Professor Catherine Ball

speaker

146 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 17 Jul

Professor Catherine Ball’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Science Show · Fossil graveyards an archive of past climate and ecology · 17 Jul 2026 podcast

So when I was at the University of Utah, I saw this little delivery robot on the path and it was really cute and it knew where it went and it went on a path and it had a designated place and off it went delivering Mexican food to some hungover students somewhere.

In the US, we've got things like, you know, the Waymos, the Teslas, the Zookses, all of these autonomous vehicles, and they will be doing lots of delivering.

And the thing will be, even if we have autonomous buses, it doesn't mean we won't have a bus driver per se.

But the bus driver won't be driving necessarily.

They'll be there for social interaction, helping the local community, being there for a safety measure, not having to worry about swerving around on the roads.

One of the things about writing this book that really shocked me, one of the statistics that really got me, was our lack of automation and AI inside how we drive our cars, in that if you combine the number of deaths on the road from drugs and from alcohol, and you combine those together, the number of deaths from fatigue is bigger than that.

And yet we worry all the time about drug driving and drink driving, but we don't really worry about fatigue driving.

So when you say, oh, do we want to have all these things, you know, blocking and delivering and stuff, I would sooner have a hungover person ordering food in through a delivery robot or a delivery human than getting in their car and driving and potentially having an accident.

So I think social licence will start switching to more autonomous systems as we see the use cases scale globally.

We have something that's a bit of a shadow pandemic in this country, which is our mental health in this country at the moment.

And the Black Dog Institute, who are experts in this matter and who I'd refer everyone to to go and have a look at this research, found that in our adolescence particularly, the mental health crisis is actually a sleep crisis.

So one of the things that you see all of these sort of fitness and health and wellness people and influencers and stuff like that, even medical advisors, if you could just have a few good nights sleep, the world will look and feel like a better place.

You'll also make better food choices.

You'll also have the energy to exercise.

You'll actually feel better in yourself.

And recently I challenged an audience to say, do you think you could do eight nights of eight hours sleep?

And everyone took a gasp.

And then for the women, could you do nine or 10 hours a night for nine or 10 nights?

And they looked at me like I was speaking Latin.

This is our biology.

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