Futuropolis by Popular Science

Futuropolis by Popular Science

By Popular Science/PanoplySociety & Culture
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Futuropolis by Popular Science episodes

  • Bon Voyage

    Vacations are supposed to be about relaxation and rejuvenation, but anyone who has stood in the crowded lines at an amusement park or waded through the hordes of people at Disneyland knows that this is not always the case. In this episode of Futuropolis—the 12th and final episode of season 1—we set out to see how technology might help shape better vacations in the future.

    Transportation will inevitably get faster and cheaper, but we also hope it will be jet-lag-free. Hotels might transform their own furniture to make your room just the way you like it. And don’t worry—the good ol’ postcard isn’t going anywhere (aside from your Grandma’s mailbox).
    With our look back at the *Popular Science* archives, you can join us in the cockpit of the Concorde in 1973, before the supersonic plane would first carry its commercial passengers.
    Beyond these basic improvements, we want to know about some of the loftier goals. We talk space tourism with Phil McAlister, who works with commercial spaceflight at NASA. Virtual reality executive producer Christine Cattano explains how technology can entice and enhance our experiences of a place. And futurist Thomas Frey describes machines that could enable you to relax on a beach, from the comfort of your couch.
    But vacations aren’t just about relaxation, they’re also about status, says Greg Lindsay, a researcher, futurist and journalist. He says we’ll soon be inventing destinations with deeper and more authentic experiences than we can even imagine today.
    Buckle your seatbelts, loyal listeners. It’s going to be a wild ride!
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree, code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution. check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future. And also by Squarespace. Start building your website today at Squarespace.com. Enter offer code Future at checkout to get 10 percent off. Squarespace—build it beautiful.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    26 min
  • Thinking Outside the Cubicle

    Between traffic-clogged commutes, high stress jobs, and crappy coffee in the breakroom, the daily grind can be painful.

    Luckily, technology is paving the way for jobs you’ll actually be excited to do. Menial tasks like email can be automated. Decision-making can be done with artificial intelligence. And “deep learning” can teach robots to be creative and even generate ideas.
    Granted, automation is something Popular Science has been excited (and worried) about for decades, so we turn to our ever-entertaining archives for some historical guidance.
    The goal today is to integrate these technologies into the workplace in ways that make our jobs easier, safer, or more efficient (without making us humans obsolete). To find out how, we talk to Fumiya Iida, an engineer at the University of Cambridge who builds biologically inspired soft robots to work alongside people. Roboticist Hod Lipson of Columbia University talks up the promise of A.I doctors and lawyers. Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, tells us about how these shiny new technologies will soon become so integral to our lives that we’ll no longer notice they’re there.
    In the coming decades, our jobs, our offices, and even our commutes will likely become unrecognizable. To give us a behind-the-scenes view, Popular Science’s own futuristic information editor Katie Peek takes us on a tour of her ten second commute (via telepresence robot) from Baltimore to New York. And futurist Glen Hiemstra paints a verbal picture of what your next office might look like. (Spoiler alert: It could be on Mars!)
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree, code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution. check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future. And also by Squarespace. Start building your website today at Squarespace.com. Enter offer code Future at checkout to get 10 percent off. Squarespace—Build it beautiful.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    27 min
  • Clicks to Bricks

    For those of you who don’t enjoy wandering the aisles of the grocery store in search of soy sauce, or mailing back endless pairs of ill-fitting shoes bought online, we have good news for you: Shopping in the future is going to be so much easier than it is today.

    Between smartphones and tracking technologies, every trip to the store will be quick, efficient, and a heck of a lot smarter than it is today. Some retailers will even be able to anticipate your needs and take care of them for you.
    To get the inside scoop, we talk to Indiana University’s Ray Burke, who studies how customers think and behave. And we hear from Scott Emmons, who heads up innovation for Neiman Marcus, about the high-tech mirrors and tablets they’re bringing to their stores.
    And looking further into the future, we talked to the people who are actually making it happen: Devora Rogers and David Mounts at a tech company called Inmar. They are pretty excited about what technology could do for stores and the people who frequent them.
    And don’t forget our ever-entertaining Popular Science archives! The futuristic delivery methods we envisioned back in 1939 look a little different from the drones of today. That said, stores aren’t going away. They’re just going to appear in some really interesting new forms.
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree—code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution, check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future.
    This episode is also sponsored by The Message, a new podcast from GE Podcast Theater. Host Nicki Tomlin follows a team of elite cryptographers as they decode a highly classified radio transmission. To sum it up: extraterrestrials. Check out The Message, on iTunes.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    28 min
  • Winning the Numbers Game

    Basketball season is now in full swing. But here at Popular Science, we’re ahead of the game. We’re looking beyond 2015 to see what sports will look like 10, 20, or even 30 years down the road.

