The recent ETH Global Lecture Series discussion is yet another powerful example of ETH’s dedication to highlighting scientists and artists together in dialogue, with compelling results. This time around, regular Global Lecture Series host and leader of the Strategic Foresight Hub in the Office of the President at ETH Zurich, Chris Luebkeman, is also part of the team that brought the subject of the panel about.

Luebkeman is a board member of the San Francisco-based Climate Music project, which brings scientist, composers and performers together to “enable the creation and staging of science-guided music and visual experiences to inspire people to engage actively on the issue of climate change”, as per its website.

A meeting last year between Luebkeman and Cathy Marston, Ballet Director and Chief Choreographer of the Ballett Zürich, resulted in the cooperation between ETH and the Junior Ballett Zürich for the “The Butterfly Effect”. This dance performance is made up of three pieces, and premiered at the Zurich Opera House in early February. It’s based on the effect noted by mathematician and meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz, in which a very small change in air conditions in one part of the world may cause a major disturbance elsewhere – a butterfly in Brazil causes a tornado in Texas.

In preparation for the performance, ETH Zurich Professor for Weather and Climate Risks, David N. Bresch, and ETH Zurich Professor for Land-Climate Dynamics, Sonia Seneviratne, met with Marston, her Junior Ballett Zurich company, as well as choreographers Ihsan Rustem and Lucas Valente at ETH’s Villa Hatt in June 2024. There he and his team gave the young dancers a meteorological look at their near future – in a presentation of statistics, models and forecasts for a very current topic: global heating.

But before the choreographers were able to create their pieces from Bresch’s and Seneviratne’s data, they had to recover from the bleakness of the facts – Valente was shocked by “information overload”; Rustem by “the vast magnitude of it all”; and Marston grappled with “imagining the scale of the problem and what could happen.” Then they and their junior dance company began the difficult job of translating statistics into movement, forming a truly meaningful performance out of all they had learned. “We need to get this information out urgently,” says Valente.

The stark reality is somewhat dark, agrees Rustem during the discussion, but it’s fascinating as a motivator for choreography. “How can we take something so distressing and so big, and find a way to deal with that? We can’t change the world in a 20-minute piece.”

The three choreographers each created one dance piece. Marston explained that when she choreographs, she very often starts with a piece of literature. “I wanted to give myself the chance in this instance to create something from a more open starting point, a more personal thing, so I was listening to all of the input and trying to filter it into myself [and figuring out] how would I bring this back out in a ballet.” Her piece, ‘A Question of Time’, reflects how she believes that time as a resource is relevant. One of the reasons we are in this predicament, she says, is because we often choose the quick option: “Taking the plane instead of the train, for example, choosing the thing that is not necessarily great for the environment or for our future, because it’s the quickest and I need to achieve all of these things.”

While Valente’s piece focuses on the data that “shows a very dark possibility of the future”, he stresses “we’re not there yet.” He turns to what would happen if we pass the point of no return. But there’s still a possibility of not crossing that ‘Point of No Return”, as he titled his piece. Valente shows us that there is hope left.

Rustem’s thinking is similar. For ‘What If?’, Rustem was inspired by the 13^th century poet and scholar Rumi. “My composer and I found this text from Rumi. It says: ‘Sit, be still, and listen, because you are drunk and we’re at the edge of a cliff.’ I thought that this was quite fitting.” The quote does lend itself nicely to the current mess we are in. Rustem’s piece is divided into four parts: Tomorrow, a dystopian world; Yesterday, understanding what’s happening; Today, the growth of protest; Tomorrow Version 2, in which there is hope for the future.

One of the young dancers, Alyssa Pratt, joins the discussion. The physical styles of the pieces are all different, she says: fast and tough; still; textured, quick, sharp, with weight exchange. “There are times where we really let go and we’re dancing as big as we can, and I think that’s beautiful. It’s been a really fun challenge for me.”

“We had to put it together pretty fast. In my experience personally [it was physically and mentally] heavy, trying to explain ego and greed and time … it’s not like I’m explaining a princess story … this is real stuff.” But Pratt too sees hope in the future and feels it’s important that this point is made clear at the end of the pieces.

It’s all about communication, Bresch says. What sticks and motivates someone? The answer to that is how we engage with one another as humans. That is part of the solution. Bresch looks to find ways to link with those who can communicate more usefully to specific audiences – like these talented young dancers, who are better equipped to speak to supporters of the arts. And that’s very powerful.

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Chris Luebkeman, leader of the Strategic Foresight Hub in the Office of the President at ETH Zurich, sat down with three young entrepreneurs for a discussion about how ETH students can turn and have turned their ideas into a solid business, and how the options for doing so have changed over the years.

The most renowned participant, Swiss-born Severin Hacker, has returned for the discussion to ETH Zurich, where he received a BS in Computer Science in 2009 before moving on to graduate studies and the development of Duolingo at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. His journey towards entrepreneurship was different than that of the other panellists.

“My career would not have been possible in Switzerland [at the time] for sure,” Hacker explains. “One of the things many people don’t know is that we made no money in the first five years, but we were always able to raise it – and that was only possible in the US. Nobody would give you the money [in Switzerland].” For Hacker, the journey towards his own business was very hands-on, from his studies to idea development to mentorship from his PhD advisor (and Duolingo co-founder, Luis von Ahn), learning as he went along.

