Life, Automated

AI is making cyberattacks cheaper, faster, and more sophisticated. Recent reports of autonomous agents compromising Hugging Face show how quickly misaligned systems can create real-world risk. But ideally those same tools could help defenders find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers exploit them.

Cybersecurity researcher V.S. Subrahmanian joins host Jess Love to examine the impact of that escalating race on everything from phishing scams and insecure apps to the systems that underpin the electric grid and other critical infrastructure. They discuss what the hacking of Hugging Face reveals about AI alignment and safety guardrails, why frontier labs are only one part of the problem, and why telecoms, app makers, financial institutions, utilities, and governments may need to take much greater responsibility for the security of the products and networks they operate.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada

Editorial and background help from Laura Pavin, Rob Mitchum, and Raghu Katakam

Live AI translation tools are making it easier to converse across languages without a human translator, a phrasebook, or years of study. So will we all just stop taking Spanish or Mandarin classes? Sociolinguist Abby Walker doesn’t think so. She shares the many reasons we learn new languages, some of which have little to do with functional communication at all. We also hear how one AI-assisted conversation brought two future in-laws together, why machine translation is still so darn buggy, and why some languages are attracting a resurgence of new learners even in the age of translation apps.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada

Editorial guidance from Laura Pavin

Special thanks to Larry Berliner and Georgi Demirev for their help testing out live translation tools

Generative AI is able to conjure new images, stories, and songs at lightning speed. So what does this mean for humans artists, storytellers, and musicians? In this special Labor Day episode, we speak with economists Ben Jones and Sam Goldberg, as well as artist Yevgenia Nayberg, to find out what happens when AI enters creative markets. We learn that, at least today, key bottlenecks prevent AI from replicating some aspects of creativity. But there’s no guarantee those bottlenecks will exist tomorrow, raising vital questions about what we value in human labor.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Producer: Steven Jackson Senior Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger

Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.

“AI will revolutionize education!”

“No, it will destroy it!”

Well, which is it?

If history is any guide, the impact will be limited in either direction. In this episode, MIT education researcher Justin Reich walks through a century of hype cycles — from filmstrips and radio to MOOCs and smartphones — to show what actually changed in classrooms, and what didn’t. Drawing on interviews with 120 teachers and students across the U.S., he explains why new tools tend to extend old habits, why gains from new technology are usually modest, and why they tend to benefit affluent schools most. (Part 2/2 in our back-to-school series.)

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED.

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger

Recording: George Christensen and Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.

As AI tools spread through classrooms, many educators see a “cheating factory.” Kellogg Professor Sébastien Martin sees things differently: as a chance to reinvent how and what we teach. In his operations management class, students trade PDFs for lifelike chatbots, log conversations with Socratic AI tutors, and use AI to explore the kinds of social and political dynamics that students normally have to learn on the job. But Martin also grapples with harder questions: What about public schools with fewer resources? When should kids use AI at all? And how can students stay hopeful and true to their own interests in a wildly uncertain future?

(Part 1/2 in our back-to-school series.)

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Associate Producer: Stacia Sliger

Additional Production: Nathan Ray

Recording: George Christensen and Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada and Charlotte Simmons.