Life, Automated
Life, Automated explores how to live, work, and make decisions in a world increasingly shaped by machines. Hosted by Jess Love, a science writer and cognitive psychology PhD, the podcast features conversations with researchers, practitioners, and artists about AI's impact on economy, community, and daily life. It asks whether AI will isolate us or bring us together, and how to prepare for a future where machines can do many human tasks. The show is grounded and non-ideological, aiming to make AI understandable for everyone.
Episodes
Is Technology Making Our Lives Less Gratifying? (with Ian Bogost)
Modern technology has generally made our lives faster, easier, and more convenient. But in swapping out stick shifts and paper menus for automatic transmissions and QR codes, have we accidentally optimized away many of the rich sensory experiences that make living so pleasurable?
Journalist, academic and award-winning video-game designer Ian Bogost joins host Jess Love to discuss insights from hi
The Cybersecurity Crisis Is About More Than “Rogue AI” (with V.S. Subrahmanian)
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 t
Will We Still Learn Languages When Machines Can Translate? (with Abby Walker)
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 con
AI, Artists, and the Future of Creative Work
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
Why AI Might Not Change Education Much at All (with Justin Reich)
“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
An Optimist’s Take on AI and the Future of Learning (with Sébastien Martin)
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 hav
Our Chatbot Friends and Lovers (with Pat Pataranutaporn)
What does a healthy relationship with AI look like? Pat Pataranutaporn, researcher at the MIT Media Lab, explores how chatbots can either support or undermine human flourishing. Pat explains why it’s so easy to imagine a “someone” behind the screen and why chatbots that never push back are dangerous. He ultimately makes the case that AI should be evaluated based not on short-term engagement or pro
Chatbots Don’t Fool Us, We Fool Ourselves (with Joshua Jay)
When people go to a magic show, they expect to be fooled. That’s part of the fun. And magician Joshua Jay says much of the magician’s work is helping people fool themselves. Our brains are hardwired to fill in gaps, predict outcomes, and take cognitive shortcuts to process the overwhelming amount of information around us. When interacting with AI chatbots, we may similarly fool ourselves into beli
Does AI Have to Be Bad News for the Planet? (with Meghan Busse)
Are you hurting the planet every time you query a chatbot? Economist Meghan Busse suggests that may be the wrong question. In this episode, we zoom out from the usual concerns about frivolous queries (and, for that matter, resource‑hungry data centers) to ask an even more basic question: is intense demand for AI locking us into decades of additional fossil fuel use, or is it accelerating investmen
To Thrive Alongside AI, Find the Bottlenecks (with Ben Jones)
Will AI actually take over every job ever? Economist Ben Jones doesn't think so. Drawing from historical evidence around innovation, Jones argues that automation never conquers everything — it inevitably creates operational bottlenecks that only humans can solve. By leaning into these bottlenecks, we can protect meaningful, well-paid work. But his optimism comes with a stark caveat: there is one n
Coming July 15th! Life, Automated
Life, Automated explores the surreal, exciting, and occasionally terrifying ways AI and automation are reshaping our daily lives.Through thoughtful conversations with researchers, practitioners, artists, and more, we do our best to make sense of how technology is changing—and how it is changing us.
We ask: What does the economy look like if AI can do much of what humans can? Will AI tools isolate
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