Heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather event, and scientists expect the earth to continue to get hotter. Unfortunately, one of the most effective tools we have to combat heat — air-conditioning — also contributes to global warming. The hotter we get, the more AC we’ll need: It’s a conundrum. So how do we keep cool without making the planet hotter at the same time? Host Arielle Duhaime-Ross speaks to Dr. David Hondula, the Director of Heat Response and Mitigation for the city of Phoenix, Arizona; Rachel Kyte, a former U.N. Special Representative, and professor in climate policy and sustainability; and Dr. Daniel Betts, an engineer and founder of the air-conditioning company Blue Frontier.

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The United States was once on track to be a world leader in nuclear power, building more than 100 plants in the 1970s and 1980s. But cost and safety concerns led to decades of decommissioning old plants and canceling plans to build new ones. Now, with clean energy production a top priority, there are signs of a revival. Reactors at the first new nuclear plant to be built in almost 30 years went online last year, and the Biden administration wants to triple the country’s nuclear capacity. Host Arielle Duhaime-Ross discusses the hurdles facing nuclear power, as well as a new vision for smaller, more adaptable reactors with Dr. Kathryn Huff, former assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy; historian and Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Rhodes; and the undergraduates – that’s right, undergraduates – who run their own nuclear reactor.

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Americans drive more, drive further, and pay less for fuel than people in other developed countries. Partly for this reason, our vehicles are more than just a means of transportation — they’re extensions of who we are. So persuading Americans to swap out gas-dependent cars for EVs is a different — and in many ways more difficult — challenge. What’s it going to take to get more Americans into electric vehicles?  Host Arielle Duhaime-Ross explores the obstacles and possible solutions to EV adoption with guests David Ferris, a reporter covering transportation and energy for E&E News and Politico; Joseph Barletta, the founder and CEO of Smart Charge America, a company that installs EV chargers; and Dr. Linda Nazar, an expert in battery chemistry and professor of chemistry at the University of Waterloo.

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In the past 50 years, solar energy has surpassed all expectations. Even early solar experts couldn’t predict how affordable and widespread it would become. The story behind its success involves Einstein, US presidents, obscure legislation and a global relay race.  Now the question is – What can the rise of solar power teach us about the future of other climate technologies? Join this season’s host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, in conversations with Greg Nemet, author of “How Solar Became Cheap,” and Nathanael Greene, from the National Resources Defense Council, to discuss today’s solar landscape, its future potential, and the challenges we face in getting there.

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We’re currently involved in one of the most ambitious projects we, as humans, have ever attempted: Rebuilding the world, pretty much from the ground up, in order to switch from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. In this season of The World as You'll Know It, science journalist Arielle Duhaime-Ross goes deep inside the world of cutting-edge climate technologies and asks: How is this going to work? The answers — from some of the world’s most innovative and audacious thinkers, builders and investors — reveal the promise, obstacles and tradeoffs of a new clean-energy landscape that will shape the way we live.

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In our final episode, Host Gary Marcus shares his hopes for and fears about an AI-driven future. On the one hand, AI could accelerate solutions to some of society’s most difficult problems; on the other, it could deepen existing problems and create new existential risks to humanity. Getting it right, Marcus emphasizes, depends on establishing both national and international standards for the industry as soon as possible. He is joined by Dr. Alondra Nelson, who led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2021, and Brian Christian an AI researcher and the author of The Alignment Problem; Machine Learning and Human Values.

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Some people use chatbots for therapy. Others have fallen in love with them. And some people argue that AI systems have become sentient and are entitled to certain rights. In this episode, Gary Marcus explores our relationship with AI technology —  how it’s changing and where it might lead. He speaks with Blake Lemoine, an engineer who believes that a Google program has achieved sentience and even has feelings, Eugenia Kuyda, the founder and CEO of Replika, Anna Oakes, a lead producer and co-host of Bot Love, and Paul Bloom, a cognitive psychologist who believes we are on the forefront of a new age of human-machine interaction.

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The emergence of generative AI threatens to automate millions of jobs, potentially ushering in a new and unprecedented wave of job displacement. In the past, newly created jobs replaced those lost. Will that happen this time? To discuss this, Gary Marcus is joined by Amy Winter, a concept artist who sees generative AI as a threat to her career, Brian Merchant, the technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of “Blood in the Machine: the Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech”, and Dr. Erik Brynjolffson, an economist and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, that studies the effects of technology on the workforce. 

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Misinformation has already influenced our elections, ruined reputations and fundamentally changed society’s relationship with the truth. Now, large language models like GPT have the potential to create and spread misinformation at a speed and scale we’ve never seen before. As new technologies allow bad actors to imitate the way we write, the way we speak and the way we appear in photos and videos, the question won’t be, ‘What we can believe in?’ but whether we’ll be able to believe in anything at all. To discuss how we got here and what we must do to fix it, host Gary Marcus talks to Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus, two technology writers from the Washington Post, and Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, a leading expert in Ethical AI and former Director of the Ethics and Transparency team at Twitter.

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