to be a big push and a lot of pressure on industry to do more reporting. The technology to do optimal water and nutrient delivery at the plant scale, like just using the optimal amount of water and fertilizer at the plant scale, so down to the plant scale within huge farms is being rapidly developed. So these things are all game changers. And that's without talking about financial innovations. So financial innovations are also not necessarily technology, but when we think about what innovations we need, some of those are financial, whether it's incentive packages or the need to work with investors. So just like we did with carbon that has been so successful working with investors who invest in the big agricultural companies, the big food and beverage companies, we've gotten great traction on the carbon side driving these companies, huge multinational companies to net zero carbon. We need to be doing the same thing on the water side. And so that investor push is a financial innovation."Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist, a professor and the Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan. Before moving to Saskatchewan, he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.  From 2013 through 2018, he was appointed  by Governor Jerry Brown to the California State Water Boards. He has appeared on CBS News 60 Minutes, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, as a featured expert in water documentaries including Day Zero and Last Call at the Oasis, and across a host of international news media. He is the host of the podcast What About Water?https://jayfamiglietti.comWhat About Water? podcast with Jay FamigliettiTwitter @WhatAboutWaterGIWS https://water.usask.cawww.waterplan.comwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

Jay Famiglietti is a hydrologist, a professor and the Executive Director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, where he holds the Canada 150 Research Chair in Hydrology and Remote Sensing. He is also the Chief Scientist of the Silicon Valley tech startup, Waterplan. Before moving to Saskatchewan, he served as the Senior Water Scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.  From 2013 through 2018, he was appointed  by Governor Jerry Brown to the California State Water Boards. He has appeared on CBS News 60 Minutes, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, as a featured expert in water documentaries including Day Zero and Last Call at the Oasis, and across a host of international news media. He is the host of the podcast What About Water?"The research that I've done with these NASA satellites - they’re called the Grace Mission, Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Mission, and they're really unusual in that they're able to weigh, using small variations in the pull of gravity that water exerts on the satellites. Satellites are like a scale. They move up and down in the sky depending on how much water there is on the ground. So we can map out these places that are gaining or losing water on a monthly basis. And you know, now the satellites have been flying for 20 years, so we can see these trends.""So there's lots of interesting stuff that's happening out there. Technology that helps industry. There's going to be a big push and a lot of pressure on industry to do more reporting. The technology to do optimal water and nutrient delivery at the plant scale, like just using the optimal amount of water and fertilizer at the plant scale, so down to the plant scale within huge farms is being rapidly developed. So these things are all game changers. And that's without talking about financial innovations. So financial innovations are also not necessarily technology, but when we think about what innovations we need, some of those are financial, whether it's incentive packages or the need to work with investors. So just like we did with carbon that has been so successful working with investors who invest in the big agricultural companies, the big food and beverage companies, we've gotten great traction on the carbon side driving these companies, huge multinational companies to net zero carbon. We need to be doing the same thing on the water side. And so that investor push is a financial innovation."https://jayfamiglietti.comWhat About Water? podcast with Jay FamigliettiTwitter @WhatAboutWaterGIWS https://water.usask.cawww.waterplan.comwww.oneplanetpodcast.orgwww.creativeprocess.info

"And you can make extremely intelligent computations and very complex computations, but you don't get a mind out of it. You don't get consciousness out of it. You get a computer, and that's what's driving my hands waving around, driving my lips and my tongue, and all that kind of stuff, it's a computer; it's our non-conscious mind. But on top of that, we have the stuff we're aware of, and that's where our creativity lies. That's where our emotions lie. We can't think of being creative without using our conscious mind. And that's where stuff comes together because the difference between what happens in our conscious mind and in our non-conscious mind – in our non-conscious mind, everything is dissected."Johnjoe McFadden is the author of Life is Simple, How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. He obtained his PhD at Imperial College London and went on to work on human genetic diseases and then infectious diseases, at the University of Surrey. Professor McFadden has specialised in examining the genetics of microbes such as the agents of tuberculosis and meningitis. His other books are Quantum Evolution: Life in the Multiverse, and Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (co-authored with Jim Al-Khalili). He has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals on a wide range of subjects and lectures around the world. His present post is Associate Dean (International) and Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey.www.surrey.ac.uk/people/johnjoe-mcfaddenhttps://johnjoemcfadden.co.ukwww.basicbooks.com/titles/johnjoe-mcfadden/life-is-simple/9781549112119www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org

Johnjoe McFadden is the author of Life is Simple, How Occam’s Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe. He obtained his PhD at Imperial College London and went on to work on human genetic diseases and then infectious diseases, at the University of Surrey. Professor McFadden has specialised in examining the genetics of microbes such as the agents of tuberculosis and meningitis. His other books are Quantum Evolution: Life in the Multiverse, and Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology (co-authored with Jim Al-Khalili). He has published more than 100 articles in scientific journals on a wide range of subjects and lectures around the world. His present post is Associate Dean (International) and Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey."And you can make extremely intelligent computations and very complex computations, but you don't get a mind out of it. You don't get consciousness out of it. You get a computer, and that's what's driving my hands waving around, driving my lips and my tongue, and all that kind of stuff, it's a computer; it's our non-conscious mind. But on top of that, we have the stuff we're aware of, and that's where our creativity lies. That's where our emotions lie. We can't think of being creative without using our conscious mind. And that's where stuff comes together because the difference between what happens in our conscious mind and in our non-conscious mind – in our non-conscious mind, everything is dissected."www.surrey.ac.uk/people/johnjoe-mcfaddenhttps://johnjoemcfadden.co.ukwww.basicbooks.com/titles/johnjoe-mcfadden/life-is-simple/9781549112119www.creativeprocess.infowww.oneplanetpodcast.org