What will the global energy mix look like in 2060? Which technologies will dominate in future, and which will dead-end? What about the toughest problems, like powering long range ships and aircraft? What happens to nuclear? I asked Michael Barnard, consultant to the biggest energy investors on the planet ...

What does the future of medical devices look like when microchips and nervous systems speak the same language? I learned about the EXPONENTIAL opportunities from the inspiring Dr Elisa Donati, a senior scientist working at the intersection of neuroscience, technology and medicine …

If we allocated EIGHT TIMES all the renewable energy in the world to Direct Air Carbon capture (DAC), we still WOULDN’T REDUCE CO2 BY A SINGLE MOLECULE; we would ONLY just be keeping up with new emissions …

Affordable age-reversal. Xenotransplants to eliminate organ shortages. Rewriting health economics. Virus resistant livestock and crops. What are the imminent genomics pathways to a better future? I asked George Church, the greatest genomic pioneer in the world …

GEORGE CHURCH: two things I'd like to see happen, is affordable healthcare to get us up out of poverty, and then something that will solve the 90% of disease that will get us past our normal retirement age. If we extend life by 30 years, and we extend retirement by 30 years, then …

The future of medicine is one where all cancers are either 100% curable or turned into manageable diseases. You’ve heard me tell the story in my keynotes for many years. Now it’s time for you to hear from one of the heroes of that story, Bruce Levine …

The dream is that we will have in vivo therapies of many types. We're going to have them soon with sickle cell disease and perhaps some other hemoglobinopathies … I think we'll see in vivo CAR T-cells, whether that's an autoimmune disease or blood cancers, I can't say at this point. And I think that technology will enable … 

Will AI exacerbate inequality? Can we stop that from happening? As the world grapples with guardrails to protect us from future dangers of AI, I thought it timely to talk to an ethicist who has lived and breathed these challenges for decades. Enter, Wendell Wallach, Carnegie-Uehiro fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs …

WENDELL WALLACH: That's what really concerns people who see gender bias and racial bias and so forth: the ‘existential risk’ is sucking the air out of the room and it's not letting us address the near-term things that we could actually address. One of the things we could address is just making the bloody people who deploy these things accountable ...

The story of cancer medicine is multi-threaded. It’s a story of early detection, of surgical removal, of radio- and chemo-therapies, of understanding lifestyle factors, of sequencing and pinpointing genetic factors, and lately of immunotherapies, with each new weapon overlapping and complementing the others. Dr Ben Stanger and his team at the UPenn Perelman School of Medicine are working on 3 new entire armories …

BEN STANGER: The biggest impact I think in cancer will come not from treating cancer, but from preventing it from happening in the first place. So there is an emerging concept out there now called cancer interception. It's subtly different from prevention …

We all know someone who has died of a heart attack. That’s because heart disease is the number one killer on our planet today. At a cutting-edge facility at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr Kiran Musunuru is developing something truly extraordinary, a ‘one and done’ gene therapy to reduce heart disease across ALL of humanity …

KIRAN MUSUNURU: What if we could deploy those good mutations across the entire population? Basically what you're doing is you're shifting the entire bell curve [for heart disease]. There's still going to be people who are still at higher risk than the general average population, but they're much better off …

“I've never loved anyone the way I loved you,” Theodore Twombly tells Samantha, and Samantha, replies, “Me too. Now we know how.” It’s a soulful exchange from a beautiful movie – Her – and it leaves the viewer in no doubt that Theodore, played Joaquin Phoenix, is truly and deeply and go-to-sleep-dreamy, in love …

Insurance companies must deal with the financial realities of climate change. They must make quantitative decisions and translate risks into dollars. They must do it for today’s impacts and predicted future impacts. And behind the insurance companies are the reinsurance companies who act as shock absorbers to the industry on a global scale …

TRENT THOMSON: The frequency of those perils – wildfire, floods, storms – have gone up by about 450% over 30 years, for very large losses. And the severity of those events have gone up by 1,500%. And so, what's driving that? It's economic growth, it's the value of the assets. It's the urbanization, people wanting to live more in cities, around the world, and that concentration of risk ...

I’m calling neuromorphic computing the most important computer engineering research in the world, now and through the next 20 years. That’s right, more important than quantum computing (you heard it hear first!). Why? Because everything we want to do in the future of AI, everywhere we want to go long-term, is predicated on transitioning to …

ALEXANDRE MARCIREAU: So what really stands out I think for the brain is that it is a massively parallel 3D structure with those incredible connections. Part of the computation is in the very structure of the system. Ultimately, we'd like to build systems that are more like the brain …

It has become fashionable in recent times for doomsayers to talk of AI as an existential threat, by which they mean something akin to the malevolent Skynet system in The Terminator movie franchise that goes rogue and launches nukes to annihilate humanity. So, is such a nightmare a probable part of our future?

We’ve barely scratched the surface of the AI opportunity. The horizons are expanding at warp speed. Each time we approach the limits of today’s AI, the next step-change will open up new layers of opportunity. Everywhere I look, every industry, every business, every job function, I come up with endless lists of useful AI applications to boost efficiency, save money and improve outcomes …