Table of Contents
By Ron Latanision, John Brown, and Walter Hubbard
In June, Marv Goldschmitt added the perspective of a technological philosopher to The Artificial Intelligence Revolution and Professor Amit Goyal spoke about High Temperature Superconductors
Artificial Intelligence - Wrap Up for the 2024-2025 Forum Season
On June 27, our season wrap-up, The Wilson Forum met for what may be the most urgent and far-reaching discussion yet — on artificial intelligence and the future of human society.
Generative AI, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) represent potential societal challenges and benefits of unprecedented character derived from science and technology.
Technological philosopher Marv Goldschmitt moderated a discussion including the results of the survey that he produced which captures this spectrum. This matter is too important to let the moment go by without active response (acceptance or resistance) on the part of everyone.
The fundamental question is what happens when cognition, creativity, and agency are no longer uniquely human? The consequences of the artificial intelligence movement will affect all of us on this planet. So, we all need to be alert and informed.
The following is a link to Goldschmitt’s interview with The Bridge, the National Academy of Engineering Quarterly publication, which appeared on June 16. This exchange adds broad perspective: NAE Website - An Interview with . . . Marv Goldschmitt, entrepreneur, AI analyst, and technological philosopher .
The recording of this meeting should serve a very useful and helpful resource going forward in informing and alerting all of us to the movement of AI and understand how and when to respond or not!
Goldschmitt has been involved in the “bleeding” edge of the computer industry for 45 years. He brings a long history of high technology executive management and consulting experience to every engagement. He is a broad thinker who applies his skills to a variety of areas that are impacted by rapid changes in technology.
Active in the evolving areas of information privacy and data governance he started and ran the first software industry lobbying organization to combat piracy and establish protection for software IP. He was a member of IBM’s Data Governance Council leading the privacy and security policy development team.
Goldschmitt has a long interest and involvement with AI. In 1986 he worked with Nestor Inc., the first dedicated neural networking company. He was at IBM when Watson was being developed and then started a company to help job seekers combat the use of AI in resume screening.
Goldschmitt has published numerous articles on business development strategies, security and data governance. He holds a BS from the State University of New York and an MS from the Medical College of Virginia/VCU, in psychology, is a professional photographer and spent a number of years as a meditation instructor.
High Temperature Superconductors: From Discovery to Large-Scale Industrial Applications
On June 13, Professor Amit Goyal spoke about high-temperature superconductors? These high-tech darlings of the late 1980s brought a Nobel Prize to their discoverers and generated endless speculation about how their near perfect conduction of electricity would revolutionize the world we live in!
A key obstacle in realizing large-scale applications of these novel materials was the difficulty of forming long, flexible wires that can carry large amounts of supercurrent per unit area, from these highly brittle, ceramic superconductors that essentially resemble “mud.”
It turns out that from a technical or performance standpoint, a mile-long, flexible, single-crystal-like wire of the highly brittle, ceramic superconductor was required. From a cost and fabrication standpoint, an industrially scalable, low-cost process was needed with the goal being to meet or beat the price of ordinary copper wire!
This constituted the first holy-grail in fabrication of high-performance, superconducting wires, namely, fabrication of single-crystal-like superconducting wires by the kilometer at a price/performance metric equivalent to that of copper.
Once this seemingly insurmountable objective was addressed via fundamental technical innovations, a second holy-grail became apparent for realizing large-scale applications where high-applied magnetic fields were present.
This related to substantially improving the vortex-pinning within the superconducting wires which could only be accomplished by introducing periodic, nanoscale, non-superconducting regions separated by nanoscale dimensions, within kilometer-long superconducting wires. Of course, all of this had to be accomplished without adding any significant cost!
In this talk Goyal of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo will take you on a journey from the discovery of high temperature superconductors towards realizing practical, large-scale, applications of these novel materials by addressing the key scientific and technical challenges mentioned above.
The eventual solutions are one of the first, large-scale, high-technology applications of nanotechnology, the only example of "epitaxy-by-the-mile" and of self-assembly of nanomaterials by the mile!
These HTS wires are now enabling commercial nuclear fusion for limitless clean energy generation, loss-less transmission of energy, superconducting magnetic energy storage systems, next-generation MRI and NMR, MagLev for transportation and all-electric planes and ships with superconducting drivetrains for defense applications.
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Dr. Amit Goyal is
a SUNY Distinguished Professor and SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at the
State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo; a Member of US National
Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Inventors; a Fellow of AAAS,
MRS, IEEE, APS, ASM, ACERS, IOP, WIF and WTN; and a Member of the US National
Materials & Manufacturing Board (NMMB). He has co-authored over 360
publications and has 85 issued patents. He was ranked by
Thompson-Reuters as the most cited author worldwide in the field of high
temperature superconductors from 1999-2009. He is the Director of the Lab for
Heteroepitaxial Growth of Functional Materials & Devices, and the
Director of the NYS Center of Plastics Recycling Research & Innovation at
SUNY. He served as the Founding Director of the Institute on Research and
Education on Energy, Environment & Water (2015-21), and is an Emeritus
Corporate Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Lab. He has received numerous
accolades including DOE’s E.O. Lawrence (EOL) Award in the inaugural category
of Energy Science & Innovation. The EOL award is given by the DOE
Secretary on behalf of the President. Selected additional honors include: TEN
R&D 100 awards, the R&D Magazine's "Innovator-of-the-Year"
award (2010), Three National Federal Lab Consortium Awards for Tech.
Transfer, and the SUNY-Buffalo President’s Medal (2019), the. highest award
at the University at Buffalo. |
UPCOMING WILSON FORUM PRESENTATIONS: The Wilson Forum will take a break in July and August and return for the 2025-2026 season on Sept. 12.
All Wilson Science & Technology Forum presentations are recorded and can be streamed free on demand at the Wilson Forum’s website.
WinCAM broadcasts recordings of Forum presentations at 3 pm on Mondays and Fridays. For the schedule, go to https://wincam.org/schedule/education/ and search for “Wilson.”
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The Wilson Forum’s meetings are via Zoom, at 10:30 a.m. on the second and fourth Fridays of each month, with the exception of July and August.
To learn of upcoming Forum speakers, you can check the Jenks Center’s website https://www.jenkscenter.org/ (events > daytime > Wilson Forum).
Better yet, you can receive advance notification of upcoming talks by emailing a request to be added to the Forum’s roster to rlatanision@alum.mit.edu.