Some 15 years after Hacker worked his way toward successful entrepreneurship in the US, post-graduate students Julia Carpenter and Nicole Kleger, co-founders of the ETH spin-offs Apheros (cooling systems) and sallea (cultivation of cell-based meat and fish) “caught the bug within the lab,” as Kleger agrees. Which means that the inspiration for a start-up can develop from a student’s studies. “I was really lucky to be in a [research] group where we had several start-ups coming out of that group previously. And I think only because of that did I even get the idea that entrepreneurship is a thing,” says Kleger, who wasn’t interested in an academic or industrial career. “I started with a small [start-up] course just to pressure-test a bit. I got to know people in the game. That also shows how important it is to have people around you.”

In this way, both were able to take advantage of ETH start-up courses and the culture of entrepreneurship that already existed within the university.

All three entrepreneurs agree that success comes only with in-depth development and organizational skills.

“You need to have a good idea,” says Hacker. “You need to have a great team, and then you need to have the funding. If any one of these is missing, it doesn’t work.”

Carpenter agrees. “Building that first team … finding the people that want to work in a start-up … that’s really a big decision and it’s something that I’m working on right now.”

It was hard finding those initial team members, says Hacker. “They were first afraid they’d get outsourced to India, so they were hard to recruit.” But von Ahn knew which students would be good for the job, so they picked them out from Carnegie Mellon’s research pool.

While it’s good to “look at students doing master theses to match positions to fill, you also need to look for people with start-up experience. It’s a matter of balance,” explains Kleger.

Questions to the Severin Hacker also focus on the Duolingo concept itself and how it developed since the first public version was released in 2012.

With studies showing that the most effective way to educate someone is through 1:1 lesson with a personal tutor, Hacker and von Anh decided to develop a personal language-learning app. They compensated for the lack of a human teacher by focusing on motivation and turning the learning experience into a game. Which is why Duolingo hands out points and rewards, and gives users the option of sharing streaks with friends, while its green owl mascot quietly cries at you from your inbox to guilt you into coming back if you haven’t opened the app in a while.

On the technical side, Duolingo’s product development is experiment-driven. This basically means that the app learns from the user as they learn the language. The findings are analysed, then adapted for the app and implemented back into the product. In doing so, the developers make sure each language level is neither too hard nor too easy, for example, again to keep the focus on motivation.

We got an example of this in our own household a few years back, when the Italian course we were taking repeatedly made sure we were familiar with the term “pizza”. Which, honestly, has to be one of the most internationally understood words in the world. This glitch (?) eventually stopped, so we can assume we experienced Duolingo’s experiment-driven development process first-hand.

Duolingo currently offers a list of over 40 – and counting – language courses, which include constructed ones like Esperanto, High Valyrian and Klingon.

And so the inevitable question comes from the audience: “Why is there no Swiss German?”

Hacker laughs. “Should I be honest? I don’t want to add it because I want Swiss German to remain that secret language that you can’t learn anywhere.” The local audience applauds loudly.

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The first known human footsteps found in Laetoli, Tanzania, are protected. Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon are not. How do we regulate both our heritage and our future on the moon and in space?

Michelle Hanlon, Executive Director of the Air and Space Law Program at the University of Mississippi, recently came to ETH for the Global Lecture Series: Who Owns the Moon? to hold a presentation and discuss just that.

Joining her were panellists Luca Thanei, Research Assistant in the Chair for the History of Technology at ETH Zurich; Catherine Kropf, Deputy Head of the Swiss Space Office; Rodrigo Polanco, Legal Adviser, Swiss Institute of Comparative Law; and host Chris Luebkeman, leader of the Strategic Foresight Hub in the Office of the President at ETH Zurich.

Hanlon’s presentation begins with a short answer to the question at hand: “Res nullius – it belongs to no one; res communis – it belongs to everyone.” There is a mix of open claims and responsibility, with no one really in charge. “It boggles the minds of my students that … all of space law can fit on one slide.” A list of treaties and agreements dating back to the 1960s and 70s is followed by later “soft law” guidelines and resolutions in the 2000s. With only four of the treaties widely ratified, the debate on the enforceability of today’s space law is ongoing, although the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 does specify that “Outer space, including the moon … shall be free for exploration and use by all States,” although they may not claim sovereignty. In today’s race for resources, it is “use” that appears to be the current focus. People may argue that this applies only to states, not commercial entities, but the OST places them under the supervision of the states they are in, even though it does not specify how exactly, and even though there are many other inconsistencies within the two-page treaty. With the exception that a vague “due regard” must be taken in the exploration of the moon.

So as Hanlon says, the moon is “the province of all humankind and we have to have due regard for everyone. That tells you that anytime anything happens in space, there’s going to be an argument about it, about who is in the right. That tells you that lawyers are going to make a lot of money off of this provision if we don’t start clarifying it.”

Meanwhile, with 52 years having passed since the last moonwalk, 150 human and robot missions are getting ready to begin launching by 2033, so it’s definitely time for laws to get clarified.

