Gary Marcus is worried about AI. The professor emeritus at NYU doesn’t count himself a luddite or techno-pessimist. But Marcus has become one of the loudest voices of caution when it comes to AI. He’s chronicled some of the funniest and most disturbing errors made by current tools like ChatGPT, calling out the many costs – both human and environmental – of an industry that continues to accrete money and power. In his new book “Taming Silicon Valley: How We Can Ensure That AI Works for Us,” Marcus lays out his vision for a responsible path forward. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Marcus about that path and how it may be further out of reach, though not impossible, given the results of this year’s presidential election.

Do the free speech protections guaranteed by the First Amendment apply to online discourse? What if that online discourse spreads misinformation? Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Nadine Farid Johnson, policy director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, about how we should understand the right to free speech in the internet era.

This fall, California became the latest state to adopt a law banning cellphone use in schools. The Golden State joins more than a dozen that have imposed restrictions as alarm grows about the potentially harmful effects of smartphone use on students’ learning and mental health. Support for these policies spans the political spectrum. But one important constituency sometimes has a hard time adjusting: parents. Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a columnist for The Cut, wrote about the challenges of disconnecting.

The president-elect is also a former president who’s been a fixture in national politics for the last decade. But predicting what Donald Trump might have in mind for the tech industry in his second term based on that history, well, that’s a tough call. Trump has, at times, had strong words for some tech titans, cozied up to others, and pushed for — and then against — a TikTok ban. His first administration initiated several antitrust cases against tech companies, but Trump recently expressed skepticism about the potential breakup of Google after a federal judge ruled that its search business was a monopoly. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Paresh Dave, a senior writer at Wired, about the future of tech antitrust policy and more in the second Trump term.

It has been almost two years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene and made teachers’ lives a whole lot harder. A report from Common Sense Media this fall showed that 70% of teenage students used artificial intelligence for school or fun. But a majority of those students’ parents and teachers were unaware. Leila Wheless, a seventh- and eighth-grade English teacher in North Carolina, asked her students how they use the technology.

The thing about the artificial intelligence boom is that the tech needs a lot of electricity. One estimate from Goldman Sachs suggests that largely because of AI, data centers will use 160% more electricity by 2030. It’s got Big Tech fired up about an option that’s never really been the cool kid of the clean energy class: nuclear power. Microsoft made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island plant, while Google and Amazon are investing in new types of reactors. It’s stirring something of a “nuclear revival” for the U.S. after decades of stagnation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anna Erickson, professor of nuclear and radiological engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about the push to revive the nuclear energy sector.

It’s Election Day and even though the campaign may be over, the battle over misinformation is not. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Derek Tisler, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, about some of the misleading online narratives voters should expect to see and how to deal with them. This conversation is part of “Marketplace Tech’s” limited series “Decoding Democracy.” Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel.

In case you forgot, we’ve got Election Day tomorrow. But it was also a big year for elections in the rest of the world. About half of the global population is voting in national elections in 2024, and in many countries people have encountered shut down internet, blocked websites or manipulated content online, according to a recent report from the nonprofit Freedom House. Allie Funk leads Freedom House’s technology and democracy initiative, and she told Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino this is the 14th consecutive year the report has documented a decline in human rights online.

An AI transcription tool used in health care has been found to frequently hallucinate things no one ever said, including making up medications. That’s just one of the topics for today’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review. Plus, we’ll get into what we learned from this week’s Big Tech earnings, including Google saying that it’s using AI to generate about 25% of its code.

But first, it’s been a busy week for Apple. The company launched some of its new Apple Intelligence features and released its new lineup of Mac computers along with some souped-up chips.

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Joanna Stern, senior personal technology columnist at The Wall Street Journal, to get her take on this week’s tech news.

For almost a century, people have been going to the movies to get freaked out by fictional depictions of artificial intelligence. Back in 1968, there was Hal 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The 1980s gave us Skynet in “The Terminator.” And these days, movies about rogue bots are more popular than ever. Films like 2022’s “M3GAN” and this summer’s “AfrAId” seem to be channeling our worst fears about the intelligent technology increasingly embedded in our daily lives. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Shira Ovide, a tech reporter and author of The Washington Post’s “Tech Friend” newsletter, about why AI is such a compelling horror villain.