The Future of Everything

Sarah Billington began her career in civil engineering studying concrete, a remarkable material that has literally shaped the world as we know it.

Concrete is one of the most-consumed materials on Earth — second only to water, but this one material alone is also responsible for 6 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere.

That cold realization and a dispiriting morning meeting spent in a bunkerlike concrete-walled room led Billington to alter her research focus. She now studies how we can construct buildings designed to enhance human health and well-being. As a part of their research for the Stanford Catalyst for Collaborative Solutions, Billington and James Landay are co-leading efforts to better understand how buildings could be central contributors to our sense of fulfillment in life. From artistic, behavior-nudging digital displays to spaces that inspire a sense of belonging and creativity, tune in as host Russ Altman and Sarah Billington discuss a new and more holistic approach to building design.

You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.

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Over the last three-quarters of a century, global corporations have lost sight of their broader role in society and now are focused almost exclusively on serving their shareholders.

That reality has had dire consequences for the workers of the world who are, quite literally, dying for a job, says guest Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Pfeffer says the workplace is the fifth leading cause of death and that as many as 1 million people worldwide die each year from overwork. The biggest culprits are long hours and micromanagement that leave workers both exhausted and unsatisfied.

Pfeffer insists that breaking the deadly cycle rests in encouraging companies to be as good at stewarding human capital as they are at financial capital. It all begins by getting a better handle on the problem through more research. Because, Pfeffer says, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.

You can listen to the Future of Everything on Sirius XM Insight Channel 121, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stanford Engineering Magazine.

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Populism can be a powerful force in a democratic society.

But according to Anna Grzymala-Busse, a Stanford professor of political science and senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, once in power populists often implement authoritarian policies that threaten the very foundations of democracy itself.

Grzymala-Busse says that the antidote to authoritarianism is to defend democratic norms, to speak out and to vote. She discusses the issue in this episode of The Future of Everything radio show with host Russ Altman.

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From Bitcoin theft to the embarrassing revelations in the Sony Pictures hacking to the recent assault on the U.S. election, the threats of international cyberattack are growing in both number and consequence.

As our technology steadily becomes more cloud based, these threats will only grow and could be soon be directed at fundamental institutions we all trust and rely upon, including the electrical grid and our financial systems.

Our guest in this episode of The Future of Everything radio show is Andrew Grotto, the William J. Perry International Security Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) and a reserach fellow at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford. Grotto was senior director for cybersecurity policy in both the Obama and Trump administrations. He says that successfully counteracting these looming threats is among the most serious and challenging issues of the present day. Grotto cautions that it is not just a technical challenge anymore, but a matter of national security that will require American resilience, leadership and a return to the basic norms of civil discourse.

Join Russ Altman and Andrew Grotto for a clear-eyed look at the challenges of cybersecurity in the era of cloud computing. Listen here on the latest episode of The Future of Everything radio show.

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Beginning in the 1980s, medical doctors started treating pain with increasing amounts of opioid medications.

That shift was driven in part by an effort by the profession to be more humane to those in serious pain, but also by misinformation and aggressive marketing by the pharmaceutical industry, which wrongly convinced doctors that their drugs were both safe and not addictive.

According to Anna Lembke, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, those changes wrought the current opioid crisis in which millions are addicted to heroin-like medications and many more are dead from overdoses caused by unregulated, immensely powerful street drugs.

Lembke tells Altman their profession is slowly reckoning with a long-simmering problem of their own making by questioning the indiscriminate prescription of opioids and by championing new approaches to dealing with addiction, including more behavioral dependencies like those to sex and gambling.

A prescription for addiction is on the table in the latest episode of The Future of Everything radio show with host Russ Altman.

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When Stanford’s Martha Crenshaw, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and an expert on terrorism, is asked if she thinks terrorism is evolving, growing more widespread, violent and shocking by the year, she has one response: It’s complicated.