China and the United States hold the position that if you extract resources, then you own those resources. As Hanlon explains, to survive long-term on the moon, we need water, which is all concentrated at the lunar south pole, so everyone is going there. “We’re all going to the same place on the 150 missions, going to the lunar South Pole. What could possibly go wrong?”

The ensuing discussion underlines the need for collective action even more. Luca Thanei notes that it’s interesting to see that the same problems apply to the moon as to low Earth orbit and the satellites within it. Catherine Kropf sees the need to answer these questions very soon, because everything is proceeding so quickly. Rodrigo Polanco believes that states will react only once there is a problem, and that the problems will be spectacular.

The subject has moved down to low Earth orbit, where things are getting more complicated as things get more crowded. Older satellites cannot be manoeuvred, so they collide into other objects. Thanei points out that collisions have contributed excessively to the accumulation of space debris in the past. “The friction that will become virulent on the moon is already virulent around the Earth. It’s a legal wild west, where the rule of the first mover applies. Everyone is trying to claim near-Earth space as a resource before it is regulated internationally.”

Hanlon expands: “We do have people thinking about it: the international norm says you have to de-orbit your satellite within 25 years of end-of-life.”

“The observation data from the ground is not that reliable,” says Thanei, in that you can’t tell from earth when old satellites will collide.

Luebkeman summarises: “So we don’t really know where everything is?” Panel nods. “I’m kind of confused about who owns the moon, who owns space, who’s responsible? We all are, no one is. So we’re ready but we’re not ready. This is a disaster waiting to happen.” He turns to Kropf “How do you feel about this? Is this exciting or terrifying or a little bit of both?”

“I’m not sure there is such a lot of uncertainty,” Kropf explains. “We do have treaties, that’s already a good thing. They do [define who’s] responsible for the damage caused by a space object. Of course you can argue that space debris is not a space object anymore. But from a Swiss perspective that would not be the correct interpretation of the United Nations treaty. So I don’t think there’s that much of a gap.”

Polanco brings the discussion around to preventing the worst: “For me, the best accident is the one that doesn’t happen. It’s scary if we blow up half of the moon, but we don’t want to get there.”

He also has the answer to Who Owns the Moon: “In 1953, Chilean Jenaro Gajardo Vera registered the moon in his name in Talca, Chile. When he died, he left it to mankind.”

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In discussing the recent leap forward in artificial intelligence based on large language models like ChatGPT, the general public seems to divide itself people into two groups: those excitedly looking forward to applying it to their lives and in their work, who see it as a tool for making life easier; and those who are afraid that AI will make their and too many other people’s jobs obsolete. Both have good points.

Which is why one focus of the work of Sir Nigel Shadbolt, leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Professorial Research Fellow in Computer Science at the University of Oxford, is to think about ways to take full advantage of the first, which can help in avoiding the second. By making sure that the continued development of technologies like AI are accompanied by ethical thinking, not just driven by financial gain.

Shadbolt recently sat down with Margarita Boenig-Liptsin, Professor for Ethics, Technology and Society in the Department of Humanities, and Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zürich for a discussion about ethics and artificial intelligence as part of the ETH Global Lecture Series.

Boenig-Liptsin starts off by asking him how we need to be thinking about technology and society in our world.

Shadbolt identifies the main challenge: nation states aren’t necessarily the prime movers any longer; private companies have a great deal of power in this area. But while some will adopt Facebook’s original “move-fast-and-break-things” approach, others may take more reflective approach – and once they each see how the market responds, we’ll “have a whole set of complexities around how we might regulate how we align incentives and how we educate our about the dangers,” he says.

Another challenge Shadbolt touches on during the discussion is that at the going rate, as a recent study theorises, we will soon run out of data to feed models. While some think that AI could just generate the needed data, the “curse of recursion”, he points out, is that the end result would not be coherent, resulting in a risk of model collapse. It is therefore important that both the feedstock and the data infrastructure be of high quality.

So how do we approach the future when significant challenges like this have already arrived or are looming? In addition to incentivising governments and business to focus on ethical AI, the answer will certainly also lie in how those creating future technologies or working on the continued development of existing ones see their role in this issue.

At least in the ETH auditorium where this Global Lecture is taking place, things look optimistic. Those in the audience joining the discussion identify themselves as engineering and computer science students, and the majority of their questions for Shadbolt indicate that ethics are already an integrated aspect in their dealings with AI:

• How can we as students shape the age of intelligent machines responsibly? (Answer: Be aware that you have a duty of care, try to hold yourself and the organisations you work for to account, and don’t fall victim to a dystopian trope – what you create might be a future solution to a current problem in a way you are not aware of yet.)
• How do you get rid of AI hallucination? (Answer: You currently can’t. Today’s best models have a 2% rate. What you need to do is ensure that AI output is always checked by a human with the corresponding expertise.)
• How we can know whether we are interacting with a human or an AI bot? (Answer: We shouldn’t have to ask.)

As for the rest of us, during his introductory presentation, Shadbolt assures the more fearful members of the audience: “We won’t lose all of our jobs, despite some claims to the contrary […] because humans are extraordinarily ingenious at finding new things to pay us to do.”

