Big Picture Science for Monday May 02, 2016 - Living Computers

Big Picture Science - Living Computers

ENCORE: It’s the most dramatic technical development of recent times: Teams of people working for decades to produce a slow-motion revolution we call computing. As these devices become increasingly powerful, we recall that a pioneer from the nineteenth century – Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and Lord Byron’s daughter – said they would never surpass human ability. Was she right?

We consider the near-term future of computing as the Internet of Things is poised to link everything together, and biologists adopt the techniques of information science to program living cells.

Plus: What’s your favorite sci-fi computer?

Guests:

• Walter Isaacson – President and CEO of the Aspen Institute and the author of The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
• Christopher Voigt – Bioengineer at MIT
• Andy Ihnatko – Technology journalist
• André Bormanis – Writer, screenwriter, Star Trek
• John Barrett – Electronic engineer, NIMBUS Centre for Embedded Systems Research at the Cork Institute of Technology, Ireland

This encore podcast was first released on December 07, 2014

Download podcast at: http://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/Living_Computers

You can listen to this and other episodes at http://bigpicturescience.org/, and be sure to check out Blog Picture Science, the companion blog to the radio show.