Eric Lander's great new podcast Brave New Planet

Utopia or dystopia? Between the promises of powerful new technologies like AI and the challenges of major problems like climate change, disinformation at scale, and wealth concentration, how we get to the future we want is a question I spend a lot of time thinking about these days.

It’s also the subject of Eric Lander’s great new podcast, "Brave New Planet," which features conversations we all should be having to ensure that science broadly benefits society.

As a pioneer in the field of human genome sequencing and the president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Eric has made it his life’s work to pursue scientific breakthroughs that improve the world at scale. But as he writes in a recent op-ed for the Boston Globe, he also recognizes we’re in the midst of an era where “just when we need science most, the compact between science and society has become dangerously frayed.”

In a highly polarized and politicized world, we must do more to re-establish what Eric describes as the fundamentals of science: Namely, “that truth comes from evidence, not authority; from honesty, not advocacy.”

Part of that process means having candid, evidence-driven discourse about the positive and negative impacts new technologies may have on society. That’s the domain of Brave New Planet, and I was pleased to participate as a guest in two of the podcast’s upcoming episodes.

The first one is Episode 2 of Brave New Planet's first season – "Deepfakes and the Future of Truth," in which I discuss some of the positive use cases that OpenAI’s new AI-driven text generator enables. The second, which will be posted soon, is Episode 5 – “Predictive Algorithms.”

Other upcoming episodes focus on the role of robots in warfighting, modifying the atmosphere as a way to mitigate climate change, and what can happen when you release new genetic technologies into the wild. I know I’ll be listening on a regular basis, because these are the conversations we need to be having to better understand the opportunities and challenges that face us as we attempt to create the future we want. For immediate access to new episodes as they are posted, subscribe here.