So when you’re feeling, as I often have for the past 20 years, like the last monk in a 15th-century monastery, still hard at work detailing illuminated manuscripts by hand to the sound of the neighbour’s Gutenberg printing press pounding out books by the hundreds next door: take comfort in Sir Nigel Shadbolt’s view of the future. Even though AI chess is possible, we still play it on physical boards with real pieces and humans that are right there across from us. And we have been entangled with our own inventions for millions of years: Our Australopithecine ancestors made tools during the Palaeolithic Age, and since then we have learned to use each new invention to make our lives easier.

“We won’t lose all of our jobs, despite some claims to the contrary,” Shadbolt says, “because humans are extraordinarily ingenious at finding new things to pay us to do.” What we need to do is adapt.

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Find out more about our ETH Global Lecture Series here.

We humans spend our time on earth building up, maintaining and restructuring social networks with other humans. Or as Nicholas A. Christakis, MD, PhD, MPH, sociologist and physician so nicely puts it during his recent presentation as part of ETH’s Global Lecture Series: “We form long-term, volitional, non-reproductive unions with unrelated conspecifics.” Or for liberal arts majors like me: we cultivate formal and informal relationships with friends, acquaintances, colleagues – and people we may not really like, or family members we may not even get along with. And throughout our lives, we use these connections to solve problems, especially while we work. Whether we are successful depends on how well we perform together.

To this end, Christakis’ research looks at what happens when you take social systems and add “dumb AI” bots – which aim to assist instead of completely replace human intelligence – to them. He summarises: “Human-human interaction has been modified by the presence of the machine and that’s what my laboratory is focused on: how human behaviours and interactions in groups can be changed by the introduction of forms of AI into our midst and by the specific programming of that AI, which might affect our ability to work together to solve a range of dilemmas. So the question is, can we use an understanding of social network structure and function to assess the uses and impact of social AI within and upon human groups?”

How can the study of these bots help us create more efficient human-machine hybrid systems for things we already have – driverless cars, checkout machines, digital assistants – and develop fresh opportunities for a new world of social artificial intelligence?

Christakis stresses that it’s not about replacing humans with super-smart AI, but using dumb AI to supplement smart humans. He concludes that carbon can exist as graphite or diamonds, depending on how its atoms are connected. And that in a similar way, how we are connected to AI can help us.

After his presentation, Christakis sits down with ETH Professor of Bioethics Effy Vayena and Chris Luebkeman, Leader of the Strategic Foresight Hub at ETH and the host of the event.

One word that arose during the presentation was “nudge”. Within the context of Christakis’ studies, the bots would “nudge” human participants to work in a more efficient way.

Vayena takes this up: “How can we make decisions or how can we guarantee that we’re going to nudge towards […] a particular direction […] that we collectively believe is a good thing to go towards? That’s not a new problem, clearly an older problem, but it makes me think […] how can we control for those possibilities?”

“I don’t think of my work explicitly as nudges […] but you’re absolutely right,” Christakis answers. “Evil actors or even actors that aren’t evil necessarily but are maximizing profit […] could employ these techniques to achieve other objectives. We had branches of the experiment where people knew the bot was labelled and what we generally found is that the labelling of the bot as a bot didn’t affect the outcomes of the experiments very much. If they believed the bot was […] acting to help the humans [participants] were happy to have the bot in their midst [but] not so if they thought the bot was malevolent and trying to harm them, then they got really upset.”

Christakis also explains that technologies will increasingly interact with us as if they were human, which will increase the rise in hybrid systems of humans and machines. The aim of his research is to see whether this can improve our coordination, cooperation, communications, creativity, navigation, sharing – and evacuation systems in cases of disaster.

Towards the end of the discussion, a question from the audience looks toward the future: “Are we going to see an evolution of social skills?”

Christakis began his presentation with how human-machine interaction works with digital assistants, so we can find the background for his answer there. We give commands like – “Alexa: weather.” We don’t speak to them politely like we would with people – “Hey Alexa: Could you please tell me what the weather will be like today?” As kids grow up giving abrupt orders to these kinds of machines, they might take that attitude with them to the playground and be rude to other children.

But while rudeness can be trained out of kids, Christakis is looking at the evolutionary big picture. “Over lifetime horizons there will be a degrading of our social interactions,” he confirms. He gives the example of our domestication of milk-producing animals 9,000 years ago, of how that allows us to digest lactose after we are babies because we changed our environment during the Neolithic Age. Christakis believes that in a similar way, AI will affect how we think over the next 10,000 years, that we will evolve due to this technology.

Which opens up a range of questions. Will we really have intelligent machines for the next 10,000 years? Or will only a percentage of the world’s population have them? And is there long-term capacity for that sort of thing, given the massive affect our machines are already having on the planet? As usual, the Global Lecture series raises many questions, stimuli for enthusiastic discussions and inspiration for new ideas.

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Find out more about our ETH Global Lecture Series here.

In the wake of the recent ETH Global Lecture: Life on Earth and Beyond, I found myself thinking about the existence of extra-terrestrial life in the universe and the importance of planet socks. It turns out that both can be explained in simple terms. The first goes like this: With all the many, many billions of probable planets outside our solar system, the chances of there being – or that there has been – life on a number of them is high. The question is only: What kind of life?

