Rapid advances in robotics and artificial intelligence means that soon, many jobs we see today will be taken over by machines.

This a prospect which might very well strike fear in the hearts of those listening as everyone from lorry-drivers to lawyers to doctors might be affected.

But what if the automation of work was not something to be feared, but welcomed? 

What would a work-free world be like? And what would we do instead?

Dr John Danaher, Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at NUI Galway and author of Automation & Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work joins Jonathan to discuss a world without work.

We have some bad news for you. Some REALLY bad news. Stay calm, don’t panic but our Universe is dying.

There is a silver lining though. It’s not going to happen for trillions of years.

But why is it dying, how do we know that and what does it even mean to say a universe can die?

Paul Sutter is an Astrophysicist at Ohio State University and author of Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence

First Aired: 3/11/18

Earlier in the month Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz were two of the three recipients of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics. 

Mayor and Queloz received the award for their discovery of the first exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star. 

That discovery was made in 1995 at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence and was the first of thousands of such discoveries.

The search continues to this day and among those on the lookout for new worlds is Dr. Emma Whelan from the Department of Experimental Physics in Maynooth University.

She joined Jonathan to discuss our search for planets beyond our Solar System from the place where it all began, the Observatoire de Haute-Provence.

The term “sliding doors moment” entered the lexicon on the back of the 1998 movie starring Gywneth Paltrow.

This idea of the varying paths our lives may have taken makes for an interesting thought experiment, an in depth philosophical discussion or in this case, a mediocre romantic comedy but could it be much more than that? 

Could Sliding Doors have been the most accurate representation of reality ever to hit the silver screen?

One person who may just think so is Sean Carroll. He is a physicist and author of Something Deeply Hidden.

When is a woman really a man? Can you be born with a penis and still be biologically female?

There is in humans, actually quite a wide spectrum of gender.

Alice Dreger is a Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University and Author of Galileo's Middle Finger

First Aired: 02/5/2015

Healthcare has long been associated with one-on-one interactions between patient and doctor.

An intimate and deeply personal relationship based on trust at times when we are most vulnerable.

But what if that relationship was not only going to change irrevocably in the future, but had already begun to do so?

Far from the days of WebMD - Telemedicine is expanding far beyond interactions between physicians and patients into entirely new ways of delivering healthcare and practice medicine and is changing the way we receive healthcare in ways we could not have dreamed of in the past.

Professor Barry O’Reilly, Director of ASSERT, Clinical Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at University College Cork joined Jonathan in studio to discuss.

There has much said on to the issue of car pooling in rural Ireland after comments from the leader of the Green party on Ireland AM on Virgin Media One this week caused quite a stir

Susan is joined by Eamon Ryan himself and Independent TD for Kerry Michael Healty Rae to discuss the issue

Is there anybody out there in the universe? It’s a question humans have probably always asked but we’ve only really started looking in the last 100 years or so.

Most of us are vaguely familiar with SETI and what it does but what sort of signals are we actually looking for? What messages are we sending to ET? And what are the chances of us understanding each other?

Daniel Oberhaus is a writer with Wired and author of Extraterrestrial Languages

Are you good with names or faces? Maybe you're good with both.

Some people, 'super-recognisers' even have the ability to recognise and remember the faces of people they met years ago, sometimes only fleetingly.

But for many people the reality it is quite the opposite.

Such is the case for those suffering from 'prosopagnosia', or 'face-blindness', which makes it difficult to distinguish between faces of even those you've known your entire life.

On this week's Futureproof Gold episode, Jonathan speaks to Brad Duchaine, Chair and Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College to find out more.

First aired Saturday, November 19th 2016

Computers and AI have long been a part of our workplace, our education system and more recently our social lives

And as AI improves our relationships with it becomes ever more involved.

Artificial Intelligence will probably take most of our jobs but will it also take our romantic partners?

Dr Kevin Koidl, lead researcher on the Heliosphere project from Trinity’s School of Computer Science and Statistics and the ADAPT Centre was in studio where Jonathan asked the question: 'Could we replace our partners with a robot?'