Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

I'm pleased to share this transcript of our discussion with Tom Nichols, author of the new book  The Death of Expertise . It's lightly edited. Please don't quote it without checking with the author. I'm grateful to our Editorial Assistant Hannah Reed, and Managing Research Assistant Adam Turosky, for working on the transcript. We had some audio problems (as you will see), but it's a key issue, brilliant book, and was a fascinating call! Best regards, Nigel Cameron President and CEO Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies Washington, DC 20002 Nigel Cameron: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this is Nigel Cameron from the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, we're glad to welcome you to this teleconference. We just finished a series of three, some of you will have been with us in those, on critical infrastructure resilience issues. We have a series upcoming which has yet to be announced on innovation for global development, w...

The Future of Warfare and the Responsibilities of Today's Brain Science Dr. James Giordano Recent articles in the French ( Les Echos ) and British press ( Daily Mail ) have reported that future wars will increasingly involve the use of ever more sophisticated combinations of neural, cognitive, and computational science and technology. Over the past decade, international advances in these areas are enabling greater capabilities to understand - and control - neurological processes of thought, emotion and behaviour, and the power conferred by this knowledge and control certainly has not been overlooked by a number of the world's militaries. Drugs and various forms of brain stimulation can be used to optimize the performance of military personnel, which some view as affording potential to create "super soldiers". What's more, brain science can be harnessed to develop weapons that act on the nervous system to produce profound physical effects, and in some cases...

I'm just back from the two events in Europe in which we partnered with our friends at Forum, the  8th Internet of Things European Summit on 4/19 and 20, and  Connected Cars Europe 2017 - on 5/11. Among other roles I was pleased to offer closing remarks at both these events, and thought you might be interested to see the comments I offered at the end of the cars conference. The "connected cars" phenomenon has proceeded at a remarkable pace. A new car today comes with between 100 and 200 million lines of code built-in. One presenter shared an early slide of cars as mobile phones; today they are fully-fledged PCs. The move to self-driving, already beginning, seems unstoppable. The link above will give you many more details, but suffice it to say that just as the equivalent event in Washington last year was opened by the then U.S. Secretary for Transportation, this Brussels conference began with a keynote from the European Transport Commissioner. Here are my ...