Robo-cars are coming. Whether the idea of autonomous vehicles excites or terrifies you, these technologies appear to be the future of transportation and their societal implications will be broad. While there will undoubtedly be many benefits to this ‘robo-car’ driven world, this possibility raises many important social, legal and ethical questions that may serve as barriers to wide adoption of these technologies. Join Brad Templeton, futurist, ‘robo-car’ commentator and former advisor to Google’s self-driving car program as he talks about the future of autonomous transportation. He will explore what it will mean for the future of cities, healthy living and sustainability; while also delving into the important dilemmas that arise when we consider giving up control.
Master Mind Master Class is a new alumni UBC event series, offering an unprecedented look into the minds of modern thinkers making a unique impact on the world, and the lessons they’ve learned.
This event took place on March 2, 2016.
Speaker Biography
Brad Templeton
Follow Brad Templeton on Twitter: @bradtem
Brad Templeton founded ClariNet Communications Corp., the first internet-based content company (sold to Individual Inc/Newsedge Corp.). ClariNet published an online electronic newspaper delivered for live reading on subscribers’ machines. He has been active in the internet community since 1979, participated in the building and growth of USENET from its earliest days, and in 1987 he founded and edited rec.humor.funny, the world’s most widely read computerized conference on that network, and today the world’s longest running blog. He has founded two software companies and is the author of a dozen packaged microcomputer software products.
He is a director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights advocacy group for cyberspace, and chaired the foundation from 2000 to 2010. He is track chair for computing and networks at Singularity University, a new multi-discliplinary school of rapidly changing technology, and was among the founding faculty. He writes and researches the future of automated transportation at Robocars.com and spent two years advising Google’s self-driving car team on strategy and future technologies. He is also on the board of the Foresight Institute (a nonprofit Nanotech think-tank) and technical advisor to delivery robot company Starship Technologies, BitTorrent, NewAer, and Quanergy. He is also a well known photographer and artist at Burning Man, and a popular speaker at international events on cars, online rights and other topics.
Select Articles and Books Available at UBC Library
Birdsall, M. (2014). Google and ITE the road ahead for self-driving cars. Ite Journal-Institute of Transportation Engineers, 84(5), 36-39. [Link]
Brombacher, A. (2014). (re)liability of Self‐driving cars. an interesting challenge. Quality and Reliability Engineering International, 30(5), 613-614. doi:10.1002/qre.1707 [Link]
Urmson, C., & Whittaker, W. (2008). Self-driving cars and the urban challenge. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 23(2), 66-68. doi:10.1109/MIS.2008.34 [Link]
Wagner, A., Ortman, S., & Maxfield, R. (2016). From the primordial soup to self-driving cars: Standards and their role in natural and technological innovation. Journal of the Royal Society, Interface / the Royal Society, 13(115) [Link]
Yang, J., & Coughlin, J. F. (2014). In-vehicle technology for self-driving cars: Advantages and challenges for aging drivers. International Journal of Automotive Technology, 15(2), 333-340. doi:10.1007/s12239-014-0034-6 [Link]
UBC Library Research Guides
Dan Burritt is the host and producer of CBC Vancouver News. Burritt joined CBC British Columbia in 2012, covering local stories in the Surrey and Vancouver bureaus.
Valerie Casselton is the Associate Editor, Integrated Projects for PNG, with responsibilities for both The Vancouver Sun and The Province. She is responsible for special series, publications and projects that promote audience engagement on all of the four platforms on which the newsrooms publish, both online and in-paper.
Farhan Mohamed is the Editor-in-Chief and a partner of Vancity Buzz, holding a BBA from CapU. He was brought on during Vancity Buzz’s grassroots stage, controlling day-to-day operations of the company and creating content. For most of his life, Farhan has volunteered and taken leadership roles with a number of different organizations that contribute to society on both a local and global scale. He has a strong passion for building relationships and creating communities through the use of technology. Before joining Vancity Buzz in 2012, Farhan got a taste of media by working at The Vancouver Sun & Province. Since then, his passion has been to change the way people consume news, harnessing the expanse of Vancity Buzz’s unfulfilled potential and turning the site into the dynamic, informative, multifaceted digital news source it has become. Today, Farhan leads the Editorial arm of Vancity Buzz, which has skyrocketed readership by over 15 times since he began, along with Calgary Buzz, the company’s 2015 expansion.
Paul Watson is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of two books, including the best-selling memoir Where War Lives. He spent most of more than a quarter century in journalism as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the Toronto Star. Paul resigned as The Star’s multi-media Arctic Correspondent after the newspaper tried to kill a story detailing how the Conservative government used the search for Sir John Franklin’s missing 19th century ships to push a political agenda. He is currently writing Ice Ghosts: The Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition to be published by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and W.W. Norton internationally. Paul is also the subject of an award-winning two-man play, The Body of an American, staged at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater from February 10 to March 20.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steve Woodward has joined the UBC Graduate School of Journalism for the academic year 2015-2016. Woodward brings to the school more than three decades of experience as an editor and reporter for major metropolitan daily newspapers in the U.S., with a track record in pioneering new approaches to journalism. He comes to the University of British Columbia from Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, where he taught journalism, transmedia, communication ethics, and media and culture for two years.
Andrew Chang joined CBC News Vancouver as host in the summer of 2014, shortly after returning from Sochi as part of CBC’s broadcast team. He has also spent time in the host chair for other network shows such as CBC Radio One’s The Current, CBC News’ The National and CBC News Now.
Shayne Ramsay was recently listed in Vancouver Magazine’s 50 most powerful people in Vancouver; the magazine stated “When you’re CEO of the provincial agency responsible for creating social housing in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets, you’re in the thick of one of the thorniest public-policy issues in the province.”
Bob Rennie is founder of Rennie Marketing Systems, whose recognized leadership for envisioning new and innovative strategies in development risk management and marketing real estate has led to landmark projects such as restructuring the Olympic Village and Woodward’s – in Canada’s poorest postal code. Also known for having built a world renowned collection of contemporary art, Bob chairs the North American Acquisitions Committee at Tate Modern, is a member of the Tate International Council, serves as trustee for the Art Institute of Chicago and is the recipient of the Queen’s Diamond and Golden Jubilee awards, the Order of BC and a doctorate from Emily Carr University. He renovated and restored Wing Sang, the oldest structure in Chinatown, to include a privately funded museum space with regular exhibitions of works from Rennie Collection. All exhibitions are open to the public with free admission two days a week.
Having started her career in television working for an MMA fight show and other various creative agencies as an editor, Lisa von Sturmer realized that she wanted to spend her life doing something positive that had a tangible impact on the community. In 2010, she quit her successful editing career, founded Growing City and never looked back.
Barbra A. Meek is Associate Professor of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Native American Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a Comanche citizen. Her research focuses on representations and performances of American Indian languages and speech, practically and theoretically. Much of her scholarship has focused on language endangerment and revitalization, having worked with First Nations in the Yukon Territory, Canada, on various aboriginal language projects since 1998. Her book, We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community (2010, University of Arizona Press) details this research and offers a socially grounded model for language revitalization. She continues to work with Kaska language teachers and advocates in their efforts to envision a future for the Kaska language. Her current book project is an edited volume with Paul Kroskrity on Native American publics and linguistic futures under contract with Routledge.