Thomas Zurbuchen, Swiss-American astrophysicist, ETH Department of Earth Sciences, previously the head of NASA’s science missions, is initially on hand to shed light on the planet socks issue. Newly hired in 2016 as the associate administrator for the science directorate at NASA after an academic career, he found himself in need of clothes that would suit appearances before the US Congress. Wanting to add an interesting accent to his conservative new attire, Zurbuchen knew the right opening: socks that matched his job. Socks with planets on them. Socks he shows off at the lecture.

Also in attendance is the Swiss astronomer and Nobel Prize winner Didier Queloz. Also wearing planet socks. “I knew I would be sitting next to you.” He grins over at Zurbuchen. It’s a great start to a relaxed existential discussion.

Both scientists are now part of ETH’s research on exoplanets and space, which also entails looking at why there is life in the universe and whether we are alone.

The answer to which, since the first exoplanets were discovered in 1992 (by Queloz and two colleagues) turns out to be probably not. The list of newly located planets has increased exponentially from hundreds to thousands — 5616 as of last week according to the Nasa Exoplanet Archive.

Let’s assume you are looking at a projected image of the first image released from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope ((Part of host Anna Maltsev’s presentation), which shows thousands of galaxies. According to Zurbuchen, if you were to put a grain of sand on the tip of your finger and stretch it out towards the image, you could cover 6000 galaxies behind that little grain of sand. If you extrapolate, he says, “that makes an order 100 billion stars, perhaps up to 400 billion. With thousands of billions of worlds that are there, and every one of those stars on the average has one planet or more.”

Queloz links possible life on those planets to physics: “There’s a magical element in our galaxies because the laws of physics are such that they enable the stars, they enable the chemistry, they enable water, they enable planets and they enable life. They even enable the consciousness we’re using for this discussion.”

“That’s why I’m a strong believer that we will find out why there is life. There’s the beautiful element of the power of the brain, it’s a fascinating tool. It’s the most powerful tool we can use think in this universe right now.”

“So the universe makes a brain that thinks about itself,” Zurbuchen quips.

Both scientists are pretty sure there is life out there, but there are caveats.

“The number (of possible life-sustaining planets) is out there, but it can come and go. The chemistry of life can change. Conditions to grow life can change, so it dies. It’s out there, but it may be that it cannot be sustained very long,” explains Queloz.

The origin of the anatomically modern Homo sapiens goes back about 300,000 years. Given the Earth’s age is estimated to be 4.5 billion years and has potential to last another 7.5 billion before it is absorbed into the sun, that’s an incredibly brief period of time. So for life to exist elsewhere, at the same time as us, and to be at an evolutionary stage where it would be able – and willing – to contact or visit us is going to be exceedingly slim.

But there is much to learn from extra-terrestrial life, even within our solar system, which will help explain life on our own planet.

Zurbuchen asks: “Where in our solar system is/was there life? Mars is the obvious place to look first. We need data. We need to bring back samples. We know there is organic material on Mars.”

“We don’t know what happened during the first billion years on Earth,” Queloz adds. “Due to tectonic plate shifting, all the material is gone. (The current conditions on) Mars are like that first billion.”

Zurbuchen and Queloz are putting their expertise together to support ETH’s exoplanet team. They are looking at a long-term strategy that, in Zurbuchen’s words, “drives action today”, as opposed to one where “basically everybody thinks we’re going to do it later. What I’d like to do is really create a sense of impatience, not with the result but with action,” because the results will come from there.

In answer to a question about Europe’s role in spaces sciences, Zurbuchen says that it has tremendous potential to contribute, that ETH – and Switzerland as a whole – need to be part of that potential. Swiss scientists should come together with the courage to take on joint projects. To take chances and increase decision velocity. “You don’t have to be successful alone,” Zurbuchen says.

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Find out more about our ETH Global Lecture Series here.

It’s a good sign that there are a number of men in attendance at the ETH Global Lecture for International Women’s Day 2024: Empowering Change. It almost makes up for the tiresome fact that we still have to set aside one day out of 365 every year to respect what is actually the majority of the planet’s population. There is work to be done.

But this is ETH, the subject is empowerment, the atmosphere is positive and it quickly becomes clear that this will be an engaging discussion, not a pro forma pageant.

Viktoria Ivarsson, Head of Alumni Engagement at ETH Zurich hosts a panel of three experts from business, science and activism: Kathrin Amacker, Board President of Fairtrade, Max Havelaar, Switzerland and member of the Chairs group of Fairtrade International; Menna El-Assady, Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich; and the climate justice activist Marie-Claire Graf, co-founder of the Youth Negotiators Academy and former youth representative at the United Nations Climate Change and Food Systems Summit.

What follows is a talk that includes themes as diverse as role models, what we want artificial intelligence to learn, how Switzerland being a nation of swots can actually accelerate progress towards equality, and how sometimes it’s desperation and frustration that drives us to affect real change.

