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 …

Innovation is a deeply, deeply social phenomenon that requires many people to come along for the ride. It’s not easy! So, where to start? What are the principles? How to think about it? Dr Ken Dovey illuminates using a lifetime of collected lessons, stories and experiences. If you want to make the world a better place by building new products or services, or simply by creating better ways of doing things inside your organization, then this episode is for you!

KEN DOVEY: So, what we identified was a political purpose. The economic purpose did not matter to these people. But it was the political purpose that really mattered. So, if this organization succeeded, the workers would be making a difference to all the people, particularly all the poor people, because there were many supplier organizations in that town too, who were employing people …

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 …

I love hydrogen. It burns clean. It can power long-distance trucks and ferries. It offers long-haul aviation a pathway towards a (nearly) net-zero future, and it gives us a way to make our steel without burning all that coking coal. But lovely hydrogen can only ever be a SMALL part of our future. Here’s why …

Has Martin Green done more than any other human to safeguard our future? For 50 years he has pushed the cost/efficiency boundaries of solar cells, setting world record after world record, and his technology is now imbedded in 91 percent of worldwide solar module production. Who better to sit down with to explore the myriad ways we will extend the solar contribution to our future ...

BRUCE MCCABE: So it's just at the commercial level we're sitting at 20% ? MARTIN GREEN: That’s right, yes. We hold the record for overall conversion of sunlight at 41%. It's proving difficult to translate that into a low-cost device, but I think eventually we'll be successful. So we have the potential for essentially doubling the efficiency …

Designer babies, agricultural mishaps, extinction via gene-drive – all possible now that CRISPR has placed into our hands the awesome power to “edit life” in all its forms. So, how to keep the good while preventing the bad? How to safeguard our future? Is that even possible? I asked Jennifer Kuzma, global expert on biotech responsibility, to shed light on one of the most important governance challenges of our time …

JENNIFER KUZMA: We always have to be careful if we're adding an organism with a gene drive in the environment, in open ecosystems, that we can actually make sure that we have an ability to control it or recall it, because there have been a number of biological control introductions that have gone awry …

The critical question about fusion is no longer, Will it work? but rather, Can we make a fusion power station that produces commercially-competitive electricity? And secondarily, assuming the answer to the above is ‘yes,’ then when is the earliest fusion could significantly impact the global energy system? I asked Alex Creely, the Head of Tokamak Operations at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, how things were progressing …

What comes after Lithium-ion? It’s one of the most important technology questions in the world! Everything in the future of electronics, road vehicles, renewables, distributed storage on the electricity grid and even the future of commercial aviation hinges on the answer. I visited Dr George Crabtree, Director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) at Argonne National Laboratory to find out …

George Crabtree: By 2030, the market and the sales of EVs will go up by a factor of ten, which is huge. So all experts agree there is enough lithium in the earth's crust to handle a global exclusive EV market. The question is, can you get it out fast enough? If demand goes up by a factor of ten in ten years …

Rejuvenation and regeneration, hope versus hyperbole, healthspans and lifespans. There is a frenzied focus on the potential for new drugs to extend human lifespans right now. But it’s a complex field, with more than a few charlatans and opportunists promising drugs that’ll buy you 150 years and more! I asked one of the world’s leading geroscientists to help me cut through to the reality …

Jan Vijg: What you ultimately want to do of course is to improve health, and you don't want people to be sickly when they are in their early 70s but you want them to stay healthy until they're in their 90s or longer … then at least they had a good, healthy, long life …

What does it mean to make a robot conscious? I asked the roboticist doing it. Oh, and then we discussed robots taking care of each another, upgrading themselves, and reproducing! A mind-bending chat with the brilliant Hod Lipson, the BIG thinking founder of Columbia University’s Creative Machines Lab …

Hod Lipson: We have this very human-centered belief that humans are special. A machine cannot have feelings. A machine cannot be creative. A machine cannot self-reproduce. For me, that's a call to action. And so one by one, I'm looking at these things …

Can lawyers save the planet? I asked the world’s foremost climate lawyer, Michael Gerrard, Professor at the Columbia Law School and Founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. What a privilege it was to spend time with this lifelong advocate for sustainability! We discussed the current status of climate litigation, what’s next, and the role it can play in changing the behaviours of greenhouse gas emitters and securing the future of our planet.

Bruce McCabe: We're here to talk about climate change law and where we're going … it seems that litigation and legal pathways can potentially play as much or an even more important role in changing our behaviours, and that's what I really wanted to explore with you today by starting with a premise … “Can lawyers save the planet?”

In the fall of 2005 I drove 55 miles southeast of San Francisco to spend a happy day at IBM’s labs at Almaden, where I met all manner of remarkable people and learned about the latest microprocessor and storage developments, but it was the last agenda item of the day that made the greatest impression. So much of an impression that it changed, fundamentally, the way I work.