Anyone who’s had a job, knows what it means to have co-workers, but what happens when your colleague is an AI agent? As AI enters the workforce, we explore this question and more in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Lattice CEO Sarah Franklin

Credits:

SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

We meet a founder questioning the wisdom of the Turing Test as he works to address the loneliness epidemic among the elderly, in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Intuition Robotics Founder Dor Skuler, maker of the ElliQ digital companion

Credits:

SHIFT is produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens. It’s mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

This episode first published in August 2024. 

A live conversation about the state of the space economy with the first Arab woman to fly to space and with a leading space investor. This episode was taped at the Middle East's largest tech event, with 25,000 attendees, from the mainstage of Web Summit Qatar. 

We meet: 

Astronaut Sara Sabry, CEO & Founder Deep Space Initiative

Adam Niewinski Co-Founder, General Partner OTB Ventures

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

In the not too distant future we might use AI agents for all sorts of things, though for now payments remain an obstacle because they can’t spend money without human help. 

We Meet: 

Amir Sarhangi, CEO of Skyfire

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Despite our best efforts, sometimes what we say we want isn’t precisely what we mean. Nowhere is that felt more acutely than when we’re giving instructions to a machine, whether that’s coding or offering examples to machine learning systems. We unpack the alignment problem in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Brian Christian, University of Oxford researcher, and author of The Alignment Problem 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

We chat with Organic Valley in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Joshua Krzych, interim CIO at Organic Valley

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

In this encore episode, we tour Google's Project Starline at the 2024 TED Conference in Vancouver.

We Meet:

Andrew Nartker from Google’s Project Starline 

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.

Certain things about the development of artificial intelligence were generally taken as fact, until Silicon Valley woke up to the rise of a small Chinese startup called DeepSeek.

We Meet: 

Tech Editor & Neuroscientist Daniela Hernandez

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

A look at industrial cybersecurity, and why it matters, in the latest installment of our oral history project.

We Meet: 

Ian Bramson, Vice President of Global Industrial Cybersecurity at Black & Veatch

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

We catch up with cognitive scientist Gary Marcus on his list of predictions for what to watch in AI this year, and beyond.

We Meet: 

Author & Cognitive Scientist Gary Marcus

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.