Life, Automated

The appeal of an AI personal assistant is straightforward: let the machine handle your busywork so you can do more important things. But are these tools ready for primetime? Are we ready for these tools? And how much of our lives can we outsource to AI and still remain in charge?

This episode, Gavriel Cohen, creator of a new AI assistant Nanoclaw, paints a picture of a world where AI agents schedule our meetings, monitor our inboxes, and generally keep us organized and on track–all so we can fulfill our dreams. Host Jess Love puts Nanoclaw to the test purchasing her family’s airline tickets. And economist Sarit Markovich explains how our individual choices to use AI assistants today could shape the future of this technology.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Senior Producer: Jesse Dukes

Assistant Producer: Tom Dixon

Music: Steven Jackson

Recording Help: George Christensen, Will Feeney, Jimmy Zarembski

Promotion: Ananya Mallapragada, Lauren Ko

Editorial Assistance: David Macey

What happens when AI can produce a mathematical proof before any human understands it? And what does that mean for the rest of us?

Northwestern mathematician Bryna Kra, a former president of the American Mathematical Society, joins Jess Love to explore how AI is changing mathematical discovery. Generative AI has already brought about extraordinary breakthroughs, but they’re also unsettling the culture of collaboration, upending how young mathematicians learn, and raising a deceptively difficult question: Is solving a problem the same as understanding it?

Kra explains why some mathematicians are becoming wary of sharing unfinished ideas and how she cautiously makes space for AI in her own research. Despite the disruption she still enthusiastically encourages students to enter the field.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Senior Producer: Jesse Dukes

Assistant Producer: Tom Dixon

Music: Steven Jackson

Recording Help: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotion: Ananya Mallapragada, Lauren Ko

Editorial Assistance: Rob Mitchum, Laura Pavin

Modern technology has generally made our lives faster, easier, and more convenient. But in swapping out stick shifts and paper menus for automatic transmissions and QR codes, have we accidentally optimized away many of the rich sensory experiences that make living so pleasurable?

Journalist, academic and award-winning video-game designer Ian Bogost joins host Jess Love to discuss insights from his book The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life. He makes the case that we’re losing some of the everyday pleasures of interacting with the world. But if technology has disconnected us from sensory gratification, can it also be part of the solution?

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Senior Producer: Jesse Dukes

Producer and Sound Design: Tom Dixon

Music: Steven Jackson

Recording Help: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotion: Ananya Mallapragada, Lauren Ko

Editorial Assistance: Rob Mitchum, Laura Pavin

AI is making cyberattacks cheaper, faster, and more sophisticated. Recent reports of autonomous agents compromising Hugging Face show how quickly misaligned systems can create real-world risk. But ideally those same tools could help defenders find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them. 

Cybersecurity researcher V.S. Subrahmanian joins host Jess Love to examine the impact of that escalating race on everything from phishing scams and insecure apps to the systems that underpin the electric grid and other critical infrastructure. They discuss what the hacking of Hugging Face reveals about AI alignment and safety guardrails, why frontier labs are only one part of the problem, and why telecoms, app makers, financial institutions, utilities, and governments may need to take much greater responsibility for the security of the products and networks they operate.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada

Editorial and background help from Laura Pavin, Rob Mitchum, and Raghu  Katakam

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.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Producer:  Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada

Editorial guidance from Laura Pavin

Special thanks to Larry Berliner and Georgi Demirev for their help testing out live translation tools

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.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Producer:  Steven Jackson Senior Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger

Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.

“AI will revolutionize education!”

“No, it will destroy it!”

Well, which is it?

If history is any guide, the impact will be limited in either direction. In this episode, MIT education researcher Justin Reich walks through a century of hype cycles — from filmstrips and radio to MOOCs and smartphones — to show what actually changed in classrooms, and what didn’t.  Drawing on interviews with 120 teachers and students across the U.S., he explains why new tools tend to extend old habits, why gains from new technology are usually modest, and why they tend to benefit affluent schools most. (Part 2/2 in our back-to-school series.)

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger

Recording: George Christensen and Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.

As AI tools spread through classrooms, many educators see a “cheating factory.” Kellogg Professor Sébastien Martin sees things differently: as a chance to reinvent how and what we teach. In his operations management class, students trade PDFs for lifelike chatbots, log conversations with Socratic AI tutors, and use AI to explore the kinds of social and political dynamics that students normally have to learn on the job. But Martin also grapples with harder questions: What about public schools with fewer resources? When should kids use AI at all? And how can students stay hopeful and true to their own interests in a wildly uncertain future?

(Part 1/2 in our back-to-school series.)

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger

Additional Production: Nathan Ray

Recording: George Christensen and Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons. 

What does a healthy relationship with AI look like? Pat Pataranutaporn, researcher at the MIT Media Lab, explores how chatbots can either support or undermine human flourishing. Pat explains why it’s so easy to imagine a “someone” behind the screen and why chatbots that never push back are dangerous. He ultimately makes the case that AI should be evaluated based not on short-term engagement or productivity but on how well it improves the lives of humans.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger Additional Production: Nathan Ray Recording: George Christensen and Will FeeneyPromotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.

When people go to a magic show, they expect to be fooled. That’s part of the fun. And magician Joshua Jay says much of the magician’s work is helping people fool themselves. Our brains are hardwired to fill in gaps, predict outcomes, and take cognitive shortcuts to process the overwhelming amount of information around us. When interacting with AI chatbots, we may similarly fool ourselves into believing we’re interacting with a human. But unlike at a magic show, it’s not always clear when the trick is over. Plus: how AI is changing magic.

Further Reading:

Joshua Jay's book: How Magician's Think

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED. 

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Administrative and Editorial Support: Stacia Sliger

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.

Produced in partnership with KQED, Jen Chien, director of podcasts.