Stay ConnectedHosted by Jennifer Strong, SHIFT is a weekly podcast taking a closer look at the far-reaching impact of automation on our daily lives.
From policy to process, we seek to understand how lives are changing alongside rapid breakthroughs in frontier technologies and artificial intelligence. Join us as we navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by this reshaped reality.
AI agents already perform complex tasks, but they largely work alone, even when they're technically connected. But what if they could collectively learn from each other, and collaborate?
Our guest wants you to think about when that transition happened for people, with our own intelligence, some 70,000 years ago, when human intelligence stopped being a solo act and became something we did together.
Our guest, Vijoy Pandey, runs Outshift by Cisco. He believes AI is standing at that exact threshold right now, and he's building the layer that gets it across the line.
A hundred million degrees Celsius. That’s the brutal reality of commercial fusion. This week, we’re sitting down with industry leaders to discuss the front lines of an energy revolution, from surviving extreme thermal stress to building brand-new supply chains.
We Meet:
Vijoy Pandey is Senior Vice President and General Manager of Outshift by Cisco, the company's internal incubation engine for emerging technology.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This episode of SHIFT was brought to you by Outshift by Cisco.
A hundred million degrees Celsius. That’s the brutal reality of commercial fusion. This week, we’re sitting down with industry leaders to discuss the front lines of an energy revolution, from surviving extreme thermal stress to building brand-new supply chains.
We Meet:
Joe Paluska is the CMO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems
Annie Kritcher is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Inertia
Alice Brooks is a Board Member & Partner at Khosla Ventures
Cary Forest is the Co-Founder & Chief Scientific Officer at Realta Fusion
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What do you think it would be like to lead AI efforts and the overall digital transformation of the CIA? This week, we find out as we dive into a world of espionage and secrets in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Retired Deputy CIA Director for Digital Innovation Jennifer Ewbank
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This episode originally aired in October 2025.
Microsoft EVP Jason Zander on the materials breakthrough that closed the gap, how AI agents cut the roadmap in half, and why he believes quantum's real job might be to make AI smarter.
We Meet:
Microsoft EVP of Discovery & Quantum Jason Zander
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Frank McCourt is an American executive and philanthropist. He’s also the author of “Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age”. We talk to him about that fight before a live audience in New York City at a gathering held by the responsible technology non-profit, All Tech Is Human.
This episode originally aired in 2024.
We Meet:
Frank H. McCourt, Jr., civic entrepreneur and executive chairman of McCourt Global, founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
For as far as we’ve come with AI and robotics, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to combining the two. AI excels in the digital space, and in the physical world, robots are often pre-programmed. That’s where physical AI comes in. It’s critical for things that can’t tolerate the kinds of mistakes that are common in today’s statistics based AI, like self driving cars or managing the power grid. In the latest installment of our oral history project, we meet a central figure in these efforts, MIT's Daniela Rus.
We Meet:
Daniela Rus is the Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
The spray-and-pray approach to AI investing is dead. Join us as we discuss what it takes to stand out in a saturated market as we move beyond the hype to identify real moats and what’s next for investors in this space.
This episode was taped before a live audience at Web Summit Vancouver.
We meet:
Andy McLoughlin is a seed-stage investor at Uncork Capital focused on B2B software, developer tools, and applied AI — and before VC, he co-founded Huddle, an enterprise collaboration platform that was acquired in 2016.
George Mathew is a self-described "deep operator turned venture capitalist" at Insight Partners, with 20+ years building companies including as CEO of Kespry and President & COO of Alteryx, which he scaled through its IPO.
Emily Fontaine leads IBM's $500 million Enterprise AI fund and quantum investing strategy — she's spent 15 years at IBM, previously serving as Executive Advocate to IBM's Chairman and CEO, and as AI Federal Leader for IBM Consulting.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What if we've all become so focused on what technology is capable of that we've lost track of what children are capable of?
We Meet:
Andrew Sliwinski is the VP and Head of Product Experience for Lego Education.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What if the standard approach to responsible AI, built around aspirational values like fairness and transparency, is fundamentally broken in the age of AI agents?
We Meet:
Reid Blackman is the author of the new book The Ethical Nightmare Challenge and the founder of AI ethics consultancy Virtue.
Episode Links:
Reid and Jennifer are speaking at the Drawing Room Salon on May 20:
https://thedrawingroom.ai/
Reid's new book:
https://www.amazon.com/Ethical-Nightmare-Challenge-Avoid-Worst-ebook/dp/B0GRC1ZPYX
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
How do you build intelligent systems that people trust? Then, how do you keep that trust when things go wrong? Because when things do, it’s not the tech that loses face but the brand people relied on.
This episode was taped before a live audience on stage at the HumanX Conference in San Francisco.
We Meet:
Radha Basu, Founder & CEO of iMerit
Shuman Ghosemajumder, Co-founder & CEO of Reken
Andrea Thomaz, Co-founder & CEO of Diligent Robotics
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Capital One is the largest issuer of credit cards in the U.S. It’s also one of the largest banks, and car finance companies, in the country. We learn from its experience building proprietary AI across fraud prevention, agentic workflows, customer experience, and risk and compliance in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Capital One’s Head of AI Foundations Milind Naphade
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Engineers charged with maintaining secure and reliable sites and services need to be able to observe what’s going on inside their systems. That observability data helps them spot issues sooner, fix problems faster, and learn from the whole experience.
A live conversation from the stage at the HumanX Conference in San Francisco.
We Meet:
Christine Yen is the Co-founder and CEO of Honeycomb,
Jennifer Tejada is the CEO and chairperson of PagerDuty
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Best-known as the creator of ImageNet, we meet the Godmother of AI, Dr. Fei-Fei Li In the latest installment of our oral history project. She's a Chinese-American computer scientist and the creator of ImageNet - the dataset that made rapid advances possible in this field of AI that helps computers take meaningful information from things like photos and videos.
We Meet:
Stanford University's Fei-Fei Li, author of "The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI" and the founder of World Labs
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Each day more than 11,000 people in the US turn 65 years old. It adds up to more than 4,000,000 people a year, and the labor force that serves them is struggling to keep up with that demand - a problem that’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.
