What do the design of high-visibility public safety vests, the distance between two railroad tracks, and the protocols that allow for file transfers between devices have in common? Each is determined by a technical standard set through a process coordinated by a private, non-profit organization called the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Technical standards are behind most of the products Americans interact with in everyday life, underpinning public safety, consumer protection, interoperability, and innovation. 

On this episode, host Megan Nicholson is joined by president and CEO of ANSI and former director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Laurie Locascio. Locascio explains the importance of standards for innovation and competitiveness, and describes how the US approach to standards development depends on the participation of people with all kinds of expertise. She also shares how more researchers can find their way into setting “the invisible infrastructure of modern life.” 

Resources

• Read ANSI’s United States Standards Strategy 2025 and review their courses and webinars about the American national standard designation.  
• Check out the US government’s 2023 National Standards Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technology, which has not been adopted by the Trump Administration. 
  Read an Issues piece from 1999 on “Why Standards Matter” by Robert L. Mallett, former Deputy Secretary of Commerce.

Cannabis policy in the United States has been, in many ways, a giant experiment. The drug was recently reclassified by the Trump administration from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug, but remains federally illegal. On the state level, cannabis’s availability to patients and consumers has been determined by voters, not by scientists and regulators. Each state has a different approach to cannabis regulation and product safety, and as a result, a patient using medical cannabis in Florida might be exposed to different risks than a consumer in California, for example.

On this episode, host Kelsey Schoenberg is joined by toxicologist Maxwell C. K. Leung, assistant professor at Arizona State University and the director of the ASU Cannabis Analytics, Safety and Health Initiative, and Symone T. Griffith, an ASU Presidential Scholar and doctoral candidate at Arizona State University. Leung and Griffith, who wrote about cannabis regulation and product safety for the Fall 2025 Issues, explain how the federal-state legal divide has shaped cannabis safety, research, and policy. They also share what it’s like to be a researcher working in this space. 

RESOURCES

• Read Leung, Griffith, and Marisa Kreider’s essay, “A Coordinated Approach to Cannabis Policy and Product Safety,” in the Fall Issues.
• Check out Leung and Griffith’s paper on cannabis use and Parkinson’s patients, as well as their lab’s analysis of state-level regulations for cannabis contaminants.
• Read a paper from the Cannabis Regulators Association outlining a research agenda for how science can shape cannabis policy.
• Listen to another episode on cannabis: “Minimizing Cannabis’s Harms to Public Health,” with Sara Frueh and guest Yasmin Hurd.

For as long as people have speculated about the development of artificial intelligence, they have debated its potential impacts on the labor market. Today, several years into widespread use of large language models, those questions are more urgent, but the answers are less clear. Is AI already taking jobs away? Could human beings flourish in a world in which they no longer have to perform economically valuable work?

On this episode, Massachusetts Institute of Technology labor economist David Autor joins host Sara Frueh to discuss the possible impacts of AI on the future of work, what that means on an economic and human level, and what policies may be able to shape AI in a way that works for humans.

Resources

Read the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2024 consensus study, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work.”

Check out Autor’s book, The Work of the Future.

Could AI help rebuild the middle class? Autor explores in an essay for Noema Magazine.

Read Frueh’s interview with economist Anne Case mentioned in this episode.

More on this topic from Issues: “A Vision for Centering Workers in Technology Development” by Amanda Ballantyne, Jodi Forlizzi, and Crystal Weise.

On Science Policy IRL, we talk to people in science policy about what they do and how they got there. In this installment, host Lisa Margonelli talks to Bhavya Lal about the trajectory of her career. Lal began as a nuclear engineer, then completed a midcareer PhD and began to work in science policy. A few years in, she decided to specialize in space policy—which is when things really started to get interesting. Lal has since served in a variety of roles at NASA, including acting chief of staff, chief technology officer, and associate administrator for technology, policy, and strategy. She is currently a professor at the RAND School of Public Policy. 

In this episode, Lal shares how policy and governance became her passion, how she went from writing reports to leading programs at NASA, and the big questions that drive her work. 

Resources

• Read Lal and Roger M. Myers’ Fall 2025 Issues piece, “A Strategy for Building Space Nuclear Systems That Fly,” to learn more about NASA’s efforts to build a nuclear reactor in space. 
• Read Lal and Myers’ white paper “Weighing the Future: Strategic Options for US Space Leadership.”
• What does space leadership mean? Lal explores this in her SpaceNews piece, “The US can get to the moon first — and still lose.”
• Check out Earth Abides, the novel that inspired Lal’s career.

Artificial intelligence assistants such as Google’s Gemini have exploded in popularity, constantly offering to help summarize a document, craft an email response, or answer a question. AI chatbots take this even further. These chatbots—sometimes called AI companions—generate conversations with users, and because they “remember” interactions and modulate their responses, they can appear, at times, quite human. 

