On DiscoverMagazine.com you can find a terrific compilation of public, panel discussions I helped Discover put together with a grant from the National Science Foundation. (I’m a senior advisor and contributor over at Discover.) Here’s a link to the series. Below, I’ve posted summary of one of our recent discussions on robotics, at Carnegie Mellon University. I’ll have more information about our wild chat at SXSW about the “future of gaming” soon.
In the interim, here’s an invite for west coast readers to attend our next panel event: Quest for the Living World at Caltech, in partnership with Thirty Meter Telescope on 4/21.
In January, DISCOVER and the National Science Foundation continued their Grand Challenges event series with a panel discussion at Carnegie Mellon University exploring the dynamic world of robotics.
The panel included four eminent roboticists—Javier Movellan from University of California San Diego, Rodney Brooks from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, William “Red” Whittaker from Carnegie Mellon University, and Robyn Murphy from Texas A&M University—who discussed some the big questions on the future of their field: How will robots transform industry, health care, and warfare? Will they ever be our equals? The conversation was moderated by DISCOVER editor-in-chief Corey Powell. Watch videos of the discussion and read more here: http://discovermagazine.com/events/grand-challenges-of-science-robotics/
Why not avoid dicey geo-engineering gambits by choosing to stop doing the soon to become patently unsustainable things we are doing to the Earth and its environs now that could likely precipitate a calamitous global ecological wreckage?
At some point in the near future, before it is too late for humankind to make a difference, reason and common sense are going to be deployed and collective action ably and humanely taken by new leadership within the family of humanity that at least strives to mitigate, if not resolve the colossal, human-driven ecological crisis which looms so ominously before all of us on the horizon.
Perhaps we can see how the attractive ideological idiocy and self-serving greediness of some as well as the stony silence of many are what is required to precipitate the ruination of the Earth and its environs as a fit place for human habitation by children everywhere.