We explore this shift and how might technology be used to help people age in place in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Chia-Lin Simmons is the CEO of Logic Mark
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Lately, it feels like you can’t go more than a few minutes without hearing someone talk about AI agents, and there’s a very good reason for that. Agents are doing more work, more quickly and in more places, and we’ve developed ways to help them retain knowledge from things they’ve done, and then build upon those experiences.
But what if the experience agents gain on a job changes the work product in ways we didn’t predict? How do you make sure that agent does what you want it to do? This episode, we explore the alignment problem in the age of AI agents.
We Meet:
Andy Hall is a professor in the Political Economy Group at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.
We Meet:
Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This episode originally ran in April 2025.
How to handle cybersecurity challenges posed by AI agents is about the hottest security topic going at the moment. If you’re wondering why that is, it’s because agents are built to take action - to do things on our behalf - and that challenges a core assumption that’s baked into companies security: that humans make the decisions.
Tailscale is a Canadian Unicorn and one of the country’s fastest growing tech companies, thanks in large part to its popularity with AI companies, and increasingly with AI bots too.
CEO Avery Pennarun joins us in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Avery Pennarun, CEO and Co-Founder of Tailscale
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
How much do we know about the way organizations are adopting agentic AI, and what it means for the human employees working alongside? Our friends at The MIT Sloan Management Review did a deep dive on these questions and several more late last year, and they found some pretty surprising things.
This week, we’re going to talk about what those things might mean for companies as we continue to unpack this latest phase of agentic rollouts.
We Meet:
Sam Ransbotham is a professor of analytics at Boston College, the editor for the MIT Sloan Management Review AI Initiative, and the host of Me, Myself and AI.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Critical minerals are in just about every device you can think of, and there’s a global race underway to find and finance the production of these materials because they’re in short supply.
This week, we hear how Earth AI uses predictive algorithms to find new deposits and how TechMet’s capital and partnerships carry those opportunities through to production and market impact.
We Meet:
Roman Teslyuk is the CEO/CTO of EARTH AI
Brian Menell is the CEO of TechMet
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
As regulatory expectations rise, and financial crime grows more complex, risk management is shifting from static checks to continuous intelligence. From the stage at this year’s Web Summit Qatar, we looked at how AI and advanced data analytics are transforming compliance workflows.
We Meet:
Joel Lange is the executive vice president and general manager of Dow Jones Risk and Research
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish?
The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury.
Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based protein.
We Meet:
New School Foods CEO Chris Bryson
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
It’s not just AI software that’s rapidly shifting. One could argue that the very map of high performance computing is being redrawn, from OpenAI investing more than $10-billion in wafer-scale chips to breakthroughs in quantum research that are making that architecture much more useful.
This episode was taped in front of a live audience in Davos, Switzerland, on stage at The Drawing Room: AI and Exploration Salon held alongside the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum.
We Meet:
Cerebras Systems CEO and Co-Founder Andrew Feldman
IonQ CEO and Chairman Niccolo de Masi
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco. A special thank you to our event sponsors: The House of Collaboration Davos 2026, Futurum Group and J3D.AI.
Figuring out what it takes to make agentic AI work in a high-stakes, real-world environment is front and center these days, because for the most part, we’re still figuring that out.
At this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, we get a first-hand look at the shift that’s taking place from agent demos to what a successful deployment looks like.
We Meet:
Shibani Ahuja is the SVP of Enterprise IT Strategy at Salesforce
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
How do you feel about the use of artificial intelligence in the hiring process? Whether it sounds like a good way to remove human bias, a bad idea that could bake in machine bias, or something in between, you won't want to miss our deep dive with author and journalist Hilke Schellmann at the P&T Knitwear Bookstore in Manhattan.
This episode was taped in collaboration with All Tech is Human in New York City.
Credits:
We Meet:
Hilke Schellmann is an Emmy award-winning investigative reporter and assistant professor of journalism at New York University.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This week, we bring you an episode of another podcast anchored by our host, Jennifer Strong, called The Next Innovation. In it, we sit down with other prominent tech journalists to discuss the biggest tech trends to watch in 2026 - including how the different iterations of AI, including agentic AI, will shape the future of cybersecurity, finance, healthcare, and defense.
We Meet:
Freelance journalist Jeff Wilser has written for The New York Times, Wired, Time Magazine and many others. He’s also the author of 8 books.
London-based editor Charlotte Jee is the news editor for MIT Tech Review.
The Wall Street Journal’s Robert McMillan writes about computer security, hackers and privacy from San Francisco.
Credits:
This episode was produced by Situation Room Studios. Christine Baratta is the executive producer, and Sharon Beriro is the senior producer. Layla Charaaoui is the associate producer. Additional production support by Global Situation Room.
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
A live conversation about the state of the space industry with serial space entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian, a co-founder of Axiom Space, Intuitive Machines, Quantum Space, and more, from the mainstage at Collision Conference in Toronto, Canada.
This episode first published on June 26th, 2024.
We meet:
Dr. Kamal "Kam" Ghaffarian
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We meet a founder questioning the wisdom of the Turing Test as he works to address the loneliness epidemic among the elderly, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Intuition Robotics Founder Dor Skuler, maker of the ElliQ digital companion
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This episode first published in August 2024.
The application of artificial intelligence to help discover new medicines could become one of the more transformative ways we use this tech in the near term. A key player in this space is Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Its outgoing CEO Chris Gibson takes us on a tour of the world's largest phenomics lab in Salt Lake City, Utah.
We Meet:
Recursion Co-Founder Chris Gibson
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What if voting in a primary could be as simple as reaching for your phone? This week, Bradley Tusk's TED Talk about this topic was named one of the ten essential TED Talks of 2025, and we're revisiting the episode we taped with him about mobile voting for our oral history project.
We Meet:
Bradley Tusk, Founder & CEO of Tusk Holdings
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What happens when machines start telling us what we want to hear—and when users start depending on them for emotional connection? Join us for a live conversation about the psychology and liability of chatbots.
We Meet:
Meg Marco is Harvard Berkman Klein Center’s Senior Director of the Applied Social Media Lab.
