Unbox Your World

18/04/2022

What if we could combine the best out of ancient direct democracy and modern delegative democracy? Where you can vote for representatives in regular elections but override their votes on any specific topic when you disagree with your representative?

This is something that David Ernst, CEO of Secure Internet Voting, Liquid Democracy Technologies, and Secure ID, set out as a mission to build. By building a modern technological platform his company is enabling states to integrate liquid democracy solutions into their already existing democratic systems.

You’ll learn:

What liquid democracy is

The role of blockchain in a liquid democracy voting system

How liquid democracy could change the political landscape

How the role of politicians could change in a liquid democracy system

David has spent a decade building empowering software across many fields, including social coordination, cryptography, finance, education, and more. He ran for the California Statehouse in 2018 as one of more than a dozen digital democracy candidates.

17/04/2022

How can you unlock your hidden creative genius?

Today's guest is Stephan Schwartz, who is a scientist, futurist, award-winning author, columnist for the journal EXPLORE, and editor of the daily web publication Schwartzreport.net. He is a Distinguished Consulting Faculty of Saybrook University, and a BIAL Foundation Fellow who has spent 40 years as an experimentalist researching the nature of consciousness. He has also studied creativity and found during his research a pattern that all creative geniuses throughout history seem to follow.

In today’s episode, he shares the secret path and what you need to do to unlock your creative genius inside you.

You’ll learn:

How you can unlock the hidden path to creativity

What the most common blocker to creativity is

How to successfully master social transformation

How small everyday choices, so call quotidian choices, can create a movement of change and how it mathematically can change society for the better

16/04/2022

What will journalism look like in the future?

In today's episode, together with Viktor Lidholt, the founder of Newsvoice who are on a mission to 'fix the news', we're discussing the future trends of journalism.

Journalism used to be a dedicated and trusted profession, however when anyone in the world can become a publisher, how can we trust anything we read online? Accelerated by filter bubbles, the need for unbiased news has become a pressing societal matter. Unbiased news is the backbone of our democratic society, so now is the time to protect it.

Newsvoice decided to do something about this, and are innovating a news model to secure reliable and unbiased news.

In today's episode you'll learn more about:

What Newsvoice is

Tactics to get one step closer to unbiased news

How the role of the editor has changed due to technology

How AI can impact the future of journalism

15/04/2022

Companies have mastered the art of design to grow their businesses, but how could you UX principles to design a better future?

Stephen Bau, a designer, writer and educator decided to, after 30 years in the design industry, retire to focus on projects that enhance not only humanity but all life forms.

In the episode, he shares his learnings from 30 years as a UX designer and how the design principles could be, instead of building products, be applied to build a better future.

You'll learn:

What social architecture is

The difference between human-centered vs life-centered design

How design could be applied to redesign our societies

What a more sustainable KPI would be for the future

Stephen Bau is also the founder of the Builder's Collective, Director of BLDRS Collective Inc, member of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and writes about social architecture at socialarc.com

14/04/2022

In today's episode, it's exciting to host one of the brain's behind Universal Basic Income; professor and author Guy Standing who is a founding member of Basic Income Earth Network.

Guy Standing has been working on the concept of Basic Income, a new political system for wealth distribution, for over 30 years. During the last years the concept of Basic Income has gained rapid traction and interest across the globe and he is one of the few to have been able to test his ideas in real. The Basic Income pilots have turned out with positive results.

Nowadays, even tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and the co-founder of Facebook Chris Hughes support Basic Income.

Would Basic Income work in practice? Would people work? Could we afford it? Could we not afford it?

In today's episode, professor Guy Standing provide some in-depth insights to the theory, the arguments for it and why it would be financially viable.

In today's episode you'll learn:

What Basic Income is

How it would work in practice

The financial arguments behind it

The results from Basic Income pilots in India

What underlying societal changes has prompted a need for a new political system

What "the precariat" is - the rise of a new working class

In his opinion, why we cannot afford not to implement Basic Income

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About Guy Standing

Guy Standing is Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London. An economist with a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, he is a Fellow of the British Academy of Social Sciences, and the Royal Society of Arts, co-founder and honorary co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), and member of the Progressive Economy Forum. He is the author of multiple books, including The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, published in 23 languages and The Corruption of Capitalism; Basic Income: And how we can make it happen.

14/04/2022

Can technology help us build authentic and meaningful relationships?

This is something that Nina Iordanova, an award-winning actor turned tech start-up founder, and Niloo Ravaei, an ex-film maker and blockchain professional, set out as their mission to build.

Both Nina and Niloo were tired of endless swiping on the phone and realized the one area where technology has not helped to improve is our relationships.

They discovered our relationships have one thing in common: ourselves. So perhaps that is where it needs to start: with ourselves.

Can technology help us understand ourselves better, and how we view the world around us?