On this episode, host Megan Nicholson explores chatbots with J. B. Branch, the Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen. Branch discusses who is using chatbots, what the companies behind these AIs are doing, and how they might be regulated. He also wrote about this topic in his essay for our Fall 2025 edition, “AI Companions Are Not Your Teen’s Friend.” Resources:J. B. Branch on the need to regulate AI chatbots:

• “AI Companions Are Not Your Teen’s Friend,” Issues in Science & Technology.

• “AI chatbots shouldn’t be talking to kids — Congress must step in,” The Hill. 

Learn more about AI companions’ impact on teens mental health by reading Common Sense Media’s risk assessment. 

Visit the Tech Law Justice Project to read more about the current lawsuits in California state courts against OpenAI. 

What could regulating AI chatbots look like? See a model state law from Public Citizen.

Our miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.

On our final episode of this season, host Malka Older examines the role art and fiction play in understanding war. She talks with art and culture historian Brigitte van der Sande, who has spent 25 years studying how war is represented in art—research that brought her to many active conflict zones. Van der Sande discusses how art humanizes the victims of war and spurs action, and how humor and imagination can be forces for resistance. 

Resources: 

• “Inside Hell We Build Paradise.” Read more about van der Sande’s visit to Rojava, Syria, as part of efforts to build democracy in the region. 
• Check out Other Futures, a multidisciplinary festival that presents speculative visions of the future, founded by van der Sande in 2018. 
• See artwork mentioned in this episode: “The Eyes of Gutete Emerita” and “Soft Target.”
• Learn more about van der Sande’s latest project, Culture House FKA the Cannibals. 

This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.

Our miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.

On this episode, host Malka Older is joined by Nasir Andisha, ambassador and permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations, to reimagine Afghanistan and the stories we tell about its past, present, and future. As ambassador, Andisha represents the people—not the current government—of a country that has been navigating disaster for decades. He shares the story of what it’s like to lose his nation while continuing to advocate for its people.Resources

Visit Nasir Andisha’s website to learn more about human rights, policy, and Afghanistan’s challenges.

This episode features brief audio snippets from the BBC and Inside Edition. 
This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.

Our miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies.

On this episode, host Malka Older examines the stories behind statistics with Julisa Tambunan, deputy executive director of Equal Measures 2030, a global feminist coalition. Tambunan uses data to advocate for policies that center the lived experiences of women, girls, and underrepresented minorities. She explains why gender inequality is a disaster and how collecting better data—both statistics and stories—can help create a better future for everyone.

Resources

Visit Equal Measures 2030 to learn more about achieving gender equality through data-driven advocacy. 
This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology.

Our miniseries Not Now, But Soon challenges the stories we often tell about disasters and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. 

On this episode, host Malka Older explores food systems with investigative journalist Thin Lei Win. Win shares her experience growing up in Myanmar, and how that has shaped how she sees the intersection between food production, climate, and disasters. 
This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project, a speculative fiction series that uses imagination to explore how science and technology will shape our future. Read the short stories from the series published by Issues in Science and Technology. 

Resources

Follow Win’s weekly newsletter, Thin Ink, to learn more about food, climate and where they meet. Get started with her newsletter with these articles: 

• “Moonstruck”: a critique of the focus of the food system’s focus on technology and productivity to solve food insecurity, at the expense of equity. 

• “A System Under Strain”: a roundup of recent reports on food systems. 

Win coordinated The New Humanitarian’s series on emerging hunger hotspots as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 

Find more of Win’s food system investigations at Lighthouse Reports. 

• “The Hunger Profiteers”: how financial speculation could be fueling hunger. 

• “Farmers Protest, Who Gains?”: Who is leading the farmers’ protest in Europe and are they truly representative of farmers? 

Visit Kite Tales to read stories from Myanmar’s people in their own words.

Our new miniseries, Not Now, But Soon, challenges the stories we often tell about disasters, and explores how we can use speculative fiction to create better futures and policies. On our first episode, host Malka Older talks to Steven Gonzalez, an anthropologist of technology who researches the human labor behind data centers. 

Gonzalez is also a speculative fiction writer under the byline E. G. Condé. He is one of the creators of Taínofuturism, which incorporates Indigenous Caribbean traditions to imagine futures from a radically different perspective. His novella, Sordidez, explores how survivors’ efforts to rebuild after a hurricane intersects with oppression and conflict in a future Caribbean. 

In this episode, Gonzalez compares these different types of disasters: the dramatic and immediate impacts of the hurricane, and the slower, steadier, and often overlooked disasters of environmental destruction, resource depletion, and exploitation of human labor associated with our internet infrastructure. 

Resources: 

Visit Steven Gonzalez’s website to learn more about the impacts of cloud computing. 

Find Gonzalez’s fiction under the byline E.G. Condé. Check out his novella, Sordidez, winner of the Indie Ink Award for "Writing the Future We Need: Latinx/Latine Representation by a Latinx/Latine author." 

This podcast is part of the Future Tense Fiction project. Read all Future Tense Fiction stories here.