New York Times Tech Reporter Kashmir Hill is also the author of YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US.
Jordi Weinstock is a Senior Advisor to Harvard’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We join the MIT community in New York for an event focused on AI, innovation, and the evolving role of tech in society.
SandboxAQ is a Google spinout that combines AI Large Quantitative Models and deep expertise in physics, biology, and chemistry in order to work on a wide range of hard problems, such as the prototyping of new materials and chemicals for manufacturing. Andrew McLaughlin is the company’s chief operating officer. We sat down to chat after he made the case to the room that the future of AI may not be large language models, but quantitative.
This episode originally aired in June 2025.
We Meet:
Andrew McLaughlin, COO of Sandbox AQ
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Join us for a deep dive on the relationship between trust and artificial intelligence as we unpack a flash poll from Edelman, the world's largest PR firm.
We Meet:
Margot Edelman, Global Technology Practice Lead for Edelman
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
How do we move quantum computing from scientific milestone to measurable business value?
It’s not an easy question to answer.
When I first started covering this tech even the physicists charged with building such machines doubted the feasibility of the whole idea. That's no longer the case today, but the bar for quantum, especially compared to AI, remains almost impossibly high.
This episode was taped before a live audience at Web Summit, Europe's largest tech conference, in Lisbon, Portugal.
We Meet:
Alice & Bob Co-founder & CEO Théau Peronnin
Planqc Co-founder & CEO Alex Glaetzle
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
For as far as we’ve come with AI and robotics, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to combining the two. AI excels in the digital space, and in the physical world, robots are often pre-programmed. That’s where physical AI comes in. It’s critical for things that can’t tolerate the kinds of mistakes that are common in today’s statistics based AI, like self driving cars or managing the power grid. In the latest installment of our oral history project, we meet a central figure in these efforts, MIT's Daniela Rus.
We Meet:
Daniela Rus is the Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.
We Meet:
Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This episode originally ran in April 2025.
AMD provides high-performance computing power that runs everything from your gaming console and personal laptop, to the giant supercomputers and AI systems that power the cloud. Its head of AI discusses the move from sequential to massively parallel processing, and the company's strategy to embed AI from big cloud machines to tiny client devices.
We Meet:
AMD’s SVP for AI Vamsi Boppana
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We explore how one group is using AI to help people talk, listen and understand in large groups, in hopes of counteracting forces that have undermined our ability to communicate online, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw, an incubator within Google
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What do you think it would be like to lead AI efforts and the overall digital transformation of the CIA? This week, we find out as we dive into a world of espionage and secrets in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Retired Deputy CIA Director for Digital Innovation Jennifer Ewbank
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
How we build products, why we build them, and what we think they’re for have always changed, but these days developers and engineers who love things like product roadmaps might find the current AI scene a little disorienting. That’s because there often isn’t a roadmap. If there is? It’s constantly changing.
This week, we meet the CTO of IBM Research and she tells us about the current landscape and what she imagines for the future.
This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna, Austria.
We Meet:
IBM Research CTO Anna Topol
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens, and special thanks to Dajana Doskoc and Alina Nikoloau at TEDAI Vienna. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Agentic AI is one of the hottest topics going in tech circles, but if pinning down exactly what we’re talking about feels a bit like a moving target, it’s not your imagination. What agents are capable of doing is changing almost as quickly as what people want to do with them.
We Meet:
VP of Agentic AI at AWS Swami Sivasubramanian
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens, and special thanks to Dajana Doskoc and Alina Nikoloau at TEDAI Vienna. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What’s an astronaut’s time worth? Answering that question is not a perfect science, but at more than $100,000 an hour (not counting salary - that's just to keep one alive) on the International Space Station, it’s safe to say it’s more than you want to pay for bagging up trash.
This week, we take a field trip in New York City to see some space robots that could help with this problem.
We Meet:
Icarus Robotics CEO Ethan Barajas
Icarus Robotics CTO Jamie Palmer
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Might a lack of legacy healthcare tech infrastructure in rural communities offer an advantage over mature markets? A founder makes the case in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Homeward Co-Founder & President Amar Kendale
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
You've likely heard that artificial intelligence is gobbling up electricity and drinking water, and causing a global race to build more energy capacity.
Have you ever stopped to consider why? Or what we’re doing to bring compute power and sustainability closer together?
This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at TechBBQ, the largest tech conference in the Nordics. It's held each year in Copenhagen, Denmark.
We Meet:
Caspar Høgh, Co-Founding Partner Noon Ventures
Yasser Nour, CTO & Co-Founder Lotus Microsystems
Ruben Bryon, CEO & Co-Founder Datacrunch
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
EU AI Act architect and lead author Gabriele Mazzini shares his experience drafting the law. He also talks about his concerns with implementation and its potential impact on European competitiveness, and how that led him to quit his job, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna and originally ran in 2024.
We Meet:
MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate & MIT Connection Science Fellow Gabriele Mazzini
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
One of the world's hottest AI startups, Builder.AI, imploded earlier this year. We dig into what actually went down at the company and what journalists and investors can learn from the experience.
We Meet:
Journalist Varsha Bansal
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Despite our best efforts, sometimes what we say we want isn’t precisely what we mean. Nowhere is that felt more acutely than when we’re giving instructions to a machine, whether that’s coding or offering examples to machine learning systems. We unpack the alignment problem in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Brian Christian, University of Oxford researcher, and author of The Alignment Problem
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
In all the noise about AI agents it’s easy to miss a fundamental change that’s taking place. For these agents to be effective, people have to feel safe delegating things to them. When we do? How we use this tech starts to feel less like a tool and more like real collaboration.
This week, we explore agentic powered legal work in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Thomson Reuters Chief Product Officer David Wong
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish?
The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury.
Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based foods.
We Meet:
New School Foods CEO Chris Bryson
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We explore how generative AI is revolutionizing game development at Roblox, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Kiran Bhat, Senior Director of Engineering at Roblox
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This is the final installment of a special series documenting the race to build superintelligent AI systems. The Race to Superintelligence is a deep dive into the rapidly expanding world of artificial intelligence. Join us as we explore the groundbreaking, mystifying and world-changing potential of the next machine age.
