A Better Tomorrow Aviva

From the melting ice-sheets to mass extinctions, from wildfires and extreme weather to whole islands washing away into the sea, there are few issues more impactful and demanding of our attention than climate change.

In this episode, the second of our podcast series 'A Better Tomorrow', we dig a little deeper as we try to find out what’s happening to our world and what, if anything, we can do about it.

In this episode, you can…

Hear about the past, present and possible future of our world’s glaciers and ice sheets from Dr James Lea, Senior Lecturer in Glaciology at the University of Liverpool, and the impacts their loss might have on all us.

Learn why climate change is such a concern for the city of Dhaka and how the historical homeland and burial ground of a Native American tribe will soon disappear from Dr Madhu Dutta-Koehler from Boston University, and why dealing with these things is no easy feat.

Hear about the impact of climate change on the flora and fauna all around us from Kate Norgrove, Executive director of advocacy and campaigns at WWF, and to what degree 1.5˚C should be a concern to all of us.

Most importantly, hear all of their thoughts on what each of us can do to help make a better tomorrow.

A transcript is available on aviva.com

Show notes and further reading:

Dr James Lea: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/environmental-sciences/staff/james-lea/

Dr Madhu Dutta-Koehler: https://www.bu.edu/met/profile/madhu-c-dutta-koehler/

Kate Norgrove and WWF: https://www.wwf.org.uk/

Isle de Jean Charles: http://www.isledejeancharles.com/island

Aviva joins forces with WWF: https://www.aviva.com/newsroom/news-releases/2021/06/aviva-joins-forces-with-wwf/

WWF ‘My Footprint’ app: https://footprint.wwf.org.uk

Could robots lead to 'a better tomorrow'?

It’s been a hundred years since the word ‘robot’ was first used*, but it feels like we might be another century away from seeing them in our daily lives. Is that the case?

To find out, we talk to the founder of a company that rents and sells robots, an academic who’s working on the ethics of robot/human interactions, and a PhD student who’s studying fairness in machine learning.

Show notes:

Adam Kushner & Robots of London: https://www.robotsoflondon.com/

Pepper the humanoid robot: https://www.softbankrobotics.com/emea/en/pepper

Bristol Robotics Lab: https://www.bristolroboticslab.com/

Anouk Van Maris – NB. We caught up with Anouk while editing this episode, and she’s now graduated (congratulations!) so she’s no longer a PhD student, and she is now working as a postdoctoral research assistant for the RoboTIPS project working on implementing an ‘ethical black box’. You can see more about the project here: https://www.robotips.co.uk/ethical-black-box

Aviva Quantum podcast: https://soundcloud.com/aviva_plc/sets/aviva-quantum

Michelle Lee: https://michellesengahlee.com/publications/

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.