To accomplish this mission, Nina and Niloo built a personalized meditation app called HelloIris, which helps us better understand ourselves and how we see the world. If we better understand how we view the world, and the impacts of our interactions with others, we can grow, learn and improve.

“Remember: despite how open, peaceful and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you, as deeply as they’ve met themselves.“ - Matt Kahn

To help ourselves understand each other better, Nina and Niloo built an AI matchmaker that worked over SMS which went into Techstars in 2019. The algorithm analysed the user’s personality by using only 160 words of free-word text - and the accuracy was astonishing.

In the end, they found the answer not in technology, but in community.

After having built all of this advanced technology they pivoted into a community service called Good People - which is a cohort-based community program to find like-minded people.

In this episode, they will share their journey and all the learnings they gathered along the way - where the one mission has been to help people build better and more meaningful relationships.

14/04/2022

What if you could live in a house where every single attribute is optimized for your well-being?

Where by each single day that passes, you in fact help to restore our planet, only by living in your house.

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This is something that James Ehrlich, a faculty member at Stanford, Singularity University and senior fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, set out as his mission to build.

Sustainability is obsolete. It is too late to sustain our planet - we need to restore our planet. This is what regenerative living means - living in a way to not only sustain our surrounding but to restore it. An ecovillage is designed in such a way that we live in tune with nature and restore our planet.

This is no longer a utopia but is in fact being built across the world. This is the rise of the new ecovillage movement, or so-called "smart villages."

James Ehrlich started the Regen Villages research initiative at Stanford in 2012, which in 2016 turned into an impact spin-off company called Regen Villages, to realize the future of living in regenerative and self-sustaining neighborhoods. His work has been influential - in fact, he has worked on regenerative infrastructure under the Obama White House administration.

He is essentially building a B2B SaaS tool, which enables architects to build and run ecovillages in a resource-efficient way - or a “Tesla for ecovillages.” With the tap of a finger, you can upgrade your ecovillage operating system with the latest software improvements.

Episode learnings:

- What regenerative living means

- What an ecovillage is and what life in an eco-village could look like

- How we can save our planet by living in a regenerative way

- What is fueling this trend

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James Ehrlich has an impressive resume. On top of all the achievements mentioned above, he started his career within lighting design working with world-famous artists such as Tina Turner and Joe Jackson. All of this background brought him to Regen Villages research initiative, marrying technology, nature and storytelling to create a better future for the younger generation.

14/04/2022

In today's episode, we have Devin Gonier on the show - a passionate machine learning expert from the U.S., who will take us deep into artificial intelligence morality and ethics.

Devin is the CTO of a machine learning company WageUp, has a Masters degree in machine learning, and a double major in philosophy and religion. He argues that the best way to apply philosophy in our modern society is to, in fact, work with artificial intelligence.

Is there a way to teach artificial intelligence morality and ethics?

What is right or wrong?

How can we teach a machine moral and ethics, when in fact philosophers cannot even agree on what is right or wrong?

In a Ted Talk at Austin College, he explains how humans learn what is good and bad, and how machines could learn morals the same way as humans. As morality and ethics is such a complex matter, perhaps we should replicate our human way of learning moral behaviour to machines - instead of trying to find one single algorithm that defines moral behaviour.

Episode learnings:

How we can teach artificial intelligence morality and ethics

What is AI safety and how we can keep machines safe for humanity

Why philosophy is an increasingly important study subject in a world powered by AI

What an AI world built for humanity, not against, could look like

Devin Gonier has also written a paper on this topic and is currently starting a blog to share more of his ideas. Visit his work at lastgreatinvention.com.

14/04/2022

Einstein once said: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

Someone that understands this is John Bunzl, a businessman and a political activist from the UK. He’s the founder of Simpol, the International Simultaneous Policy Organisation, a new political innovation to overcome the obstacles that are today refraining governments to cooperate with each other.

By applying game theory from business school, he explains the concept "The Political Prisoner's Dilemma" to visualise why governments are held back on taking true action to solve global problems. Simpol is a solution to overcome this obstacle that keeps governments from true cooperation and is designed in such an ingenious way so that all countries can keep their competitiveness and only gain benefits from supporting it.

Episode learnings:

- What is Simpol

- Why governments refrain from cooperating

- What needs to be done to overcome the obstacles that keep us from global cooperation

- How you can design a system to solve global matters

- How evolutionary biology has solved big problems for humanity in the past - and what we can learn from it

- How the future of global votes can change democracy

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To support the cause, go to Simpol.org and make your global vote count.

Want to learn more about the research behind it, evolutionary biology and how to design a global vote system? Listen to the ebook - it is a highly recommended read.

The political initiative Simpol is today supported by over 100 Members of the Parliament in the UK, and growing internationally as well. It is supported by many eminent professionals and researchers across the globe, such as José Ramos-Horta, previous Noble Peace Prize Laureat.

14/04/2022