Support for this program comes from The Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network, supporting and bringing together journalists reporting on AI, and with AI, globally.
Credits:
The Race to Superintelligence is created and produced by Jennifer Strong, with Emma Cillekens, Daniela Hernandez, and Meg Marco. We had additional research and production assistance from Sonya Gurwitt, Niamh McAuliffe, Anthony Green and Luke Robert Mason. The show is mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
The U.S. trade war is expected to add billions of dollars to things like building AI data centers, and for companies trying to figure out and manage their exposure, it’s never been a more complicated task.
But what if we could build a map that could show us how supply chains, tariffs and trade policy are playing out in real time?
We Meet:
Evan Smith, CEO Altana
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Developing and scaling AI systems brings new security challenges, and companies are scrambling to figure out just how to handle some of the more pressing ones.
I was recently joined on stage by co-founders from two Canadian unicorns, Cohere and Tailscale, to dig into these challenges at Web Summit Vancouver.
We Meet:
Avery Pennarun, Co-founder & CEO, Tailscale
Ivan Zhang, Co-founder, Cohere
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What if instead of software coaching you on how to use it–what buttons to push and what file menus to open–the software could just use itself, once it knew what you wanted?
We explore Intuit's new AI agents in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Alex Balazs, CTO of Intuit
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This is part two of a special series documenting the race to build superintelligent AI systems.
The Race to Superintelligence is a deep dive into the rapidly expanding world of artificial intelligence. Join us as we explore the groundbreaking, mystifying and world-changing potential of the next machine age.
Support for this program comes from The Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network, supporting and bringing together journalists reporting on AI, and with AI, globally.
Credits:
The Race to Superintelligence is created and produced by Jennifer Strong, with Emma Cillekens, Daniela Hernandez, and Meg Marco. We had additional research and production assistance from Sonya Gurwitt, Niamh McAuliffe, Anthony Green and Luke Robert Mason. The show is mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
We join the MIT community in New York for an event focused on AI, innovation, and the evolving role of tech in society.
SandboxAQ is a Google spinout that combines AI Large Quantitative Models and deep expertise in physics, biology, and chemistry in order to work on a wide range of hard problems, such as the prototyping of new materials and chemicals for manufacturing. Andrew McLaughlin is the company’s chief operating officer. We sat down to chat after he made the case to the room that the future of AI may not be large language models, but quantitative.
We Meet:
Andrew McLaughlin, COO of Sandbox AQ
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Most geospatial data is gathered by satellites and cameras attached to planes, but a new decentralized network is helping amateur drone pilots capture and contribute ultra high resolution data.
In this week's show, we go fly a drone and learn how that data is helping power next generation apps for things like disaster response.
We Meet:
Alec Wilson, COO Spexi
Bill Lakeland, CEO Spexi
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What might the future of AI look like?
Robert Brunner is responsible for some of the most iconic industrial designs of this century, and Matt Biilmann coined the phrase AX, which considers the user experience for AI agents. They joined me on center stage for a live conversation about what it means to design for AI at the Web Summit Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
We Meet:
Matt Biilmann, Co-founder & CEO Netlify
Robert Brunner, Founder of Ammunition Group
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
The Race to Superintelligence is a deep dive into the rapidly expanding world of artificial intelligence. Join us as we explore the groundbreaking, mystifying and world-changing potential of the next machine age.
Support for this program comes from The Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network, supporting and bringing together journalists reporting on AI, and with AI, globally.
This episode first published in October 2024.
Credits:
The Race to Superintelligence is created and produced by Jennifer Strong, with Emma Cillekens, Daniela Hernandez, and Meg Marco. We had additional research and production assistance from Sonya Gurwitt, Niamh McAuliffe, Anthony Green and Luke Robert Mason. The show is mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
Special thanks to our guest Cade Metz at The New York Times.
The application of artificial intelligence to help discover new medicines could become one of the more transformative ways we use this tech in the near term. Recursion Pharmaceuticals CEO Chris Gibson takes us on a tour of the world's largest phenomics lab.
We Meet:
Recursion Co-Founder & CEO Chris Gibson
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Frank McCourt is an American executive and philanthropist. He’s also the author of a new book about the internet, called Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age. We talk to him about that fight before a live audience in New York City at a gathering held by the responsible technology non-profit, All Tech Is Human.
We Meet:
Frank H. McCourt, Jr., civic entrepreneur and executive chairman of McCourt Global, founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Whether you're on a dating app or playing a game, how do you know if you're interacting with another human? We meet someone working on a possible solution to this problem in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Adrian Ludwig, Chief Architect of Tools for Humanity
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Browsing online reviews when you’re shopping for a new product or service can be incredibly helpful, but only if they’re real.
We Meet: Trustpilot CEO Adrian Blair
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.
We Meet:
Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
What if voting in a primary could be as simple as reaching for your phone? We explore mobile voting in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Bradley Tusk, Founder & CEO of Tusk Holdings
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Meet the CEO of Cerebras Systems in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in the way new drugs are discovered. It’s radically changing how this process works, and speeding up the development of new therapies.
We Meet:
Alex Zhavoronkov, CEO at Insilico Medicine
Mike Nally, CEO at Generate Biomedicines
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We know that kids spending time on social media are more likely to experience depression and anxiety. Less clear, and far more contentious, is the role we expect of schools, governments, and tech companies, and some parents are starting to organize.
It's the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Mothers Against Media Addiction (MAMA) Founder Julie Scelfo
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Anyone who’s had a job, knows what it means to have co-workers, but what happens when your colleague is an AI agent? As AI enters the workforce, we explore this question and more in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We meet a founder questioning the wisdom of the Turing Test as he works to address the loneliness epidemic among the elderly, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Intuition Robotics Founder Dor Skuler, maker of the ElliQ digital companion
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This episode first published in August 2024.
A live conversation about the state of the space economy with the first Arab woman to fly to space and with a leading space investor. This episode was taped at the Middle East's largest tech event, with 25,000 attendees, from the mainstage of Web Summit Qatar.
