x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

SHIFT

Jennifer Strong

Hosted by Jennifer Strong, SHIFT is a weekly podcast taking a closer look at the far-reaching impact of automation on our daily lives.From policy to process, we seek to understand how lives are changing alongside rapid breakthroughs in frontier technologies and artificial intelligence. Join us as we navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by this reshaped reality.

technology tech news

All Episodes

22:59

Companion Robots for Older Adults

SHIFT ·

2025/12/31

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 companionCredits: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.

en

17:39

Uncovering How Biology Works

SHIFT ·

2025/12/24

The application of artificial intelligence to help discover new medicines could become one of the more transformative ways we use this tech in the near term. A key player in this space is Recursion Pharmaceuticals. Its outgoing CEO Chris Gibson takes us on a tour of the world's largest phenomics lab in Salt Lake City, Utah.We Meet: Recursion Co-Founder Chris GibsonCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with

en

15:29

The Future of Voting Is on Your Phone

SHIFT ·

2025/12/17

What if voting in a primary could be as simple as reaching for your phone? This week, Bradley Tusk's TED Talk about this topic was named one of the ten essential TED Talks of 2025, and we're revisiting the episode we taped with him about mobile voting for our oral history project. We Meet: Bradley Tusk, Founder & CEO of Tusk Holdings 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

en

35:37

The Psychology and Liability of Chatbots

SHIFT ·

2025/12/10

What happens when machines start telling us what we want to hear—and when users start depending on them for emotional connection? Join us for a live conversation about the psychology and liability of chatbots.We Meet: Meg Marco is Harvard Berkman Klein Center’s Senior Director of the Applied Social Media Lab.New York Times Tech Reporter Kashmir Hill is also the author of YOUR FACE BELONGS TO US.Jordi Weinstock is a Senior Advisor to Harvard’s Institute for Rebooting Social

en

17:00

The Future of AI is Quantitative

SHIFT ·

2025/12/03

We join the MIT community in New York for an event focused on AI, innovation, and the evolving role of tech in society. SandboxAQ is a Google spinout that combines AI Large Quantitative Models and deep expertise in physics, biology, and chemistry in order to work on a wide range of hard problems, such as the prototyping of new materials and chemicals for manufacturing. Andrew McLaughlin is the company’s chief operating officer. We sat down to chat after he made the case to the room that the

en

17:00

Without Trust, Innovation Stalls

SHIFT ·

2025/11/26

Join us for a deep dive on the relationship between trust and artificial intelligence as we unpack a flash poll from Edelman, the world's largest PR firm.We Meet: Margot Edelman, Global Technology Practice Lead for Edelman 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.

en

24:42

The Economics of Quantum Innovation

SHIFT ·

2025/11/19

How do we move quantum computing from scientific milestone to measurable business value? It’s not an easy question to answer. When I first started covering this tech even the physicists charged with building such machines doubted the feasibility of the whole idea. That's no longer the case today, but the bar for quantum, especially compared to AI, remains almost impossibly high. This episode was taped before a live audience at Web Summit, Europe's largest tech conference, in Lisbon,

en

25:12

How to Build AI for the Physical World

SHIFT ·

2025/11/12

For as far as we’ve come with AI and robotics, there’s still a huge gap when it comes to combining the two. AI excels in the digital space, and in the physical world, robots are often pre-programmed. That’s where physical AI comes in. It’s critical for things that can’t tolerate the kinds of mistakes that are common in today’s statistics based AI, like self driving cars or managing the power grid. In the latest installment of our oral history project, we meet a central figure in these

en

34:55

Encore: How to Build a Moonshot Factory

SHIFT ·

2025/11/05

Astro Teller, Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots, joins us for a conversation about the importance of failure, workplace culture in a moonshot factory, and not throwing away your shot.We Meet: Astro Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet's Moonshot FactoryCredits: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.This episode originally ran in April 2025.

