Blur - The Disappearing Lines Between Us and The Technologies We Create

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Speaker
Chip Walter
Filmaker, Journalist and Consultant

When
-

Where
Wean Hall 5409

Description

As digital technologies become increasingly powerful, pervasive, mobile and networked, the lines between humans and machines, biology and technology, reality and virtual reality will become more and more blurred. Eventually they may disappear altogether. Very soon we will find ourselves moving through, and rapidly evolving within, a digital ecology as complex as anything conjured the natural world. Where are current trends leading? Over the millennia what has been the relationship between us and the tools we create? Will we use the power of emerging digital technologies to amplify our humanity, or will the technologies we are now creating eventually remake us in their own image and likeness? Come join Chip Walter for a fun and thought-provoking exploration of the co-evolution of humans and machine.

Speaker's Bio

Chip Walter is an filmmaker, journalist, and consultant on the future effects of emerging technologies. He has an unusually diverse background as an author, documentary film producer, feature film screenwriter and former CNN San Francisco bureau chief. More recently he has served as National Programming Director at WQED-TV, CEO of Digital Alchemy, Inc. and Vice-President and Executive Producer of ENGAGE Games Online. Chip is author of Random House’s Space Age, a companion book to the primetime PBS series of the same title which he developed for WQED. He has sold screenplays to Warner Bros., Tri-Star and Universal Pictures. He is currently co-authoring a book for Simon & Schuster with William Shatner about the ways in which Star Trek foreshadowed many technologies which are now becoming a reality. The book is due to hit bookshelves the fall of 2000.