Donate to WERU Today!Producer/Host: Jim Campbell
There are three very big challenges that humans will have to deal with in the near future: Climate Change, Genetic Engineering, and Artificial Intelligence or AI. Today, we briefly look at some sources to check for those interested in the first two challenges, and then turn our attention to sources for those interested in what AI means for us today, and will mean for humans in the near future and beyond.
On genetic engineering, a good book for an overview, written very clearly for non-specialists, is The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson.
A book from 1950 that has had a big impact on the development of what we now call Artificial Intelligence is The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener.
About the host:
Jim Campbell has a longstanding interest in the intersection of digital technology, law, and public policy and how they affect our daily lives in our increasingly digital world. He has banged around non-commercial radio for decades and, in the little known facts department (that should probably stay that way), he was one of the readers voicing Richard Nixon’s words when NPR broadcast the entire transcript of the Watergate tapes. Like several other current WERU volunteers, he was at the station’s sign-on party on May 1, 1988 and has been a volunteer ever since doing an early stint as a Morning Maine host, and later producing WERU program series including Northern Lights, Conversations on Science and Society, Sound Portrait of the Artist, Selections from the Camden Conference, others that will probably come to him after this is is posted, and, of course, Notes from the Electronic Cottage.
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