We meet:
Astronaut Sara Sabry, CEO & Founder Deep Space Initiative
Adam Niewinski Co-Founder, General Partner OTB Ventures
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
In the not too distant future we might use AI agents for all sorts of things, though for now payments remain an obstacle because they can’t spend money without human help.
We Meet:
Amir Sarhangi, CEO of Skyfire
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Despite our best efforts, sometimes what we say we want isn’t precisely what we mean. Nowhere is that felt more acutely than when we’re giving instructions to a machine, whether that’s coding or offering examples to machine learning systems. We unpack the alignment problem in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Brian Christian, University of Oxford researcher, and author of The Alignment Problem
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We chat with Organic Valley in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Joshua Krzych, interim CIO at Organic Valley
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
In this encore episode, we tour Google's Project Starline at the 2024 TED Conference in Vancouver.
We Meet:
Andrew Nartker from Google’s Project Starline
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Certain things about the development of artificial intelligence were generally taken as fact, until Silicon Valley woke up to the rise of a small Chinese startup called DeepSeek.
We Meet:
Tech Editor & Neuroscientist Daniela Hernandez
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
A look at industrial cybersecurity, and why it matters, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Ian Bramson, Vice President of Global Industrial Cybersecurity at Black & Veatch
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We catch up with cognitive scientist Gary Marcus on his list of predictions for what to watch in AI this year, and beyond.
We Meet:
Author & Cognitive Scientist Gary Marcus
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
A live conversation about the state of the space industry with serial space entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian, a co-founder of Axiom Space, Intuitive Machines, Quantum Space, and more, from the mainstage at Collision Conference in Toronto, Canada.
This episode first published on June 26th, 2024.
We meet:
Dr. Kamal "Kam" Ghaffarian
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We’re taking a break for the holidays but given the recent quantum news with the unveiling of Google’s Willow, we think it’s a great time to revisit a chat I had with the man who founded and leads Google’s Quantum AI Lab.
We’re back with a new episode next week. Until then, Happy New Year, and thanks for listening!
We Meet:
Google Quantum AI Lab Founder Hartmut Neven
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
This episode was recorded in Vancouver, Canada at the 2024 TED Conference.
When North Korea hacked Alejandro Caceres, he expected the U.S. government to rush to his defense. When they just shrugged, he took matters into his own hands. This week we bring you an episode of the CLICK HERE podcast from Recorded Future News and PRX.
Credits:
CLICK HERE is hosted by Dina Temple-Raston and this episode was produced by Sean Powers, Cat Schuknecht and Jade Abdul-Malik, edited by Lu Olkowski and fact checked by Darren Ankrom. It contains original music by Ben Levingston, with some other music from Blue Dot Sessions. The staff writer is Lucas Riley, and the illustrator is Megan Goff. Martin Peralta is the sound designer and engineer. CLICK HERE is a production of Recorded Future News and PRX.
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
A question I was asked to explore at this year’s Web Summit, Europe’s largest tech conference, is whether AI has broken the media.
We Meet:
New York Times Editorial Director of AI Zach Seward
Financial Times Head of Digital Matthew Garrahan
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Appealing a decision by a health insurance provider not to cover a treatment can be a complicated and time consuming process. But what if it didn’t have to be? We meet a founder working to automate the appeals process.
We meet:
Fight Health Insurance Founder Holden Karau
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
We take for granted access to certain services even when the commercial value and the societal value don’t align - like the ability to mail a letter anywhere in the US. In the latest installment of our oral history project, we explore how things like this might work in the age of AI.
We meet:
Mozilla Technical Lead for AI Governance Nik Marda
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
From deciding where to build a new business, airport or fire station, to understanding the potential impact of decisions regarding conservation or governance, people make billions of maps everyday using GIS. We explore the history and evolution of this tech with one of its pioneers, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Esri Founder & President Jack Dangermond
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
AI startups dominate the funding landscape, from mega deals like xAI, to more modest investments. But how do venture capitalists see this market evolving?
This episode was taped before a live audience at Web Summit 2024.
We meet:
Khosla Ventures Partner Kanu Gulati
Mangusta Capital Co-Founder & Managing Partner Kevin Jiang
Faber Ventures Partner Carlos Silva
Clone Founder and CEO Clement Benoit
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Frank McCourt is an American executive and philanthropist. He’s also the author of a new book about the internet, called “Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age”. We talk to him about that fight before a live audience in New York City at a gathering held by the responsible technology non-profit, All Tech Is Human.
We Meet:
Frank H. McCourt, Jr., civic entrepreneur and executive chairman of McCourt Global, founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
EU AI Act architect and lead author Gabriele Mazzini shares his experience drafting the law. He also talks about his concerns with implementation, and its potential impact on European competitiveness, and how that led him to quit his job, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna.
We Meet:
MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate & MIT Connection Science Fellow Gabriele Mazzini
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.
Activists are fighting back against generative AI and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process, says Brian Merchant in a new piece for The Atlantic.
Originally aired February 14, 2024.
We Meet:
Tech Journalist & Author Brian Merchant
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
This is the final installment of a special series documenting the race to build superintelligent AI systems. The Race to Superintelligence is a deep dive into the rapidly expanding world of artificial intelligence. Join us as we explore the groundbreaking, mystifying and world-changing potential of the next machine age.
Support for this program comes from The Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network, supporting and bringing together journalists reporting on AI, and with AI, globally.
Credits:
The Race to Superintelligence is created and produced by Jennifer Strong, with Emma Cillekens, Daniela Hernandez, and Meg Marco. We had additional research and production assistance from Sonya Gurwitt, Niamh McAuliffe, Anthony Green and Luke Robert Mason. The show is mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
This is part two of a special series documenting the race to build superintelligent AI systems.
The Race to Superintelligence is a deep dive into the rapidly expanding world of artificial intelligence. Join us as we explore the groundbreaking, mystifying and world-changing potential of the next machine age.
Support for this program comes from The Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network, supporting and bringing together journalists reporting on AI, and with AI, globally.