Kathrin Amacker tells of a smallholder cocoa farmer named Lucy who produces for the Fairtrade label in Western Africa. Thanks to the European market’s sustainable development goals, which include equal rights initiatives, Lucy was able to set up a Fairtrade-certified farm and a pension plan. In an environment where about 85% of all families or farm holders don’t receive a living wage, where child labour is a serious issue and women do not have equal rights, she is a role model at a time when the UN estimates if we had equal rights around the world, 150 million people on the planet would not be malnourished.

At the scientific end of the spectrum, Menna El-Assady’s work studying interactive human-AI collaboration interfaces looks at solving problems such as trying detect biases in large language models like ChatGPT. Representations of women in these data reflect the real world, so if an LLM learns that women are blonde receptionists and housekeepers and men are strong football players, it’s not that computer scientists aren’t able to create better models, but that we need to ask ourselves what we want AI to learn. “Do we want them to represent the reality of our world, which is not equitable,” she asks, “or do we want them to represent something more idealistic?”

The empowerment lies in creating communication interfaces that allow people to actually look into AI systems, she believes, to see how they make changes and input their human feedback to tell scientists about the world they want to create. So that people, regardless of their background, can really make an impact. “I really think that bringing humans and AI together can lead us to solve more complex problems, but also to create a better world,” says El-Assady.

Marie-Claire Graf has an inspiring story of how biases motivated her to found the Youth Negotiators Academy. This organisation trains young people from all around the world to go into spaces dominated by older white men in dark suits, like the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP).

While representing Switzerland as a negotiator at COP 25 as a 23-year-old, Graf was rejected by an older male attendee who insisted on meeting “the Swiss delegation”, when actually she was standing right in front of him. Instead of speaking to her, he walked away.

“I’m really grateful to this person,” Graf says, “because only then did I come up with the idea of creating an academy, which is today the largest one for young negotiators and diplomats in the environmental space.”

A question from the audience on Switzerland’s dismal glass ceiling performance (The Economist has it placing 27th out of 30 countries) brings surprising optimism from Amacker. She reminds the audience that when the number of women in board positions stood at about 13%, in 2014 Federal Councillor Simonetta Sommaruga challenged Swiss government agencies and companies to increase this to 30% by 2023. While Switzerland’s largest tabloid ridiculed her as a governess wagging her finger at the patriarchy, the organisations stepped up. “That’s also Switzerland. When you see: ‘Oh, now it’s required’, then you’re faster so that you reach it in two years,” says Amacker. As a result, in 2020 the Council raised the number to 40% for companies subsidised by the government.

Amacker also stresses the need to support female junior staffers by seeing them and using their names to encourage them. “This is so powerful. And everyone, every one of you, can do that every day.”

Ivarsson picks this up: “How do you make it International Women’s Day every day? How can we build it into our everyday lives as global citizens?”

“Some studies have found that change always takes longer to reach the tipping point. But then the change itself accelerates, and it becomes implemented faster than we ever thought,” says Graf. “And we can all contribute to that every single day.”

In answer to Ivarsson’s question of what she thinks of the future, El-Assady replies: “We just need to dream up that future and push for it and make it happen.”

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Find out more about our ETH Global Lecture Series here.

Hosted by Chris Luebkeman, Head of ETH’s Strategic Foresight Hub, the Global Lecture Series: Industrial Metaverse began with Peter Körte, Siemens CTO and CSO giving a 20-minute talk on the history of the metaverse and its present application in the Siemensverse. Also on hand for the subsequent discussion was Professor Torbjörn Netland, Head of Head of Chair of Production and Operations Management at ETH.

For those of you who, like me, saw the lecture title and thought “Eek, what?”: some enlightenment. This is not the self-referential “meta” that’s become part of informal speech. For which the often cited example is: the actor Michael Keaton, who played Batman in the early 90s, aimed to refresh his somewhat flagging career by starring in an artsy film as an actor known for playing a superhero who is trying to restart his career by starring in a high-brow Broadway play. Another example might be Mark Zuckerberg renaming his company Meta.

This, however, is the Greek “beyond” meta, as in more than just using machines to compute, instead expanding them to create a digital reality – a metaverse – for highly advanced simulations that aim to improve the world, while selling a few things along the way.

But within a relatively short time span, the metaverse has gone from being received with excitement to being declared “dead” less than a year ago by Business Insider. So why are we here?

Peter Körte begins by explaining it’s the hype about the metaverse, not the metaverse itself, that is dead. Now that the initial excitement has worn off, we regular people can begin to realize that the metaverse – like a movie star who was “discovered overnight” – has actually been steadily evolving since the 1970s. And the engineers can finally get back to work without having to stop to answer the same dumb questions about gaming avatars all the time.

Körte begins his enjoyably uncomplicated presentation with the fact that ABI Research 2022 & ST Market Estimates has segmented the metaverse into three markets: consumer (social networks, gaming, e-learning); enterprise (virtual storefronts, advertising, training, meetings); and industrial. Which is why we’re here. Körte paraphrases ABI as saying the industrial metaverse “is growing the fastest financially, because its value can be clearly defined and the building blocks for doing so already exist.”

A key building block is the digital twin – that is, a digital world that matches the one in reality. There you can simulate how things could work in the real world through multiphysics, which allows you to see how different features of physical systems would interact.

