AI & The Future of Humanity: Artificial Intelligence, Technology, VR, Algorithm, Automation, ChatBPT, Robotics, Augmented Reality, Big Data, IoT, Social Media, CGI, Generative-AI, Innovation, Nanotec

AI, Virtual Reality & Dawn of the New Everything w/ JARON LANIER, VR Pioneer, Musician, Author

“AI is obviously the dominant topic in tech lately, and I think occasionally there's AI that's nonsense, and occasionally there's AI that's great. I love finding new proteins for medicine and so on. I don't think we serve ourselves well when we put our own technology up as if it were a new God that we created. I think we're really getting a little too full of ourselves to think that. This goes back to Alan Turing, the main founder of computer science, who had this idea of the Turing test. In the test, you can't tell whether the computer has gotten more human-like or the human has gotten more computer-like. People are very prone to becoming more computer-like. When we're on social media, we let ourselves be guided by the algorithms, so we start to become dumb in the way the algorithms want us to. You see that all the time. It's really degraded our psychologies and our society.”Jaron Lanier is a pioneering technologist, writer, and musician, best known for coining the term “Virtual Reality” and founding VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. He led early breakthroughs in virtual worlds, avatars, and VR applications in fields like surgery and media. Lanier writes on the philosophy and economics of technology in his bestselling book Who Owns the Future? and You Are Not a Gadget. His book Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality is an inventive blend of autobiography, science writing, and philosophy. Lanier has been named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people and serves as Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft’s Office of the CTO—aka “Octopus.” As a musician, he’s performed with Sara Bareilles, Philip Glass, T Bone Burnett, Laurie Anderson, Jon Batiste, and others.Episode Websitewww.creativeprocess.info/podInstagram:@creativeprocesspodcastPhoto credit: Michael Springer

How Can AI-moderated Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? JAMES FISHKIN - Highlights

“The three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method, which we've perfected over the last several decades. Democracy is supposed to make some connection with the "will of the people." But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone is trying to manipulate it?”James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His work focuses on Deliberative Polling, a process of deliberative public consultation that has been conducted more than 150 times around the world. He is the author of Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?, Democracy When the People Are Thinking (OUP) and other books.“Deliberative democracy is itself, when properly done, a kind of democracy that can speak to the interests of a community. And we need that all over the world.”Episode Websitewww.creativeprocess.info/podInstagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

How Can AI be Part of Bringing Deliberative Democracy to the Masses? w/ JAMES S. FISHKIN

“Deliberative democracy is itself, when properly done, a kind of democracy that can speak to the interests of a community. And we need that all over the world.” James S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His work focuses on Deliberative Polling, a process of deliberative public consultation that has been conducted more than 150 times around the world. He is the author of Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?, Democracy When the People Are Thinking (OUP) and other books.“The three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method, which we've perfected over the last several decades. Democracy is supposed to make some connection with the "will of the people." But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone is trying to manipulate it?”Episode Websitewww.creativeprocess.info/podInstagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

The Imagination Emporium with Fmr. VP of Innovation & Creativity at Disney DUNCAN WARDLE

How can we free our minds to cultivate curiosity, innovation, and creativity in our daily lives? In this age of AI, where creative tasks are increasingly being performed for us, what is intelligence? And what is the future of education?Duncan Wardle was Vice President of Innovation and Creativity at Disney and has helped organizations like Apple, the NBA, Coca-Cola, and Spotify to innovate. The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation is a toolkit with easy-to-use recipes to make innovation and creativity accessible and fun.Episode Websitewww.creativeprocess.info/podInstagram:@creativeprocesspodcast

The Hidden Humans Behind Artificial Intelligence & the Sociopathology of Elon Musk

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu talks with Sarah T. Roberts about the hidden humans behind Artificial Intelligence, which is reliant on executives and business managers to direct AI to promote their brand and low-level, out-sourced, and poorly paid content managers to slog through masses of images, words, and data before they get fed into the machine. They talk about the cultural, sociological, financial, and political aspects of AI. They end by taking on Elon Musk and the DOGE project, as an emblem of how Silicon Valley executives have embraced a brand of tech rapture that disdains and destroys democracy and attacks the idea that people can take care of each other, independent of sociopathic libertarianism.Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D., is a full professor at UCLA (Gender Studies, Information Studies, Labor Studies), specializing in Internet and social media policy, infrastructure, politics and culture, and the intersection of media, technology, and society. She is the faculty director and co-founder of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Technology & Power, and a research associate of the Oxford Internet Institute. Informed by feminist Science and Technology Studies perspectives, Roberts is keenly interested in the way power, geopolitics, and economics play out on and via the internet, reproducing, reifying, and exacerbating global inequities and social injustice.www.palumbo-liu.comhttps://speakingoutofplace.comBluesky @palumboliu.bsky.socialInstagram @speaking_out_of_placePhoto of Elon Musk: Debbie RoweCreative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported