Changesurfer Radio

Empathy moves us, but it may move us to make an unethical decision. Conversely, says Bloom, dehumanization is not the ultimate evil we typically assume it to be.

Is the technology of the future more radical than the technology of the past? Alison Gopnik provides some historical perspective.

Nature is wonderfully abundant, diverse and mysterious — but biological research today tends to focus on only seven species, including rats, chickens, fruit flies and us. We’re studying an astonishingly narrow sliver of life, says biologist Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, and hoping it’ll be enough to solve the oldest, most challenging problems in science, like cancer. In this visually captivating talk, Alvarado calls on us to interrogate the unknown and shows us the remarkable discoveries that surface when we do.

Every year the silicon computer chip shrinks in size by half and doubles in power, enabling our devices to become more mobile and accessible. But what happens when our chips can’t get any smaller? George Tulevski researches the unseen and untapped world of nanomaterials. His current work: developing chemical processes to compel billions of carbon nanotubes to assemble themselves into the patterns needed to build circuits, much the same way natural organisms build intricate, diverse and elegant structures. Could they hold the secret to the next generation of computing?

Today nine nations collectively control more than 15,000 nuclear weapons, each hundreds of times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We don’t need more nuclear weapons; we need a new generation to face the unfinished challenge of disarmament started decades ago. Nuclear reformer Erika Gregory calls on today’s rising leaders — those born in a time without Cold War fears and duck-and-cover training — to pursue an ambitious goal: ridding the world of nuclear weapons by 2045.

Dr. J. talks to Robin Marantz Henig on her book Pandora’s Baby, a story about the moral panic around the first “test-tube babies,” born from in-vitro fertilization. (First broadcast March 13, 2004.)

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Dr. J. talks to Richard Samson, a futurist, author of a number of books on human potential and director of the EraNova Institute. In Mind over Technology, Mr. Samson argues that, as machines automate routine physical and intellectual labor, human beings will be able to enhance their unique human capacities to find new niches in the economy. (First broadcast March 20, 2004)

Dr. J. chats with Erik Helzer (Dept of Psychology, Cornell University) co-author of the paper “Dirty Liberals!: Reminders of physical cleanliness influence moral and political attitudes” in Psychological Science. They discuss the growing literature on the ways that political attitudes are driven by disgust sensitivity, and by disgust priming such as bad smells and sticky hands.  Listen also to the 2004 Changesurfer interview with Martha Nussbaum about her book Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law. (First broadcast April 5, 2011)

For Valentine’s Day, Dr. J. talks with Katherine Gates, author of Deviant Desires: Incredibly Strange Sex, and founder of Gates of Heck Press, about the boundary between sexual variation and psychopathology, the political correctness of S&M, the market for erotic genetic engineering, and the joying of blowing up and popping balloons. (Originally broadcast February 14, 2004)

Bostrom speaks on the illusiveness of “human dignity” and the dignity to be found in enhancements. (Originally broadcast Aug 23, 2003)