Credits:
The Race to Superintelligence is created and produced by Jennifer Strong, with Emma Cillekens, Daniela Hernandez, and Meg Marco. We had additional research and production assistance from Sonya Gurwitt, Niamh McAuliffe, Anthony Green and Luke Robert Mason. The show is mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
The Race to Superintelligence is a deep dive into the rapidly expanding world of artificial intelligence. Join us as we explore the groundbreaking, mystifying and world-changing potential of the next machine age.
Support for this program comes from The Pulitzer Center’s AI Accountability Network, supporting and bringing together journalists reporting on AI, and with AI, globally.
Credits:
The Race to Superintelligence is created and produced by Jennifer Strong, with Emma Cillekens, Daniela Hernandez, and Meg Marco. We had additional research and production assistance from Sonya Gurwitt, Niamh McAuliffe, Anthony Green and Luke Robert Mason. The show is mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
Special thanks to our guest Cade Metz at The New York Times.
Disney’s science-fiction thriller, The Creator, paints a picture of a future world at war—humans vs. artificial intelligence. This episode we meet the film’s director Gareth Edwards, who unpacks just how complex the relationship is between the two, and why he decided to explore it in this film.
We Meet:
Director Gareth Edwards
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from Jacob Gorski.
There’s a world in which a group of mountain gorillas in Rwanda might one day be able to pay for their own protection. It involves a new financial model with an AI-powered digital wallet and data that’s provided by the gorillas themselves, as well as the people who live and work around them.
All of this might sound far-fetched, but the man behind this project has brought other unlikely ideas to life. Jonathan Ledgard is a futurist thinker on risk, nature, and advanced technology in Africa and emerging markets, as well as a pioneer of drone delivery and interspecies money. We hear his story in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Jonathan Ledgard, CEO of Tehanu
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Perhaps the greatest fear about artificial intelligence is it will eventually replace human intelligence altogether, because if AI takes over decision-making, what’s irreplaceable about humans?
We Meet:
Neil Lawrence, professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Songwriter and music producer Harvey Mason Jr. has worked with some of the biggest stars of our time, from artists like Beyonce and Elton John, to Whitney Houston and Justin Bieber. In his current role as CEO of the Recording Academy he helps drive the conversation about AI in the music industry - like deciding what qualifies for the Grammys.
We Meet:
Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Do you think it's harder or easier to be a teenager now than in the past? The Pew Research Center has been studying this question and found that however a parent or teen answers, technology is likely to be cited as the reason.
We Meet:
Jeff Gottfried, Associate Director of Research at Pew Research Center
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Meet a founder questioning the wisdom of the Turing Test as he works to address the loneliness epidemic among the elderly, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Intuition Robotics Founder Dor Skuler, maker of the ElliQ digital companion
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
In this encore edition of our oral history project we meet a man trying to solve AI’s black box problem with symbolic AI, a subfield that communicates how decisions are made.
We Meet:
Casper Wilstrup, the Founder & CEO of Abzu
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
We learn why lawyers who help people seeking to legally expose corruption in the government and at private companies have decided to focus on big tech, in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Whistleblower Aid CEO Libby Liu
Credits:
The show is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Hearing has a profound impact on a person’s emotional, mental and cognitive well-being and there’s also a long, rich history of cutting edge tech being used in devices that are meant to help us hear better.
And yet, it’s not something we talk much about.
We Meet:
Stefan Launer, Sonova's Senior Vice President Science & Technology
Credits:
The show is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
In the latest installment of our oral history project, we meet a scientist who’s been supporting deep investigative journalism projects for more than a decade. This collaboration between Neo4j and journalists helped to uncover Russian interference in the 2016 election and the Panama Papers - an investigation of one of the biggest ever global corruption scandals that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
We Meet:
Neo4j Chief Scientist Dr. Jim Webber
Credits:
The show is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
We hop into the backseat of a police car and learn how officers in Rwanda have adopted and deployed AI on the streets of its capital city, Kigali.
We Meet:
Chief Inspector of Police Paul Ryamugwiza, director of traffic and road enforcement systems for Rwanda National Police
Credits:
The show is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Potentially a quarter billion children worldwide lack access to an education. Advances in education tech and AI programs for learning can help students who have access to tools and internet. This episode, we bring you a conversation with members of the International Rescue Committee, an aid group developing tailored learning experiences for children in crisis. It was taped before a live audience at Web Summit, Europe’s largest tech conference, in Lisbon, Portugal.
This episode originally ran on November 29, 2023.
We Meet:
Atish Gonsalves, Global Lead for Research & Innovation in Education, International Rescue Committee (IRC)
Morena Baccarin, Actor, IRC Ambassador
Sara Wayne Callies, Actor, IRC Ambassador
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
We meet Dr. Fei-Fei Li In the latest installment of our oral history project. She's a Chinese-American computer scientist and the creator of ImageNet - the dataset that made rapid advances possible in this field of AI that helps computers take meaningful information from things like photos and videos.
We Meet:
Stanford University's Fei-Fei Li, author of "The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI"
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Smart TVs that track what people watch and how they watch it give political campaigns a new trove of data to exploit, with little transparency on how it’s happening.
We meet:
Investigative Reporter Maggie Severns speaking about her article:
https://www.notus.org/2024-election/streaming-tv-campaign-ads
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
A live conversation about the state of the space industry with serial space entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian, a co-founder of Axiom Space, Intuitive Machines, Quantum Space, and more, from the mainstage at Collision Conference in Toronto, Canada.
We meet:
Dr. Kamal "Kam" Ghaffarian
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
How do we minimize the risk of mid-air collisions between aircraft? And how does that change in the era of artificial intelligence and things like drone swarms?
Claire Tomlin works on questions like these, and her work is now the basis of a new field of AI in which a system automatically learns operational and control objectives from data, while maintaining things like flight safety.
We Meet:
University of California Berkeley’s Claire Tomlin, 2024 IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal recipient recognized “for foundational work in the design and verification of cyber-physical systems with applications to safety in autonomous systems”
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
A growing number of school kids are getting their writing assignments back with grades and feedback that were given by AI software.Teachers say these AI tools can help them grade papers faster but who’s grading the AI tools?
