Patt Morrison for Tuesday, November 9, 2010

PATT MORRISON SCHEDULE

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

1-3 p.m.

 

CALL-IN @ 866-893-5722, 866-893-KPCC; OR JOIN THE CONVERSATION ONLINE ON THE PATT MORRISON BLOG AT KPCC-DOT-ORG

 

 

 

1:06 – 1:39

OPEN

 

 

1:41 – 1:58:30

Who likes new, opaque bank fees?

 

Guests:

TBD

 

 

2:06 – 2:39

Dodging death – is radical life extension too radical?

How old is too old?  Some scientists think the body has a metabolic stop-sign at about age 122; others think that through new technologies, genetics, and robotics we can expand our longevity to a quarter of a century.  And one man thinks immortality is possible -- that the first human who will reach 1000 years of age has already been born.  But with great age our assumptions of life, family, work, taxes, government, health, sex… our humanness…would change.  Are you ready for the long life?

 

Guests:

Joel Garreau, Professor of Law, Culture and Values and Director, The Prevail Project: Wise Governance for Challenging Futures, at Arizona State University. His latest book is Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What it Means to be Human.

CALL HIM:

• Is interested in culture and values, who we are, how we got that way, what makes us tick – the future of human nature. (Doesn’t care about the medical technology.)
• Feels we’re entering period of “grim” technologies – genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnology, which are the basis of changing our human longevity, maybe our humanness.

 

 

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a biomedical gerontologist, a Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation, where he works to develop, promote and ensure widespread access to rejuvenation biotechnologies.

CALL HIM:

 

• Believes man can live to be 1000 years old.

• The editor of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s only peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging, he is an advocate of research seeking answers to how molecular and cellular metabolic damage brings about aging and ways humans can intervene to repair and/or obviate that damage. He is founder of the Methuselah Foundation, which is dedicated to significantly extending the healthy lifespan of humanity.

 

 

 

2:41 – 2:58:30

It’s a bird, it’s a plane….it’s an unmanned aerial drone spying on me

Up until now unmanned aerial vehicles were these exotic machines used in times of war to spy on enemies or take them out altogether, but think of the endless applications of airborne craft that are small, maneuverable and free of those pesky pilots.  From airborne traffic analysts watching over the freeway networks of L.A. to child monitors for nervous parents, UAV’s can be used in a whole host of scenarios that can truly benefit society; they can also be used in all kinds of nefarious, or at least tasteless, ways that compromise privacy and safety, from flying paparazzi to airborne spies for private investigators.  As UAV technology becomes cheaper and more widely accessible, the dawn of the widespread commercial use of drones is coming fast.  Already paparazzi firms are contracting researchers to work on small, quiet drones that could hover over a celebrity’s house all day and commercial security groups are looking for drones to replace stationary cameras.  Don’t look now, but that could be a drone following you home tonight.

 

Guests:

UNCONFIRMED

Missy Cummings, director of the Humans & Automation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; principal investigator, Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

CALL HER:

 

 

Jonathan Serviss

Producer, Patt Morrison Program

Southern California Public Radio

NPR Affiliate for Los Angeles

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jserviss@kpcc.org / jserviss@scpr.org

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