Episode 11: Jack Haworth

Put your headphones on and take some time out to listen to this episode. Your ears are in for a treat! Thanks to Adam at Overtone Productions, we're bringing you outstanding sound design in the final episode of this series.

Inventive Podcast is all about mixing fact and fiction - featuring engineers whose work is transforming the world we live in and award-winning writers who transform their stories. We have another first for you in this episode as we feature sublime poetry from Katrina Porteous interwoven with presenter Trevor Cox's interview with electrical engineer Jack Haworth. Jack works with robots designed for extreme environments at the clean-up of the Sellafield nuclear site.

When he was at school, Jack thought he was going to university to study business and become the next Alan Sugar. But he took the long road into engineering instead. On the graduate scheme at Sellafield, he's working with machines that go where human beings can't - inspecting outdoor areas for radiation and highly radioactive nuclear cells. But what about the darker side of robotics? Will they put people out of work or even take over? And what made him choose an industry with such a bad reputation?

Katrina doesn't have any qualifications in science – not even a GCSE! But she's worked for many years with scientists and she believes the distinction between the arts and sciences is an extremely unhelpful one. It's all about imagination – for engineers and artists, it's all about imagining new worlds.

Katrina's poem is a response to Jack's chat with Trevor, interwoven throughout the episode, and explores themes that include how the data-driven systems that increasingly dominate our world may impact on our freedom and, on a more optimistic note, how we may gain more freedom by the possibilities for interaction between human consciousness and machine learning.

A informative and highly creative listen!

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