A.I. and the Future of Inequality - with Wendell Wallach

11/10/23 • 58 min

Will AI exacerbate inequality? Can we stop that from happening? As the world grapples with guardrails to protect us from future dangers of AI, I thought it timely to talk to an ethicist who has spent a lifetime pondering these challenges. Enter, Wendell Wallach, Carnegie-Uehiro fellow at Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, where he co-directs the Artificial Intelligence & Equality Initiative (AIEI). He is also Emeritus Chair of Technology and Ethics Studies at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, a scholar with the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, a fellow at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technology, and a senior advisor to The Hastings Center.
We recorded our discussion over cups of tea in his lounge room in Hartford CT. He was grounded and thoughtful and had a refreshingly broad perspective on the many complex forces shaping our future. Most importantly, while worried about bad corporate behaviours and all the ways A.I. can make things worse, he was also optimistic about the actions available to us to re-shape the trajectory for the better.
Enjoy the podcast!

As always, I’ll add a post to the FutureBites page soon with additional thoughts and further reading, as well as a copy of the full interview transcript.

Learn more about my work as a futurist speaker.
See you in the future!

As always, I’ll add a post to the FutureBites page soon with additional thoughts and further reading, as well as a copy of the full interview transcript.

Learn more about my work as a futurist speaker.
See you in the future!

Previous Episode

Three New Frontiers In Cancer Medicine - with Ben Stanger

The story of cancer medicine is multi-threaded. It’s a story of early detection, of surgical removal, of radio- and chemo-therapies, of understanding lifestyle factors, of sequencing and pinpointing genetic factors, and lately of immunotherapies, but instead of one succeeding the other, each overlaps and complements and adds more weapons to the armory, and many of these weapons can be deployed in series or in combination.
In this episode of FutureBites, I’m talking to Dr Ben Stanger about adding three more entire armories.
Dr Ben Stanger is the Hanna Wise Professor in Cancer Research at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. He’s also Director the Penn Pancreatic Cancer Research Center and a member of half a dozen other prestigious Institutes. What a guy! In addition to his many prestigious academic positions, he still practices AND makes time to write science for a popular audience. We met in his office, and in our half-hour conversation, he shared his optimism for three new frontiers in cancer medicine: the advancement from liquid to solid tumors, the development of mRNA cancer vaccines, and the latest work being undertaken in ‘cancer interception.’
As always, I’ll add a post to the FutureBites page soon with additional thoughts and further reading, as well as a copy of the full interview transcript. Enjoy!
Ben's latest book is From One Cell – a Journey Into Life’s Origins and the Future of Medicine. I've enjoyed every page and thoroughly recommend it.

Learn more about my work as a futurist speaker.
See you in the future!

Next Episode

What's Next in CAR T-Cell Therapy? - with Bruce Levine

The future of medicine is one where all cancers are either 100% curable or turned into manageable diseases. You’ve heard me tell the story in my keynotes for many years. Now it’s time for you to hear from one of the heroes of that story, Bruce Levine.

Bruce and his colleagues pioneered CAR T-cell therapy, one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine, where your own immune cells are reprogrammed to attack and destroy your cancer. They developed it, applied it, saved the first lives, achieved the first FDA approvals, and perfected a therapy that has now been applied to tens of thousands of patients around the world and will soon be hundreds of thousands.

Now Bruce is targeting solid tumors. And he’s moving CAR T-cell production INSIDE the human body to slash the costs. And he’s not stopping at cancer ...

Which makes CAR T-cell therapy not only one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine, but also one of the most important platforms for the FUTURE of medicine.

Enjoy the podcast. As always, I’ll add a post to the FutureBites page soon with additional thoughts and further reading, as well as a copy of the full interview transcript.

Learn more about my work as a futurist speaker.

See you in the future!