    In this episode of the podcast, we talk to Marcus Elliott, founder of the Peak Performance Project, or P3. The company uses a slew of data to build better athletes. And we hear from Ryan Warkins, who works at Catapult Sports, a company that tracks athletes with all kinds of sensors. We discuss how to keep star players injury-free and playing at their best.
    To figure out how to put together a team that works like a well-oiled machine, we talk to Dean Oliver, vice president of data science at TruMedia Networks. He says that numbers have a huge amount of power in sports but that it all comes down to how they’re analyzed.
    Looking back into the PopSci archives also brings up some painful (if hilarious) memories about how we used to train elite players back in the day. Take, for example, the basketball “bumpers” from April 1941, designed to protect your fragile eyeglasses. Or how about a high-tech training exercise using action figures from March, 1940?
    The ways we play (and watch) sports have come a long way in the past 75 years, and they’ll be changing even more going forward. Tune in to find out how.
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree—code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution, check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future.
    This episode is also sponsored by The Message, a new podcast from GE Podcast Theater. Host Nicki Tomlin follows a team of elite cryptographers as they decode a highly classified radio transmission. To sum it up: extraterrestrials. Check out The Message, on iTunes.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    25 min
  • The Prognosis is Good

    Being sick is no fun. There's nothing worse than a queasy tummy, or that pesky sniffle that just won’t go away. But what will illness look like in the future?

    Will we be dealing with the same old diseases? Or will we have engineered solutions to be super-human healthy? That’s what we’ll try to figure out in this episode of Futuropolis—the prognosis for future illnesses.
    Unfortunately, cancer isn’t going away anytime soon. But oncologist Jennie Crews tells us how our bodies can be persuaded to kill these out-of-control cells. On the other end of the life cycle, geneticist Santiago Munne describes a bizarre but not implausible vision of what baby-making might look like in just 20 years. And zooming out even further, David Morens, an NIH epidemiologist, talks about how humans and microbes have evolved together—sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.
    The archives are pretty optimistic about what modern medicine will be able to achieve. Whether or not our 1950's predictions are realistic, though, is another story.
    Plus we hear from the CDC’s deputy director Anne Schuchat, who describes what it’s like to be a disease detective working with microbial behavior she says is “stranger than fiction.”
     
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree—code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution, check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future.
    This episode is also sponsored by The Message, a new podcast from GE Podcast theater. Host Nicki Tomlin follows a team of elite cryptographers as they decode a highly classified radio transmission. To sum it up: extraterrestrials. Check out The Message, on iTunes.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    26 min
  • Show me the digital money!

    Money is one of those things you’re not supposed to talk about. It’s politically incorrect and often uncomfortable. But your favorite podcast hosts are bucking social conventions in this episode of Futuropolis to discuss how we’ll pay for things in the future.

    Futurist and IEEE member Heather Schlegel helps us understand why we have money in the first place,so we can see how that might change in our increasingly connected world. To take that threat further, Marla Blow, a partner at a finance investment company called Fenway Summer, envisions a world kids today might not even need to know how to swipe a credit card. And maybe paying for things will go away altogether. Virginia Heyburn, vice president of insights and advocacy at online banking tech company Fiserv gives us her predictions on that topic.  
    Of course, in typical retro style, our archives describe new-fangled ways to pay—some that have come to pass, and some that we would rather not experience firsthand.
    And finally, as digital wallets and Apple Pay become mainstream, the good old fashioned dollar is seeming less and less relevant. But it’s not going to go away completely. At least not according to Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. These investors/entrepreneurs say the dollar will go digital and start to look and act more like their cryptocurrency of choice: bitcoin.
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. Tune in every other Wednesday for more sneak peeks at the future.
     
