Flash Forward

What happens when everybody has 100% control over when they do or don’t have babies? We got to a world with perfect and accessible birth control. You asked for a utopia, and this is as close as we're going to get!Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we do something weird, in honor of the end of the second season! Instead of coming up with a future and then finding experts to talk about it, I asked an AI to write a future for us. And the AI apparently wants us to talk about space travel, witches, and the occult.  So here’s what happened in this episode. I asked Mike Rugnetta, the creator and host of PBS Idea Channel and Reasonably Sound, to help me create a script for Flash Forward. Mike had done this for his own channel a few months ago.  Around the same time that Idea Channel video came out there was this short film that came out called Sunspring which was written by an AI named Benjamin. The guys behind Benjamin fed a neural network a huge corpus of science fiction scripts, everything from Avatar to Armageddon to Resident Evil to Spiderman. And they asked that AI to write them a script. And then they spent one day with a cast, filming the movie that Benjamin wrote for them. I totally recommend watching it.  And so I thought, what if, I fed an AI

Today we go to a future where animal products are banned. It’s one that lots of listeners have asked for so here you go. We talk about what happens to the land, the animals and the humans in this equation.  In this episode we discuss the arguments in favor and against banning meat. How does that impact culture? Why should we do it? Does it help or hurt the environment? Can you really grow meat in a lab? And is that meat vegan?   First we talked to folks in the “ban the meat” camp. Marta Zaraska, the author of Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession With Meat, tells us about the evolution of meat consumption and why we don’t actually need meat to survive. Then, David Agranoff, the author of The Vegan Revolution with Zombies, makes the vegan argument.   Then we talk about the environmental argument in favor of kicking our global meat habit. And as promised here are the citations for the statistics I talk about.  In 2014, the entire world produced 315.3 million tonnes of meat from c

Today we try to figure out what happens when our future presidential candidates have thousands of Tweets and Tumblr posts and Instagrams in their online record.   What happens, when today’s teens start running for office? When their entire internet history is there, searchable, for us to read? What if these teens Tweet something at 15 that they might regret at 45? Do we learn to accept that their opinions have changed? Or do we go through every candidate's entire social media history to find dirt on them? Does that tactic still work in the future? Or do we all just throw up our hands and admit that teens have bad opinions and that hopefully those opinions have changed?   To find out, I talked to a real live young person with political ambitions, Eve Zhurbinskiy a student at George Washington University. She describes her own social media strategy, and how she never Tweets without thinking about how it might come back to bite her. She also talks about going back and deleting Facebook posts and even in one case

Today we travel to a future where all drugs are legal. Just roll up to the store, and get yourself some cocaine!  We start with some history: for centuries a world without drug laws existed. Mark Kleiman, a professor at NYU who studies drug policy, explains that fear of drugs, and the desire to regulate them, really started in the last 1800’s. The rise of industry, advances in chemistry, and the invention of the hypodermic needle all fueled a rise in drug use and in drug fears.   Today, of course, some drugs are legal and others aren’t. Alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and pharmaceuticals are all legal. You probably already know what’s not.   But why are certain drugs legal in the United States and others not? The answer isn’t really science or public health research, but rather historical precedent and racism. Maia Szalavitz, the author of a book called Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, walks us through some of the racist campaigns against drugs that linked most of them with “viol

Today a future without schools. Instead of gathering students into a room and teaching them, everybody learns on their own time, on tablets and guided by artificial intelligence.  First, I talk to a Ashok Goel, a computer scientist who developed an artificially intelligent TA named Jill Watson and didn’t tell any of his students she wasn’t a human.   Then I talk to two people building future, app based educational systems. Jessie Woolley-Wilson from DreamBox explains what adaptive learning is, and how it can help create a better learning experience for kids. She also talks about all the data they collect on kids to better serve them (data we’ll come back to later in the episode.) Along with Jessie, Julia Stiglitz from Coursera explains how this kind of self-directed learning can extend into the college and post-college world.   Jessie and Julia see a future with these kinds of learning apps that could be more democratic, more creative, more fun and more effective. But there are some downsides too. Neither of

Today week we take on a doomsday future! We haven’t done one of those this season. So, what would happen if all the active volcanoes in the world erupted at the same time? The short answer is: bad things. The long answer is, well, you’ll have to listen to the episode!  First we talk to Jessica Ball, a volcanologist, who walks us through the different types of eruptions, what make something an active volcano, and just how bad ash is. Spoiler: it’s really bad. It gums up engines, cuts up your lungs, and is so heavy that it can collapse buildings.  But the destruction of a massive volcanic eruption doesn’t stop there. Oh no. Then Ball tells us about the ways in which volcanoes can actually impact the climate. In fact, in 1815, a single volcanic eruption at Mount Tambora caused the entire Northern Hemisphere to experience “A Year Without a Summer,” resulting in famine, death, and Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. (You’ll have to listen to the podcast to get that particular story.)  So how does one live through this kin

