Show Notes
Life, Automated explores the surreal, exciting, and occasionally terrifying ways AI and automation are reshaping our daily lives.Through thoughtful conversations with researchers, practitioners, artists, and more, we do our best to make sense of how technology is changing—and how it is changing us.
We ask: What does the economy look like if AI can do much of what humans can? Will AI tools isolate us further, or steer us back toward community and common ground? Can the average person expect to be better off a decade from now? And what the heck should we tell a sixteen year old who wants to know whether learning German (or design, or coding, or the piano) is still worth it?
Life, Automated is grounded and non-ideological, going deep without getting too technical. Because you shouldn’t need to be an “AI person” to understand the future we’re collectively building.
The show is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, distributed by KQED. You can reach us at [email protected].
Production note: We relied on the Freesound Project for many of the sound effects used in this trailer. Including:
Alarm clock
School Bus
Air break
Computer mouse
All made available through Creative Commons licenses.
More from Life, Automated
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Live AI translation tools are making it easier to converse across languages without a human translator, a phrasebook, or years of study. So will we all just stop taking Spanish or Mandarin classes? Sociolinguist Abby Walker doesn’t think so. She shares the many reasons we learn new languages, some of which have little to do with functional communication at all. We also hear how one AI-assisted conversation brought two future in-laws together, why machine translation is still so darn buggy, and why some languages are attracting a resurgence of new learners even in the age of translation apps.
Generative AI is able to conjure new images, stories, and songs at lightning speed. So what does this mean for humans artists, storytellers, and musicians? In this special Labor Day episode, we speak with economists Ben Jones and Sam Goldberg, as well as artist Yevgenia Nayberg, to find out what happens when AI enters creative markets. We learn that, at least today, key bottlenecks prevent AI from replicating some aspects of creativity. But there’s no guarantee those bottlenecks will exist tomorrow, raising vital questions about what we value in human labor.
“AI will revolutionize education!”