en

13:05

Shaping the Future of Intelligence

SHIFT ·

2025/10/29

AMD provides high-performance computing power that runs everything from your gaming console and personal laptop, to the giant supercomputers and AI systems that power the cloud. Its head of AI discusses the move from sequential to massively parallel processing, and the company's strategy to embed AI from big cloud machines to tiny client devices.We Meet: AMD’s SVP for AI Vamsi BoppanaCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed

en

15:32

Reclaiming the Digital Public Square

SHIFT ·

2025/10/22

We explore how one group is using AI to help people talk, listen and understand in large groups, in hopes of counteracting forces that have undermined our ability to communicate online, in the latest installment of our oral history project.We Meet: Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw, an incubator within Google 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.

en

22:15

Meet the CIA's Former Digital Chief

SHIFT ·

2025/10/15

What do you think it would be like to lead AI efforts and the overall digital transformation of the CIA? This week, we find out as we dive into a world of espionage and secrets in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet: Retired Deputy CIA Director for Digital Innovation Jennifer Ewbank 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

en

15:56

Building AI’s Roadmaps

SHIFT ·

2025/10/08

How we build products, why we build them, and what we think they’re for have always changed, but these days developers and engineers who love things like product roadmaps might find the current AI scene a little disorienting. That’s because there often isn’t a roadmap. If there is? It’s constantly changing.This week, we meet the CTO of IBM Research and she tells us about the current landscape and what she imagines for the future. This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna, Austria. We

en

17:40

AI Agents = Intelligence Taking Action on Its Own

SHIFT ·

2025/10/01

Agentic AI is one of the hottest topics going in tech circles, but if pinning down exactly what we’re talking about feels a bit like a moving target, it’s not your imagination. What agents are capable of doing is changing almost as quickly as what people want to do with them. We Meet: VP of Agentic AI at AWS Swami Sivasubramanian Credits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens, and special thanks to Dajana Doskoc and Alina Nikoloau at TEDAI

en

21:01

These Robots Might Solve Space's Labor Problem

SHIFT ·

2025/09/24

What’s an astronaut’s time worth? Answering that question is not a perfect science, but at more than $100,000 an hour (not counting salary - that's just to keep one alive) on the International Space Station, it’s safe to say it’s more than you want to pay for bagging up trash. This week, we take a field trip in New York City to see some space robots that could help with this problem. We Meet: Icarus Robotics CEO Ethan Barajas Icarus Robotics CTO Jamie Palmer Credits:This episode of SHIFT

en

15:46

How Tech Could Help Fix Rural Healthcare

SHIFT ·

2025/09/17

Might a lack of legacy healthcare tech infrastructure in rural communities offer an advantage over mature markets? A founder makes the case in the latest installment of our oral history project.We Meet: Homeward Co-Founder & President Amar Kendale 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.

en

28:44

Building the Future of AI Infrastructure

SHIFT ·

2025/09/10

You've likely heard that artificial intelligence is gobbling up electricity and drinking water, and causing a global race to build more energy capacity. Have you ever stopped to consider why? Or what we’re doing to bring compute power and sustainability closer together?This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at TechBBQ, the largest tech conference in the Nordics. It's held each year in Copenhagen, Denmark.We Meet: Caspar Høgh, Co-Founding Partner Noon Ventures Yasser Nour,

en

17:43

Architect of the EU AI Act Expresses Concerns

SHIFT ·

2025/09/03

EU AI Act architect and lead author Gabriele Mazzini shares his experience drafting the law. He also talks about his concerns with implementation and its potential impact on European competitiveness, and how that led him to quit his job, in the latest installment of our oral history project.This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna and originally ran in 2024.We Meet:MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate & MIT Connection Science Fellow Gabriele MazziniCredits:This episode of SHIFT was

en

16:54

What Happened at Builder.AI

SHIFT ·

2025/08/27

One of the world's hottest AI startups, Builder.AI, imploded earlier this year. We dig into what actually went down at the company and what journalists and investors can learn from the experience. We Meet: Journalist Varsha BansalCredits: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.

en

19:14

The Alignment Problem

SHIFT ·

2025/08/20

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

en

124 results

Similar Podcasts

Lead With AI

Tamara Nall

Linux in the Ham Shack

Black Sparrow Media

Data Engineering Podcast

Tobias Macey

Eye On A.I.

Craig S. Smith

Reflections

Livewire Labs