Your Undivided Attention
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Your Undivided Attention
Join us every other Thursday to understand how new technologies are shaping the way we live, work, and think. Your Undivided Attention is produced by Senior Producer Julia Scott and Researcher/Producer is Joshua Lash. Sasha Fegan is our Executive Producer. We are a member of the TED Audio Collecti...
Episoade Recente
143 episoade
The Crisis That United Humanity—and Why It Matters for AI
In 1985, scientists in Antarctica discovered a hole in the ozone layer that posed a catastrophic threat to life on earth if we didn’t do something abo...
How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death
Content Warning: This episode contains references to suicide and self-harm.
Like millions of kids, 16-year-old Adam Raine started using ChatGPT...
“Rogue AI” Used to be a Science Fiction Trope. Not Anymore.
Everyone knows the science fiction tropes of AI systems that go rogue, disobey orders, or even try to escape their digital environment. These are supp...
AI is the Next Free Speech Battleground
Imagine a future where the most persuasive voices in our society aren't human. Where AI generated speech fills our newsfeeds, talks to our children, a...
Daniel Kokotajlo Forecasts the End of Human Dominance
In 2023, researcher Daniel Kokotajlo left OpenAI—and risked millions in stock options—to warn the world about the dangerous direction of AI developmen...
Is AI Productivity Worth Our Humanity? with Prof. Michael Sandel
Tech leaders promise that AI automation will usher in an age of unprecedented abundance: cheap goods, universal high income, and freedom from the drud...
The Narrow Path: Sam Hammond on AI, Institutions, and the Fragile Future
The race to develop ever-more-powerful AI is creating an unstable dynamic. It could lead us toward either dystopian centralized control or uncontrolla...
People are Lonelier than Ever. Enter AI.
Over the last few decades, our relationships have become increasingly mediated by technology. Texting has become our dominant form of communication. S...
Echo Chambers of One: Companion AI and the Future of Human Connection
AI companion chatbots are here. Everyday, millions of people log on to AI platforms and talk to them like they would a person. These bots will ask you...
AGI Beyond the Buzz: What Is It, and Are We Ready?
What does it really mean to ‘feel the AGI?’ Silicon Valley is racing toward AI systems that could soon match or surpass human intelligence. The implic...
Rethinking School in the Age of AI
AI has upended schooling as we know it. Students now have instant access to tools that can write their essays, summarize entire books, and solve compl...
Forever Chemicals, Forever Consequences: What PFAS Teaches Us About AI
Artificial intelligence is set to unleash an explosion of new technologies and discoveries into the world. This could lead to incredible advances in h...
Weaponizing Uncertainty: How Tech is Recycling Big Tobacco’s Playbook
One of the hardest parts about being human today is navigating uncertainty. When we see experts battling in public and emotions running high, it's eas...
The Man Who Predicted the Downfall of Thinking
Few thinkers were as prescient about the role technology would play in our society as the late, great Neil Postman. Forty years ago, Postman warned ab...
Behind the DeepSeek Hype, AI is Learning to Reason
When Chinese AI company DeepSeek announced they had built a model that could compete with OpenAI at a fraction of the cost, it sent shockwaves through...
The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive
When engineers design AI systems, they don't just give them rules - they give them values. But what do those systems do when those values clash with w...
Laughing at Power: A Troublemaker’s Guide to Changing Tech
The status quo of tech today is untenable: we’re addicted to our devices, we’ve become increasingly polarized, our mental health is suffering and our...
Ask Us Anything 2024
2024 was a critical year in both AI and social media. Things moved so fast it was hard to keep up. So our hosts reached into their mailbag to answer s...
The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to be Skeptics
Silicon Valley's interest in AI is driven by more than just profit and innovation. There’s an unmistakable mystical quality to it as well. In this epi...
What Can We Do About Abusive Chatbots? With Meetali Jain and Camille Carlton
CW: This episode features discussion of suicide and sexual abuse.
In the last episode, we had the journalist Laurie Segall on to talk about the...
