In this special edition of the Futurists, media expert Peter Csathy debates with Rob about copyright and generative AI. It’s a preview of their upcoming live debate at the Streaming Media summit in New York. Peter and Rob discuss the major issues in copyright, the most contentious lawsuits, and the most relevant precedents. If you…

AI safety pioneer Roman Yampolskiy believes that artificial intelligence presents a challenge unlike anything humanity has ever faced. He says we have just one chance to get it right. A single AI model can cause an existential crisis, and there are already more than 500,000 open source AI models available. In his view, the AI…

What’s next for retail shops and shopping malls? The previous decade was excruciating for national retail chains. Steve Dennis, the author of Remarkable Retail and Leaders Leap, explains how shopping will evolve in the aftermath of pandemic, e-commerce and the “collapse of the middle”. Why Amazon gets too much blame and the real reason why…

For decades, we cursed at evil cable and satellite TV companies. Now TV has been “unbundled.” Streaming on-demand video is available on every device. Surprise, surprise, nobody is happy. The cost of television has skyrocketed, audiences are fragmented across hundreds of services, and it’s a pain to find what we want to watch. Veteran TV…

Dr. Markku Wilenius is the Unesco Chair in Learning Society and Futures Education. This week on The Futurists, Markku shares his global perspective on emerging trends and regional conflicts, including the fate of the EU, the newly-active BRICs, Chinese military projection, the end of US hegemony, the emergence of new trade blocks and what lies…

Capitalism is dead, according to Yanis Varoufakis, the author of Technofeudalism. This week on The Futurists you’ll learn about the dramatic reconfiguration of the global economy, whereby profit has been replaced by rents and a flood of central bank money, leading to bigger bubbles and worse crises than ever before. Yanis calls this new system…

What’s next in robotics with Marc Theermann, the Chief Strategy Officer of Boston Dynamics. Known as “the Bell Labs of robotics”,  this firm is famous for its mechanical menagerie of legged robots that includes Spot, Atlas, Stretch.  These autonomous robots can go anywhere a human can go, and to many places humans cannot, including mine…

Mark Pesce returns to The Futurists with a report about weird and wonderful discoveries at the 2024 Consumer Electronics Show. Every year, 200,000 people converge at CES in Las Vegas to get a glimpse of the near future. Mark pushes far beyond mainstream press coverage to tell us about bleeding-edge progress in memristor chips, brain-computer…

Boaz Ashkenazy is the CEO and founder of Simply Augmented. He’s on a mission to equip small and medium sized companies with AI superpowers. Boaz talks to the Futurists about the prospect of fully automated corporations, digitally augmented workforce, and how every company can get started on the process of AI reinvention. 

Tech entrepreneur Byron Reese has a pragmatic approach to the future. He has launched several startup companies, exiting three via M&A and two via IPO. He’s also the author of several books, including his newest, Agora. Byron spoke to the Futurists about superintelligence, collective intelligence, super organisms, and emergence. What can human organizations learn from…

Tracey Follows, the author and podcaster of The Future of You, explains how your digital identity will evolve. Custodial or self-sovereign? Centralized or Web3? Big Brother-style surveillance capitalism or liberty? What do we mean by digital identity when there is no government-issued credential?  

Former CIA undercover operative Valerie Plame exposes the future of espionage and spy craft. The advent of artificial intelligence, especially deep fakes and a flood of disinformation, has made the task of  gathering reliable intelligence exponentially more difficult, with big implications for democracies. Listen to this episode to learn about the 17 US intelligence agencies,…