We Meet:
CalMatters Tech Reporter Khari Johnson
https://calmatters.org/economy/technology/2024/06/teachers-ai-grading/
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
A team of computer scientists at the University of Chicago has built tools that let artists poison the training data embedded in their work, and fight back against those who scrape the internet to build generative AI models.
We Meet:
Nightshade Creator Ben Zhao, Neubauer Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
For some types of problems quantum computers can work exponentially faster than other types of supercomputers, but significant challenges remain to building useful quantum machines.
We hear from one of the key players in the field and learn about his efforts to do so in the latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Google Quantum AI Lab Founder Hartmut Neven
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
A live conversation about the potential promises and pitfalls of AI in public health, hosted by Boston University's School of Public Health.
We meet:
Dr. David Cutler, Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economics at Harvard University, with secondary appointments at the Kennedy School of Government and the School of Public Health
Dr. Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, former Deputy Assistant to President Joe Biden and Acting Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Greg Singleton, Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer at the US Department of Health and Human Services
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
A look at how generative AI is being used in the drug discovery process in this latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Insilico Medicine Founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Cornell University’s Elephant Listening Project has been trying to get real-time monitoring of the Central African Republic’s forest elephants for years. FruitPunch AI and a roster of other AI researchers are closer than ever to making that a reality.
This week’s show is a special feature episode from our friends at the Click Here Podcast. We’ll be back with a new episode of SHIFT next week. Thanks for listening!
A look at how AI is helping and hurting cybersecurity in this latest installment of our oral history project.
We Meet:
Palo Alto Networks Chief Product Officer Lee Klarich
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
In this bonus episode, we tour Google's Project Starline at this year's TED Conference in Vancouver, Canada.
We Meet:
Andrew Nartker from Google’s Project Starline
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
The way we pay for things is changing dramatically, and it’s only going to become more invisible and integrated into our experiences going forward—like a car that can pay for gas or electric charging all on its own.
We Meet:
Mastercard President and CTO Ed McLaughlin
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
AI is being used to write stories that flood the internet with trash and spam, but it can also help journalists tell stories that can be personalized and updated automatically. In the latest installment of our oral history project, we look at how journalism story structures are evolving with AI.
We Meet:
Computational Journalist Francesco Marconi, co-founder of real-time information company Applied XL
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
As more people try ChatGPT and other AI tools, our thoughts about what's fair or what to trust with generative AI are evolving. The Pew Research Center offers some of the most comprehensive surveys of American public opinion and has been studying these questions.
We Meet:
Alec Tyson, Associate Director at Pew Research Center
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
The current AI ecosystem has plenty in common with the early days of the web. So, what have we learned?
We Meet:
Mark Surman, President of Mozilla
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Our trust in people, government, science and even our trust in technology—we have a lot less trust in all of it than we used to. Our lack of trust might even turn out to be the most bi-partisan thing about this US election cycle, especially our lack of trust in AI.
We Meet:
Richard Edelman, the president and chief executive officer of the public relations company Edelman
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Frank McCourt is an American executive and philanthropist. He’s also the author of a new book about the internet, called “Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age”. We talk to him about that fight before a live audience in New York City at a gathering held by the responsible technology non-profit, All Tech Is Human.
We Meet:
Frank H. McCourt, Jr., civic entrepreneur and executive chairman of McCourt Global, founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Join EngineEars founder Derek "MixedByAli" Ali and EMPIRE founder Ghazi Shami as they deep dive into the convergence of innovation and artistry, discuss the latest trends in the music industry, and explore how tech is revolutionizing the creation and distribution of music around the world.
We Meet:
Derek Ali, EngineEars, Founder and CEO
Ghazi Shami, EMPIRE, Founder & CEO
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
In this second of a two-part series, we meet people fighting to build an open internet.
We Meet:
Digital Medusa Founder Farzaneh Badiei
Internet Society President & CEO Andrew Sullivan
Vivaldi CEO Jon Von Tetzchner
ICANN Interim President & CEO Sally Costerton
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
The infrastructure underpinning the internet is increasingly under threat, but how many of us stop to consider how or why the internet works?
We Meet:
Internet Society President & CEO Andrew Sullivan
ICANN Interim President & CEO Sally Costerton
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Activists are fighting back against generative AI and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process, says Brian Merchant in a new piece for The Atlantic.
We Meet:
Tech Journalist & Author Brian Merchant
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
Software can make it easier for people to file their own taxes, but what if you have a question? Would you trust generative AI to give you the answer?
We Meet:
H&R Block VP of Technology Aditya Thadani
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.
An analysis by Consumer Reports suggests that every person on Facebook is being monitored by thousands of companies, but new tools and laws are starting to make it easier for people to take back their privacy.
This episode was recorded in New York City at an event hosted by the responsible tech nonprofit All Tech Is Human.
We Meet:
Consumer Reports R&D Director Ginny Fahs
New York Times Contributing Opinion Writer & Investigative Journalist Julia Angwin
Block Party Founder & CEO Tracy Chou
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. The on-site recording engineer was Josh Chapdelaine. SHIFT is mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art direction by Anthony Green. The Founder and President of All Tech is Human is David Ryan Polgar.
Artists are starting to use AI to fight back against AI with free tools that let visual artists deter–even poison–AI models that use their work without permission.
We Meet:
Carl Franzen, Head of News at VentureBeat
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
A new study explores how an AI model that’s been taught to lie might be brought back into line.
We Meet:
Brown University Professor of Computer Science Michael Littman
Credits:
This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
In the latest installment of our oral history project we meet one of the central figures behind generative coding tools.
We Meet:
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
In the latest installment of our oral history project we meet one of the key figures behind Rwanda’s national AI policies.
We Meet:
Esther Kunda, Director General, Innovation & Emerging Technologies for Rwanda’s Ministry of Information Communication Technology and Innovation
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
In the latest installment of our oral history project we meet Ryan Graciano, a co-founder of the personal finance company, Credit Karma.
We Meet:
Ryan Graciano, Co-founder & CTO of Credit Karma
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski, with special thanks this week to the folks at TED AI.
As this year draws to a close we’re bringing you a look at the tech trends we’ll be watching in 2024.