Today we go to a future where all pop stars use avatars, clones, robots or cartoons instead of their real bodies and faces. What does that do to music? Can everybody pull off an avatar? And why would any pop star even want that?   We start with a conspiracy theory. Jaya Saxena tells us about the theory that Beyonce is a clone. And one of the reasons Jaya thinks that people might think Beyonce is using a clone is because she’s so private, and hates doing press stuff. Which of course is not the case, Beyonce may seem perfect but she is in fact a single human woman.   But the idea that a pop star might want to use a clone or avatar to do some of the more boring and annoying tasks required of pop stars: red carpets, meet and greets, constant interviews, is believable. Kelsey McKinney, a culture writer at Fusion, says that most of the pop stars she’s interviewed would absolutely take an out if they were given one. She tells us about what the grind of pop-stardom is really like, and why so many stars eventually do

Today we travel to a future where it’s possible to know exactly when you will die. Do you chose to find out?  Now, this is, impossible. Totally impossible. And I’m not even going to try and come up with some strange pseudoscientific explanation for how this might happen. It’s not a thing. Just go with me here. Some people asked for more weird episodes this season, so, here you go!   We start the episode talking to Chanel Reynolds, the founder of a site called Get Your Shit Together which helps people get their shit together around death and dying. Stuff like: writing a living will, getting it executed, getting disability insurance, putting together an emergency plan, all that shit that, if you’re like me, you do not have together. Chanel started Get Your Shit Together a few years after losing her husband to a sudden accident, and realizing that she really didn’t know what to do, and didn’t have any of her own shit together.  And she tells us about all the reasons it’s good to think about your own death, even

Today we travel to a world with universal translation devices. Where the babelfish from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes true (although probably not in the form of an evolved organism, but let's not fret about the details).   We start this episode with Barry Slaughter Olsen, who's the co-president of Interpret America. Barry tells us all about what interpreting and translation actually is, and why it will be really hard to replace human translation with machines.  Then we talked to Julie Sedivy, a writer and language scientist based in Calgary. She helps us think about what these kinds of devices might do for language loss and cultural assimilation of immigrants. Do people still learn English when they move to America or Canada?  Last we talked to Erin McKean, the editor of Wordnik, the world's largest English Language dictionary. She walks us through a ton of fun future possibilities like branded Taylor Swift language plugins and online translation truthers.  Links and references mentioned in today

Today we travel to a future where America has converted to a direct democracy. Everybody votes on everything!   Hey, did you know it was an election year in the United States? I know, you've probably not really heard about this, it's not like it's on the news 24/7. But for all the coverage and the fights you might be getting into on Facebook, tons of people in the United States aren't going to vote in this election. The Pew Research Center has some pretty depressing statistics on just how many Americans go to the polls every year.  People in the U.S. don't vote for a lot of reasons. The main one is time. But the second most common answer (16 percent) that Americans give, when asked by the Census Bureau why they don't vote, is that they weren't interested. And eight percent of people said they didn't vote because they didn't like the candidates or the issues.  It's no secret that Americans hate their government. In 2015, a Gallup poll estimated that only eight percent of Americans have faith in Congress as an

Okay, you asked for it, and I finally did it. Today’s episode is about conscious artificial intelligence. Which is a HUGE topic! So we only took a small bite out of all the things we could possibly talk about.  We started with some definitions. Because not everybody even defines artificial intelligence the same way, and there are a ton of different definitions of consciousness. In fact, one of the people we talked to for the episode, Damien Williams, doesn’t even like the term artificial intelligence. He says it’s demeaning to the possible future consciousnesses that we might be inventing.   But before we talk about consciousnesses, I wanted to start the episode with a story about a very not-conscious robot. Charles Isbell, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, first walks us through a few definitions of artificial intelligence. But then he tells us the story of cobot, a chatbot he helped invent in the 1990’s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today we travel to a fully digital world, a world where paper is a thing of the past.   On this show we’ve tackled a huge range of futures — we’ve talked about things that are extremely likely, like, antibiotic resistance, and we’ve also talked about things that are simply never going to happen. Like space pirates dragging a second moon to earth for some reason.  And when I started working on this episode, I assumed that this future was more on the likely end of the spectrum. Maybe not in a few years, but eventually, we’ll probably stop using paper, right? Well, pretty much everybody I talked to said I was wrong.  The first person we talk to in this episode is Michael Makin, the President and CEO of Printing Industries of America, an organization that represents the printers all over the United States. And Printing Industries of America isn’t the only organization out there trying to keep printing alive. In 2014, a group called Two Sides launched a campaign arguing that companies who advertised paperless bill

Today’s episode is a minipod, a smattering of time travel, future travel, and news about the show.  In this episode we hear a bunch of messages from listeners: what folks think about past futures we’ve been to, and future futures we should travel to.   We also cover some show news! So, in bullet point form:  Some of you might be new to the show this season. Maybe you didn’t even know this was the second season! Well, it is! Season one is available on Soundcloud, where you can download all the episodes for listening purposes.  The show now has a subreddit! So if you like Reddit and you want to talk about the show there, we’re at r/FlashForwardPod. I have some plans for the subreddit, including maybe some AMAs with guests of the show, and just general discussions of each future, and all that stuff. We also now have an online store! Where you can buy stuff! Right now there are a couple of different versions of the logo that you can put on anything from a tote bag to a mug to a cell phone case. It’s all very cool