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree, code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution, check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future.
    This episode is also sponsored by The Message, a new podcast from GE Podcast theater. Host Nicki Tomlin follows a team of elite cryptographers as they decode a highly classified radio transmission. To sum it up: extraterrestrials. Check out The Message, on iTunes.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    27 min
  • Talk Emoji to Me

    When you think about the future of language, you might worry that we’ll all walk around speaking in weird code. Or perhaps that we won’t speak at all, instead just texting each other all day. But fear not! In this episode of Futuropolis, we discover that the spoken word (and words in general) aren’t going anywhere. They’re just morphing in cool and crazy ways.

    To figure out technology’s role in the future of language, we talk to Fred Benenson, the author of How to Speak Emoji and Emoji Dick, as well as Jerome Pesenti, who’s working with IBM Watson to improve the language abilities of artificial intelligence.
    And to discover how the past informs the future, we dug into some particularly entertaining archival musings about universal languages and whether slang can really ruin English as we know it.
    For a glimpse at which languages will survive the test of time, and what the world will be speaking in the future, we talk to renowned linguist and political commentator John McWhorter (who you may know from his discussion on the racially charged meaning of the word “thug” following the Baltimore riots).
    Plus: Don’t miss our conversation with David J. Peterson, the man who creates fictitious languages for Hollywood movies and shows like Game of Thrones.
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree, code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution, check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    25 min
  • Finding Mr. (Swipe) Right

    In this episode of Futuropolis, we tackle the age old question: what is love? Okay, we don’t actually answer that question, but, we do talk to a sociologist at Tinder, the co-founder of OkCupid, and a sociologist who has studied how the ways through which we find mates has changed over time. Plus we take an entertaining look back at our archives to see why people were marrying young back in 1960. In the end, we think we have a pretty good handle of how technology is butting into our love lives. For better or for worse. (In sickness and in health.) And when all else fails, we ask Siri.

    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree, code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution. check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    25 min
  • Better, Stronger, Faster

    Could humans one day scrap our flesh-and-blood limbs for bionic ones? High-tech prosthetics are improving in leaps and bounds, so bionics seemed like the perfect topic for the fourth episode of our Futuropolis podcast. In the past few years, researchers have developed bionics that can act on signals from muscles--we talk to actress Angel Giuffria, who uses one--and even the brain. And we speak with a researcher who’s working on prosthetics that give the wearer a sense of touch.

    We also look at prosthetics from the past, when they were far less advanced. For that, we turn to a couple of 1940s stories in the Popular Science archives.
    But for the future, bionics could go beyond replacing body parts--and start augmenting them. As inventor Dean Kamen reminds us, this idea is not that crazy: If you’re reading this thanks to corrective lenses, you’re already participating in such a world.
    Hugh Herr, who co-directs the Center for Extreme Bionics at MIT and is a member of the IEEE, helps us see what that future will look like if bionics go even further. Plus, we dive into the philosophical questions of the difference between human and machine.
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree, code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution. check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    25 min
  • The Programmable Pooch

     

    During this exploration of everyday life in the future, we’re looking at pets. In the shiny world of tomorrow, you won’t be walking any old run-of-the-mill Fido—because we’ll have high-tech cuddling machines.
     
    Robot pets have graced the pages of Popular Science on more than a few occasions. But first, we had to figure out what people want in a pet. In 1893, we laid out the parameters for designing the ideal (live) pet. And things have only gotten more complicated—and interesting—from there. In the future, it won’t be so strange to have a pet that runs on batteries instead of kibble. And perhaps, instead of just keeping us company, they’ll also do our bidding.
     
    In this episode, we talk to Gail Melson, a psychologist at Purdue University who has studied how people react to real and robotic animals; Jean-Loup Rault, who researches animal behavior and welfare at the University of Melbourne in Australia; Dan Goldman, a physicist at the University of Georgia who designs robots that model real animals; and last but not least, Bill Smart, a roboticist at Oregon State University.
     
    If you’ve ever dreamed of having a dog that doesn’t need to be walked, a cat that doesn’t require a litter box, or a 3-D printed interactive unicorn, look no further.
     
    Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree, code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution. check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future.

    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

    26 min

About Futuropolis by Popular Science

From the publisher's feed

Hosted by Popular Science Assistant Editor Lindsey Kratochwill and Associate Editor Breanna Draxler, Futuropolis is a new podcast about everyday life in the future. We’ve always wondered what it will…