When the "Person" Abusing Your Child is a Chatbot: The Tragic Story of Sewell Setzer
Content Warning: This episode contains references to suicide, self-harm, and sexual abuse.
Megan Garcia lost her son Sewell to suicide after he...
Is It AI? One Tool to Tell What’s Real with Truemedia.org CEO Oren Etzioni
Social media disinformation did enormous damage to our shared idea of reality. Now, the rise of generative AI has unleashed a flood of high-quality sy...
'A Turning Point in History': Yuval Noah Harari on AI’s Cultural Takeover
Historian Yuval Noah Harari says that we are at a critical turning point. One in which AI’s ability to generate cultural artifacts threatens humanity’...
‘We Have to Get It Right’: Gary Marcus On Untamed AI
It’s a confusing moment in AI. Depending on who you ask, we’re either on the fast track to AI that’s smarter than most humans, or the technology is ab...
AI Is Moving Fast. We Need Laws that Will Too.
AI is moving fast. And as companies race to rollout newer, more capable models–with little regard for safety–the downstream risks of those models beco...
Esther Perel on Artificial Intimacy (rerun)
[This episode originally aired on August 17, 2023] For all the talk about AI, we rarely hear about how it will change our relationships. As we swipe t...
Tech's Big Money Campaign is Getting Pushback with Margaret O'Mara and Brody Mullins
Today, the tech industry is the second-biggest lobbying power in Washington, DC, but that wasn’t true as recently as ten years ago. How did we get to...
This Moment in AI: How We Got Here and Where We’re Going
It’s been a year and half since Tristan and Aza laid out their vision and concerns for the future of artificial intelligence in The AI Dilemma. In thi...
Decoding Our DNA: How AI Supercharges Medical Breakthroughs and Biological Threats with Kevin Esvelt
AI has been a powerful accelerant for biological research, rapidly opening up new frontiers in medicine and public health. But that progress can also...
How to Think About AI Consciousness With Anil Seth
Will AI ever start to think by itself? If it did, how would we know, and what would it mean?
In this episode, Dr. Anil Seth and Aza discuss the...
Why Are Migrants Becoming AI Test Subjects? With Petra Molnar
Climate change, political instability, hunger. These are just some of the forces behind an unprecedented refugee crisis that’s expected to include ove...
Former OpenAI Engineer William Saunders on Silence, Safety, and the Right to Warn
This week, a group of current and former employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind penned an open letter accusing the industry’s leading companies of...
War is a Laboratory for AI with Paul Scharre
Right now, militaries around the globe are investing heavily in the use of AI weapons and drones. From Ukraine to Gaza, weapons systems with increasi...
AI and Jobs: How to Make AI Work With Us, Not Against Us With Daron Acemoglu
Tech companies say that AI will lead to massive economic productivity gains. But as we know from the first digital revolution, that’s not what happene...
Jonathan Haidt On How to Solve the Teen Mental Health Crisis
Suicides. Self harm. Depression and anxiety. The toll of a social media-addicted, phone-based childhood has never been more stark. It can be easy for...
Chips Are the Future of AI. They’re Also Incredibly Vulnerable. With Chris Miller
Beneath the race to train and release more powerful AI models lies another race: a race by companies and nation-states to secure the hardware to make...
Future-proofing Democracy In the Age of AI with Audrey Tang
What does a functioning democracy look like in the age of artificial intelligence? Could AI even be used to help a democracy flourish? Just in time fo...
U.S. Senators Grilled Social Media CEOs. Will Anything Change?
Was it political progress, or just political theater? The recent Senate hearing with social media CEOs led to astonishing moments — including Mark Zuc...
Taylor Swift is Not Alone: The Deepfake Nightmare Sweeping the Internet
Over the past year, a tsunami of apps that digitally strip the clothes off real people has hit the market. Now anyone can create fake non-consensual s...
Can Myth Teach Us Anything About the Race to Build Artificial General Intelligence? With Josh Schrei
We usually talk about tech in terms of economics or policy, but the casual language tech leaders often use to describe AI — summoning an inanimate for...