She says that many of those trends are true, but they are driven both by the intense motivation of the terrorists and by their ability to broadcast images and messages across the world in a flash. This ability to communicate, she says, is both a tool to shock opponents and to recruit adherents. When combined, the result is a more-violent violence.

The obvious question soon follows: How can we fight terrorism? Crenshaw says that it is unlikely that terrorism will ever end, but one path to reducing its influence lies in resolving many of the civil struggles that make it a compelling option for so many organizations throughout the world.

Join host Russ Altman and terrorism expert Martha Crenshaw for a wide-ranging look at terrorism today, on The Future of Everything radio show from Stanford School of Engineering.

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Can an expectant mother’s exposure to air pollutants or even extreme temperatures impact her unborn child’s earning potential 30 years later?

Can paid family leave improve workforce attachment for new mothers?

According to Maya Rossin-Slater, economist and an assistant professor of health research and policy at Stanford School of Medicine, the answer to these and other questions is “yes.” She says that research on these topics can provide policy makers with more comprehensive information on the costs and benefits in their decision-making, which is especially important for policies that have disproportionate effects on the less affluent.

Rossin-Slater says, for instance, that just 14% of Americans have access to paid family leave from their employers and the numbers grow starker the further down the economic ladder a new parent happens to be. The consequences are hurting not just future generations of Americans, but also American businesses, she says.

On this episode of The Future of Everything, host Russ Altman and Rossin-Slater discuss the many ways public policy decisions can affect families and America’s poor.

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It may not be widely known, but before he launched Apple, Steve Jobs lived for a year on a commune.

The fact that he became one of the wealthiest capitalists in America, however, should not surprise anyone who knows anything about the antecedents of Silicon Valley, says Stanford’s Fred Turner, professor of communication and history.

The truth is that there is a strong countercultural thread running through the fabric of today’s digital world. From “phreaking” scams of the long-distance telephone system to the Whole Earth Catalog, those who sought to disrupt society often found comfort in computers. For proof, one need only consider the Utopian ideals that led to the ascendancy of the internet itself — universal, free and limitless. Seen in that light, Facebook is about as communal as it comes. Nonetheless, while all that freedom has made many people very rich, very fast, it has not come without a cost to our social consciousness and our social fabric, says Turner.

In this episode of The Future of Everything radio show, Russ Altman and Fred Turner look at the somewhat surprising communal roots of today’s social, digital world. Tune in, if you dig.

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From Oculus Rift to Samsung VR, the era of virtual reality is right around the corner, if not already upon us.

But what are the psychological impacts of VR and what are the best uses of this much-hyped technology — the “killer apps,” as they say?

Jeremy Bailenson is a professor of communication at Stanford and author of the new book, Experience on Demand. He has been studying virtual reality and its effects on humans since 1999. Back then, his dream was to create virtual office spaces that might absolve people of the need to commute every day. These days, he studies how to make virtual reality even realer and which uses are closest to becoming the indispensable apps that could turn VR from a curiosity to a must-have in every home and office.

From exploring the subtleties of virtual donuts to the most effective ways to teach, Bailenson says the best uses of VR may not be those that leap immediately to mind. Join The Future of Everything host Russ Altman and Bailenson for a grand tour of the very latest in virtual reality.

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As the global population approaches 10 billion and the effects of climate change continue to alter familiar agricultural patterns, the world is already witnessing a transformation in how and where it gets its food.

Even diets are changing as people move away from traditional animal proteins, like beef and pork, to fish and vegetable sources.

Stanford’s Roz Naylor, the director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment, says those shifts could lead to a world that looks a lot different than today. For instance, Naylor says that aquaculture, better known as fish farming, is now the fastest growing sector of the global food industry. And, thanks to changes in the industry, rapidly growing Africa stands to become a hotspot for agricultural entrepreneurs.

On this episode of “The Future of Everything” radio show, Naylor discusses these and the many other ways in which the business of feeding the world is changing right before our eyes.

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