One of the most optimistic examples of this is a Siemens solution that makes it much easier – and approximately 90% less expensive – for people who have lost a limb to acquire a prosthesis. And one that not only fits and works, but is also much lighter and looks more natural than what has previously been available. The company that makes these prostheses, Unlimited Tomorrow, uses computer models to simulate and subsequently create customised, personalised limbs in a matter of weeks instead of the usual months – a highly significant improvement, especially for children, who regularly outgrow a conventional prosthetic limb before really having had a chance to use it.

That there is great potential in digital twinning and simulation is also supported by the urban development project Siemensstadt Square. This new district projected for Berlin will include residential buildings, schools, stores and factories, to be planned, built and operated using a digital twin – and designed to be 20% more productive and 40% more flexible. This will include the implementation of intelligent technologies and renewable energy to make the district both carbon-neutral and energy-efficient.

The Siemensstadt Square project illustrates the industrial metaverse Siemens sees for the future: “Everything you build will exist twice,” says Körte. “Once in the real world and once in the digital world. We build the physical plant based on the simulations, then collect the real time data and feed it back into the digital twin to see how accurate the model was. This creates a feedback loop to tweak the models so they can be more effective, useful.”

But there is a way to go yet before these kinds of ideas are widely implemented. New machines can’t connect to or understand old ones; people lack the skills to hit the ground running. “This will only work if we all collaborate,” says Körte. “It will take many companies to get us there.”

Torbjörn Netland is also concerned about the human factor. About “making better workplaces, not just more profitable ones.” And while large companies can fly a helicopter on Mars, “Just try to put a human pilot in there – it’s not going to happen, at least not in the next two or three years”, he says. “The role of the human is perhaps sometimes undervalued in thinking about the metaverse. Just because it’s industrial, doesn’t mean there are no humans.”

The question is raised as to how people fit into this process and how they will stay in the loop. Netland says because technology moves so fast, we need to educate businesses, “but it’s always been like this.” He adds: “We don’t all have to know everything … it’s too much … we have to work with others who have the knowledge we lack”.

Here again, the focus is on collaboration. One more instance of the world needing to come together on solutions to improve life for all beings on the planet.

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Find out more about our ETH Global Lecture Series here.

ETH’s Head of the Strategic Foresight Hub, Chris Luebkeman, recently sat down for a Global Lecture Series talk with sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson and Nako Nakatsuka, an ETH senior scientist in the Laboratory of Biosensors and Bioelectronics. Their focus: Robinson’s novel about climate change, and how to impactfully communicate highly complicated concepts to people from all walks of life.

And there is arguably no complicated concept more in need of being communicated right now, for all humans to understand, than climate change in general and global warming in particular.

Kim Stanley Robinson is best known for his utopian Mars Trilogy, which spans 200 years of Mars settlement and terraforming through the eyes of a wide range of characters. But it is his latest novel – The Ministry for the Future – that has grabbed attention, thanks to its call for urgent solutions to global warming.

So how did Robinson come to write this book, Chris Luebkeman asks, which he completed in just nine (!) months in 2019?

“I was under contract and a book was due.” Robinson smiles. But seriously, folks. At the time, people around Robinson talked about how humans can adapt to anything, even to climate change. Many argued there was no need to worry. “But two or three years before, I had run into this new bit of information: that human beings cannot live at wet bulb temperature 35.”

Studies had emerged with findings that “wet bulb temperature 35” – i.e. 35° Celsius at 100% humidity – is the threshold at which young, healthy humans can no longer adapt to the hyperthermia it creates within their bodies. The combination of heat and humidity at this level make it impossible for them to sweat, and their insides would essentially begin to cook. Wet bulb temperatures of 31 and 32 have already been known to kill the elderly and infants around the world.

Robinson felt compelled to spread this information in reaction to the climate change adaptation argument. “I thought this story had to be told, because it’s important, we have to keep global average temperatures down, (because) large portions of the earth (will) become inhabitable for certain times of the year in ways that would be fatal if you didn’t have air conditioning – and it’s exactly under conditions like these that the electrical grids go down, so you wouldn’t have air conditioning. You could be indoors, in the shade, without clothes on, with a fan on you – and still die within a few hours.”

The resulting book, The Ministry for the Future, is Robinson’s hopeful, optimistic near-future science fiction novel, packed with solutions that get Earth out of our impending dilemma. Published in 2020, it was recommended by US President Barack Obama and got Robinson onto discussion panels at events like the World Trade Organization, COP and the World Economic Forum. “It’s a better time (for this book) now,” Robinson says, “because people are aware.”

Nakatsuka says: “My family still lives in Tokyo, and my mom tells me it’s just too humid to live (there) in the summer now. They can’t leave their apartments … it’s happening now in Tokyo. It’s no longer something that is just a science-fiction novel.”

One of Robinson’s strengths in getting his point across is an approach to storytelling that expands perspectives for new ideas. He places the reader inside a wide variety of characters’ heads, so they can experience a multitude of aspects, a multitude of viewpoints, of the overall issue.