We Meet:
Deloitte’s Chief Futurist Mike Bechtel
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong, Anthony Green, and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
Language translation increasingly falls to artificial intelligence—but AI still doesn’t speak many of the world’s languages.
We Meet:
Vasco Pedro, CEO, Unbabel
Paulo Dimas, VP Product Innovation, Unbabel
Pelonomi Moiloa, CEO, Lelapa AI
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong, Anthony Green, and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
In this third installment of our oral history project we meet a man working to build edtech programs in under-resourced languages for children without access to traditional schooling. His company, Taleemabad, was awarded the WISE award in 2021 and has been recognized by Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai and the late Queen Elizabeth.
We Meet:
Haroon Yasin, the Co-founder & CEO of Taleemabad
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
Potentially a quarter billion children worldwide lack access to an education. Advances in education tech and AI programs for learning can help students who have access to tools and internet. This episode, we bring you a conversation with members of the International Rescue Committee, an aid group developing tailored learning experiences for children in crisis. It was taped before a live audience at Web Summit, Europe’s largest tech conference, in Lisbon, Portugal.
We Meet:
Atish Gonsalves, Global Lead for Research & Innovation in Education, International Rescue Committee (IRC)
Morena Baccarin, Actor, IRC Ambassador
Sara Wayne Callies, Actor, IRC Ambassador
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
In this second installment of our oral history project we meet a man trying to solve AI’s black box problem with symbolic AI, a subfield that communicates how decisions are made.
We Meet:
Casper Wilstrup, the Founder & CEO of Abzu
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
In an increasingly digital world, ensuring equitable access to broadband and digital tools has become a pressing societal issue—particularly within the Black community. This episode, a conversation moderated by our show’s co-creator and senior producer, Anthony Green. It was taped in front of a live audience at The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, DC.
We Meet:
Dr. Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings, and also serves as Co-Editor-In-Chief of TechTank
Sean Mickens, Associate Vice President, External Affairs, Comcast
Dr. Jon Gant, director, Department of Commerce, NTIA, Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives
Justice Ukadike, Manager, Senior Analyst, U.S. Government Affairs & Public Policy, Google
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
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Privacy officers from Google, Microsoft, Meta and IBM discuss how they approach AI governance before a live audience at the general meeting of the IAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals) on November 3, 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts.
We Meet:
Julie Brill, Chief Privacy Officer, Corporate Vice President, Global Privacy & Regulatory Affairs, Microsoft
Keith Enright, Global Chief Privacy Officer, Google
Christina Montgomery, Chief Privacy and Trust Officer, IBM
Rob Sherman, Vice President and Deputy Chief Privacy Officer, Policy, Meta
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
We explore what impact the U.S. President's executive order on artificial intelligence might have as governments across the globe move to regulate AI.
We Meet:
Khari Johnson, senior writer, Wired
Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign with the Data Science Institute at Brown University
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong, Anthony Green and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
The hardest part of making something in space right now might just be getting it back to Earth. A conversation with Quartz’s Tim Fernholz about the opportunities and challenges of making goods in orbit.
In the first installment of our oral history project we meet the woman overseeing Airbnb's efforts to build an anti-party AI system to try to combat fraud and stop bad actors from using the company’s platform.
We Meet: Naba Banerjee, head of trust and safety at Airbnb
Credits: SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
Stanford University measured the transparency of top AI foundation models–all failed. The researchers are urging companies to reveal more information such as the data and human labor used to train these models.
We Meet: Karen Hao, contributing writer at The Atlantic
Credits: SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
We take you to the heart of New York City’s manufacturing center, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, for a conversation about AI ethics and geopolitics. It’s taped in front of a live audience of students and manufacturing experts at a factory owned by Nanotronics - a company that manufactures hardware and software capable of working on a nanometer scale - during Manufacturing Week.
We Meet:
John Paul Farmer, Chief Innovation Officer & President, WeLink Cities
Anwaar AlMahmeed, Strategic Advisor, Republic MENA
Geoffrey Levene, Director Worldwide AI Initiatives and Global Public Sector, Head of Climate Action, Defense and Space, NVIDIA
Credits:
The show is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green with help from Emma Cillekens. The theme music was composed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
We hop into the backseat of a police car and learn how officers in Rwanda have adopted and deployed AI on the streets of its capital city, Kigali.
We Meet:
Chief Inspector of Police Paul Ryamugwiza, director of traffic and road enforcement systems for Rwanda National Police
Credits:
The show is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
Advances in off the shelf commercial technologies have helped manufacturers build complex war machines at much lower prices. It’s changed how drone combat works and who can wage it. This episode, we examine the implications on international security and everyday life.
We Meet:
Abishur Prakash, Founder & CEO of The Geopolitical Business
Lorenz Meier, Founder & CEO of Auterion
Credits:
The show is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
Tech companies and investors openly discuss the shifting role of soil in climate-proofing the world’s complex food systems in this live episode taped in front of an audience at New York Climate Week.
We Meet:
Shely Aronov, CEO of Innerplant
Avantika Daing, Managing Partner, Plum Alley and General Partner, Plum Alley Venture Fund
Ana Pavlovic, Chief Commercial Officer at Eion Carbon
Sara Eckhouse, Executive Director of FoodShot Global
Credits:
This show is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski.
It’s been six months since an open letter signed by many of the biggest names in AI called for a temporary pause on the development of certain types of the tech. This episode, we speak with AI luminary Gary Marcus about what's changed since the letter was published, what hasn’t, and how he’s thinking about the way forward.
We Meet:
Gary Marcus, scientist and entrepreneur
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from Jacob Gorski.
Disney’s science-fiction thriller, The Creator, paints a picture of a future world at war—humans vs. artificial intelligence. This episode we meet the film’s director Gareth Edwards, who unpacks just how complex the relationship is between the two, and why he decided to explore it in this new film.
We Meet:
Director Gareth Edwards
Credits:
SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Anthony Green, with help from Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from Jacob Gorski.
Welcome to SHIFT—a new weekly podcast from PRX and the creators of the In Machines We Trust and Future of Everything. Episodes drop September 27th.
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