bots

Programmed…to kill! On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly sit down with BattleBots’ Ray Billings to discuss combat robots, his killer robot Tombstone, and how to create robotics for competition. 

NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/show/killer-bots-with-battlebots-ray-billings/

Thanks to our Patrons Angie, Bruno Faria, EMILY RIVERA, Jocelyn Sailas, Kellie J. LeDonne,  Ben Hansen, and Brooks Dart for supporting us this week.

Photo Credit: Kai Schreiber, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

We are in the middle of a global trust crisis. Neighbors are strangers and local news sources are becoming scarcer; institutions that used to symbolize prestige, honor and a sense of societal security are ridiculed for being antiquated and out of touch. To replace the void, we turn to sharing economy companies and social media, which come up short, or worse. Our guest on this episode, academic and business advisor Rachel Botsman, guides us through how we got here, and how to recover. Botsman is the Trust Fellow at Oxford University, and the author of two books, including “Who Can You Trust?” The intangibility of trust makes it difficult to pin down, she explains, and she speaks directly to technology leaders about fostering communities and creating products the public is willing to put faith in. “The efficiency of technology is the enemy of trust,” she says.