When he gets asked to participate in high-level talks off the success of his novel, “people invite me as if I could add something to the discussion. Very often I’m talking to a group of experts who know way more about the topic I’m speaking about than I do.” Robinson has found a way to share his language of storytelling with these experts, who he says are often “there to talk to a science fiction writer (as) a person from the future. So they can get out of their specialty and think about the totality. So they can imagine what could happen and what could come.” Robinson lets the scientists go inside the heads of their own characters to see what might happen. He allows scientists to become science fiction writers and in doing so, adds to the discussion in his own way.

Nako Nakatsuka sees this need for common language as well. She says, that as researchers, “we have to learn to be communicators. Storytelling is important to get research across better than dry tech. I’m a chemist by training, but I talk to engineers, neuroscientists, patients, clinicians, and we always speak a very different language. But we have to speak the same language to come up with solutions that actually work.”

In answer to the question whether technology will save us, Robinson asks: “What is a technology? Software is a technology and language is a software. Justice is a software, so justice becomes a technology. What are the crucial technologies? Language. Justice. Because then we can make (what we need). If everyone has enough… problem solved.”

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Find out more about our ETH Global Lecture Series here.

Two people who know this better than anyone were recently at ETH to give the Global Lecture Go Below: On National Geographic Assignment with David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes – Exploring Our Seas.

David is an artist who began taking pictures underwater at 12, Jennifer is an aquatic biologist and photojournalist specialising in natural history and marine environments. Together, they have become two of the world’s renowned underwater photographers, co-producing stories for National Geographic Magazine and supporting the future of ocean sciences.

The series of films and photos they presented were always artistically beautiful, but often hard to watch: dead and deserted coral reefs; infant harp seals starving on unstable ice floes.

While their work focuses on the changing ocean and the effect on its inhabitants, it does so with a neutral touch. Instead of seeking to place blame for the destruction of reef ecosystems and the extinction of animals, instead of lecturing at sceptics who may seem more interested in exploiting nature for profit, David and Jennifer “just show what’s happening. That’s what gets you into the corporate bubble. Bring all the voices to the story – even those you might not be comfortable with,” says Jennifer.

Jürg Brunnschweiler, Chief of Staff to the President of ETH Zurich, has been an independent shark researcher for the past 20 years. He agreed with Jennifer’s statement: “You protect what you love, so you make them love it, show the beauty, document the state of the world, show what’s happening. That changes the story – seeing is understanding.”

Along with the bad news, some of the presented projects were laced with welcome optimism. The ReShark coalition, for example, launched in 2020 by the Seattle Aquarium, is working internationally to reintroduce sharks to marine areas where their disappearance has caused entire ecosystems to collapse, as sharks and rays are vanishing at an alarming rate due to fishing and habitat loss. This coalition is devoted to changing the story and “resharking” the ocean.

There has already been recorded success, with eggs laid by Indo-Pacific leopard sharks in the SEA LiFE Sydney Aquarium and brought to a shark nursery in Raja Ampat, Indonesia. There, the project follows the sharks from embryo to tank to water pen to marine protected area, tagging them and keeping track of them as they are returned to their habitats. The aim is to apply this programme to all kinds of species, starting with these sharks. This is community-based conservation, focusing on in-depth collaboration with local scientists – it’s not about “us” bringing help to “them”. And ReShark’s work is continuing in other places around the world, with new eggs, new locations and new species to recover.

Then we are reminded that half of the Great Barrier Reef is now bleached to death due to warmer water temperatures. Coral polyps are finding it much harder to attract algae, which populates the coral under the right temperatures and feeds its inhabitants. David’s collection of photographs, “Coral through the lens of time”, show before and after shots of reefs – from colourful ecosystems to white, lifeless coral.

But here too there is hope, in the form of the coral ecologist and Director of the Marine Ecology Research Centre at Southern Cross University, Peter Harrison, who is working on farming out coral reef reproduction. His project collects coral polyp spawn from healthy reefs, transporting them to sea pens where they are incorporated into blankets, which then cover reefs that have been decimated, introducing the spawn where it’s needed. An image of the spawn shooting up from the polyps looks like underwater snow going in the wrong direction.

Images from David’s 2021 photo book “Two Worlds: Above and Below the Sea” explore the border between the ocean’s surface and the space just under the water. Shot with an underwater wide angle lens covered by a large dome, the images are lit only underwater, leaving the surface light ambient. The resulting photographs are stunning, even as they highlight the need for environmental conservation.

During the panel discussion, Jürg highlighted the importance of citizen scientists who take and share photographs of life under water. A Fiji conservation project that Jürg is part of has traced sharks over the years using videos, photos and tracking devices – which offer collected data on birth, feeding an reproduction. Citizen science has created a relationship between scientists and photographers, who can provide imagery that includes positive information, which may inspire others to keep working and supporting projects that aim to bring the ocean back to life everywhere.

Jennifer expanded on this: “What’s important for our future is combining forces, supporting other people, the next generation, because they will be substantial in solving future problems. We want to give the future a voice, inspire those starting out. We have talked for a lifetime and published stories for a lifetime. It’s time to push other people forward … to give them a platform.”

Watch the full recording:

Find out more about our ETH Global Lecture Series here.