Today we travel to a future without pets. What would it take for us to give up our fuzzy, slithery, fishy friends? Should our pets get more rights? And if we didn’t have dogs or cats, would we domesticate something else to take their place?  This week's episode name is perhaps the worst pun I've ever committed. Sorry not sorry.  Anyway. In this episode pets are outlawed, gone, we don't have them anymore. No more dogs, cats, fish, birds, bunnies, none of them. This might seem like a really outlandish future, who actually wants us to stop having pets? Well, it turns out, this actually something that some people currently do advocate for.  To find out more about folks who argue that we should try to phase out pets, I talked to Doris Lin. She's an animal rights attorney and used to write the animal rights section for About.com. And she explains in the episode that she really does think that we should phase out pets.  But she also wants to clarify something: she’s not about to show up at your door and confiscate y

Today we travel to a future full of spreadsheet approved lives. A future where everything we do is tracked and quantified: calories, air quality, sleep, heart rate, microbes, brain waves, finances, happiness, sadness, menstrual cycles, poops, hopes and dreams. Everything.  This episode is longer than our usual 20 minute jaunts to the future, because the future of quantified self is so huge. We cover everything from biased algorithms, to microbiomes (again), to the future of the calorie, and more.  The first person we talk to this week is Chris Dancy, who is basically living in this future today. He’s been called the most quantified man in the world. Every day Chris wears and carries around over thirty devices that track everything from his heart rate to his brain waves. You can see a live stream of his data here. Chris started tracking his life in 2008, and has upgraded his system continuously to become more streamlined and include more forms of data.  But, as I was watching a few of these videos (including t

Today we travel to a future where your microbiome becomes a key part of your identity. From health to your child’s kindergarten, here are all the ways knowing about your microbiome might impact your life.   Let’s start with a definition: what is the microbiome? Simply put, the microbiome is the collection of microbes (mostly bacteria) that live in and on your body. It’s hard to say exactly how many microbes make up the human microbiome, but researchers estimate that somewhere between 500 and 1,000 different species of bacteria live in the human gut. And that’s just the gut, there are microbial communities in our mouths, on our skin, in the vagina, all over the place. To put things in another perspective, the average human body is made up of 30 trillion cells. And on top of those 30 trillion cells, the average human also carries around in and on it, 40 trillion bacteria. 40 Trillion!  To learn how those 40 trillion cells might be leveraged in the future, we talked to Ed Yong, the author of the upcoming book I

Today we travel to a future where humans have decided to eradicate the most dangerous animal on the planet: mosquitos. How would we do it? Is it even possible? And what are the consequences?   Mosquitos have worked hard to earn the nickname “deadliest animal on earth.” According to the World Health Organization there are 20 million cases of dengue virus every year. And there are 214 million cases of malaria, 438,000 of which are deadly. In the United States, an outbreak of West Nile Virus that started in 1999 infected 41,000 people and killed 1700 of them. Since 2005, there have been 1.9 million cases of Chickungunya virus documented in East Asia, and as of last year 1.3 million cases of the virus had been documented in the US and Latin America. Yellow Fever infects 200,000 people every year, and kills about 30,000 of those people.   All of these diseases are carried by mosquitos. For comparison, snakes kill about 50,000 people a year. Humans kill about 475,000 other humans every year. And mosquitos, all told

Today we travel to a future without lies. What would it be like if we all wore accurate lie detectors around all the time?  In this episode we talk about when children learn to lie, the different social functions of lying, and what might happen if we couldn’t ever fib. How would negotiations be different? How would we make small talk? Could we create art or music? All that and more in this week’s future.   This week’s show features four experts in the different facets of deception. Patti Wood is an expert in detecting non-verbal cues. She told me about her work, and the ways she uses body language to try and tell if someone is lying. Maria Konnikova is a journalist and the author of a book called The Confidence Game, all about con artists and people who are really good at lying. She says that while many of the people her book is about would have been thwarted, there would be serious downsides to not being able to lie to one another. Michael Lewis has studied lying and childhood development for over fifty year

Right now there’s a whole lot of buzz about sex robots. Some people are really excited about them, and think we’ll be marrying robots by 2050. Other people are really worried about them, and are organizing whole campaigns against sex robots. This week, we travel to a future where sex robots are realized, and talk about everything from warranties to ethics.   [A note: if you listen to our show with or near young kids be aware that today’s episodes discusses the future of sex, and goes into some detail about sex toys, sex work and other sexy time things. If your kiddos are ready for a calm, reasonable discussion of sex and the sex industry, carry on! If you’re not there yet, that’s cool, but maybe skip this one.]  This week we have three experts helping us think through how we get to sex robots, and what we do when we get there. A.V. Flox is journalist who covers the intersection of sex, law and technology. She is very skeptical of all the sexbot hype, and says we have a long way to go before we’ll see anything