Most of us interact with some form of artificial intelligence every day, whether it’s asking a smart speaker about the weather or being assigned shift work or served content by an app. But how many of us consider our relationship to those algorithms? Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Noelani Arista, an associate professor of history and classics and chair of the Indigenous studies program at McGill University. She collaborates with other Indigenous scholars to examine and develop AI models. Adams asked her about an Indigenous approach to these algorithms.

On this day in 1947, scientists at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T — which had a telephone monopoly at the time — tweaked a new gadget the size of a shot glass to produce, basically, amplification. It marked the invention of the transistor. My colleague David Brancaccio has been using the anniversary to tell the story of the transistor and how it led to the semiconductor revolution. Part of that revolution was getting the technology from Bell Labs in New Jersey to what eventually became Silicon Valley. One man who made that move across the country played a key role.

A government agency known for keeping its secrets has been attempting to be a bit more open when it comes to cybersecurity. Digital attacks are now a regular threat, not just the for private sector, like last year’s hack of the Colonial oil pipeline. They are also a threat for public infrastructure, like major ransomware attacks on hospitals and public schools. So the National Security Agency is expanding its work with the private sector, nearly tripling the number of industry partnerships to more than 300 in the past year, according to the agency’s 2022 Cybersecurity Year in Review report. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Rob Joyce, the NSA’s director of cybersecurity, about how the agency’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center is working with private companies.

After more than 60 years of work, scientists have made a breakthrough that could potentially change the future of energy. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy announced this week that they had successfully achieved energy-producing nuclear fusion that produced more energy than they put into it. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm called it a huge achievement for science and for clean energy. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Carolyn Kuranz, an experimental plasma physicist at the University of Michigan’s department of nuclear engineering about how the experiment worked.

China recently eased some of its strict zero-COVID policies after unprecedented protests erupted in several parts of the country. For weeks, there were demonstrations against three years of constant PCR testing and reporting, travel restrictions and citywide quarantines, nonstop tracking and surveillance of citizens. Now, Chinese authorities are deploying some of the same tools they used to limit the spread of COVID-19 to track down demonstrators who have been speaking out against the government in public and online. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Marketplace’s China correspondent, Jennifer Pak, who’s been covering this story from Shanghai. Pak gave Adams a quick rundown of how the surveillance is being carried out.

Last week, officials in San Francisco decided to scrap a plan that would have allowed law enforcement to use robots in situations that may require “deadly force.” Specifically, according to the language of the ordinance that the city’s board of supervisors initially approved, when “risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available.” The plan was rolled back after a public backlash, but the technology is out there and it may be just a matter of time before it’s used by local police departments. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Ryan Jenkins, a professor of philosophy and senior fellow at the Ethics + Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. There’s a concern, he said, that the deployment of robots would lower barriers to the use of force, making violence a more common occurrence in police work.

Unions have come to the video game industry. They started small at just one indie developer about a year ago, then those efforts started to spread. Workers at some of the biggest names in the business have started organizing — at Activision Blizzard and recently at ZeniMax, a company owned by Microsoft. This sudden upswell is shaking up an industry that has long been known for grueling hours, low pay and a workforce that is not especially diverse. So how did the union movement go from 0 to 60, and where is it headed from here? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nicole Carpenter, a senior reporter for Polygon, a gaming and entertainment news site. She recently wrote an explainer about unions in the industry. She said a turning point came in 2021 when California sued Activision for an alleged pattern of sexual harassment and discrimination, which set off a chain of investigations and lawsuits that brought the problems of the industry into the public eye.

Hurricane season is officially over. There were 14 named tropical storms this year, three of which made landfall as hurricanes on the U.S. mainland and Puerto Rico, including Hurricane Ian. The climate crisis, along with the boom in coastal development, have given hurricanes the power to cause more death and destruction. Marketplace’s Amy Scott spent a day with people who try to predict such disasters for our climate solutions podcast, “How We Survive.” She found out that climate change is making their job more complicated.

This episode originally aired Nov. 16 on the “How We Survive” podcast.

Despite the bankruptcies, hacks and general foul mood in crypto, one metric is moving in the right direction. As we talked about earlier this year, ethereum — the world’s second-largest crypto network — made a move to reduce the energy used in the “mining” process for authenticating transactions on the blockchain. In September, ethereum switched from the so-called proof of work method, in which a bunch of miners compete to solve an authentication puzzle with giant banks of supercomputers, to a method called proof of stake, in which just one miner validates a transaction. That requires much less electricity. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Alex de Vries, the founder of Digiconomist, a website that tracks cryptocurrency energy use, about just how much less energy the ethereum network is consuming, based on a paper that De Vries recently published.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have solved a particularly challenging differential equation that dates back to the early 1900s. The explanation gets pretty technical pretty fast, but the point is that solving this equation enabled researchers to create a new type of artificial intelligence system that can learn on the spot and adapt to changing patterns, as opposed to traditional systems in which the machine learning is based on existing patterns or expected outcomes. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with MIT researcher Ramin Hasani, who said it’s called a liquid neural network, and it kind of works like a human brain.