What Makes Us Unique in the Age of AI?

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 original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

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 Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

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 Media.  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.

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 future of AI may not be large language models, but quantitative.This episode originally aired in June 2025.We Meet:  Andrew McLaughlin, COO of Sandbox AQ 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.

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.

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, Portugal.We Meet:  Alice & Bob Co-founder & CEO Théau Peronnin Planqc Co-founder & CEO Alex Glaetzle  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.

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 efforts, MIT's Daniela Rus.We Meet:  Daniela Rus is the Director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.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.

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.

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 by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

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.