Should This Exist?

We’re excited to launch WaitWhat's newest weekly series, Pioneers of AI — your guide to the latest technological frontier. Hosted by AI thought leader, scientist, and investor Rana el Kaliouby, tune in for insights from industry trailblazers, explore the ethical considerations of AI, and get ahead of what’s to come as the technology continues to develop. Head to the Pioneers of AI feed now to hear Rana's latest conversations alongside Masters of Scale's Reid Hoffman and Dr. Joy Boulamwini. New episodes of Pioneers of AI release every Wednesday. Pioneers of AI is made possible with support from Inflection AI.

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From the team behind Should This Exist?, we're happy to share the first episode of Offsite Adventures, our newest show uncovering the gems, magical moments, and unique learnings in iconic business travel destinations.

Three minutes before midnight in Times Square, one of the most trafficked commercial centers in the world momentarily transforms into a vibrant digital art installation, providing a refreshing pause for locals and tourists alike. It’s called the Midnight Moment, and you won’t believe how something so unexpected came together. In this episode, Janet digs into the history of this unique collaboration between the advertising and arts communities before experiencing it herself with innovative, boundary-breaking artist Shahzia Sikander.

Offsite Adventures is a Masters of Scale Production presented in alliance with Capital One Business.

Special thanks to Jean Cooney and Times Squares Arts and artists featured as part of the Midnight Moment episode:  

Artist: Shahzia Sikander | Title: Reckoning | Video by Tatyana Tenenbaum 

Artist: Nora Maité Nieves | Title: Eyes of the Sea | Video by Tatyana Tenenbaum

Artist: LuYang | Title: DOKU: Digital Reincarnation | Video by Phatt Features

Special thanks to composer Du Yun for music featured in this episode.

See this story come to life in our video series on YouTube. Click here to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERpUrWKdCjE

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Renowned creator, entrepreneur and pioneer Caterina Fake brings together some of the most brilliant and visionary figures of our time, many of them friends and colleagues, for deep discussions about inspiration, humanity, technology, and the future of the world. With Ingenious, she explores the sources of inspiration and the hopes fueling luminaries working on the cutting edge of creativity, art, entrepreneurship, and technology. Shaping the outcome of global conflicts, climate change, education, and other forces acting upon the future, Caterina poses essential questions about where we are headed and how our ingenuity can solve some of the world’s thorniest problems.

You can listen to Ingenious here https://link.chtbl.com/ingenious_ste

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If you love Should This Exist?, we have exciting news to share: From the same company behind our show, the podcast Spark + Fire is back for Season 2! Spark + Fire explores what really happens on the road to creative success. In their own words, creative icons share the moments of inspiration and setback, the collaborations and the pivots, the breakthroughs and the dead ends along the hero's journey to bring something new into the world. Regardless of your own field, there are endless discoveries in each story that could transform the way you approach your practice of creative thinking and innovating.

Stories from comedian Patton Oswalt, "Wicked" composer Stephen Schwartz, actor and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt, best-selling author Ann Patchett, "Frozen" composers Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, Pixar director Domee Shi, and many more.

Subscribe at sparkandfire.com or your favorite podcast platform.

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You’d be forgiven for being surprised if your doctor wrote you a prescription for ecstasy, ayahuasca, magic mushrooms, or LSD. But a recent resurgence in psychedelic research shows that a number of mental health conditions can be treated directly and effectively with potent psychoactive drugs. Dr. Dave Nichols has been studying the chemistry of these drugs for over 40 years, and he’s convinced of their therapeutic potential — and aware of the dangers of abuse. After a long psychedelic winter, are we ready to welcome these drugs back into the psychiatric fold?

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When you think of nuclear power, what do you envision? For many people, the answer is Chernobyl or Fukushima: massive meltdowns that turned vast areas into radioactive wastelands. But those were meltdowns — and without meltdowns, nuclear power could be a valuable source of clean energy. Dr. Jose Reyes, the co-founder of NuScale, has designed a small, modular reactor that, he claims, cannot melt down. A six-pack of these reactors could power a good-size city, and though that power comes at a higher price than natural gas or renewables, the cost might be offset by the gains in climate goals. Bottom line: How safe is safe enough for nuclear power?

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Kelly Wanser is a climate activist who wants to use a strategy called cloud brightening to fight climate change, using a naturally occurring process to bounce rays from the sun back out to space. She and others have described it compellingly as “emergency medicine for the earth’s climate fever,” and suggest it could buy us more time to implement policies addressing the root causes of climate change. But climate change is a planetary problem – so who gets to decide what countries or groups are allowed to take the risk of geoengineering to fix it? How can one country pursue a risky mitigation strategy if neighboring countries would be the most adversely affected if things went wrong?

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UCSF bioengineer Shuvo Roy and his team have created the world’s first bionic kidney. The coffee-cup-sized device includes a silicon nanotechnology filter to cleanse the blood, while living kidney cells grown in a bioreactor perform the other functions of a natural kidney. A bioartificial kidney could save kidney patients from being stuck on a dialysis machine for life – or dying while waiting for a rare transplant. But is the promise of such a life-changing device enough to convince investors to bring such a thing to market? We talk through the ethics of artificial organs. 

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Could you, would you, go one full hour without your phone? The average American spends one-third of their waking hours on a smartphone; we’ve been told our devices make life better, faster, and easier. What happens when we choose to live without them – or when we are forced to? In this episode, we’ll talk to media studies professor Douglas Rushkoff, get the down low from a U.S. senator who sat in a “digitally sequestered” hearing for three weeks (guess which one) – and travel to the WiFi-free town of Green Bank, West Virginia, to find out exactly what happens when we unplug.

Listen to Douglas Rushkoff’s podcast Team Human: http://teamhuman.fm

Get Douglas’ book Team Human: https://rushkoff.com/books/team-human-book

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Standard college admissions tests are:

a. based on an outdated model of intelligence;

b. exclusionary;

c. a lucrative business and a near-monopoly;

d. all of the above.

28-year-old Harvard dropout Rebecca Kantar is disrupting the paradigm of pencil-and-paper tests like the SAT and ACT by designing interactive scenarios that play like video games, and that test for qualities like grit and creativity. But is another test the answer? Given the spotty history of aptitude tests, maybe it’s time to completely reevaluate how colleges evaluate prospective frosh.

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A VR system called Bravemind allows combat veterans with PTSD to confront and process their trauma in a virtual environment. The therapy, developed by psychologist Skip Rizzo, shows promise for PTSD and potential for other issues like phobias and addiction – and it may have applications to help healing more broadly. But does the potential for harm from virtual self-medication outweigh the good it can do in a clinical setting? And given what we know about how VR affects the brain – is it as safe as it seems? 

Find an episode transcript at shouldthisexist.com

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What if you could extend your healthy life by 10 or 20 years – with a blood transfusion from someone younger and healthier than you? Research by Stanford professor Tony Wyss-Coray shows potential to treat Alzheimer’s and prevent age-related cognitive decline: He’s discovered that proteins found in the blood of young mice can dramatically reverse the effects of aging when transfused into older mice. Doing the same thing in humans could increase our quality of life as we age, and our life expectancy too. We’re years away from seeing any clinical applications of this research, which gives us time to ask about its implications. Who will have access to this treatment? Who are the donors providing young blood? We could add years to our lives – but is that what we really want?

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Is it the loneliest idea you’ve ever heard? Or an ingenious hack that helps human caregivers be more attentive and empathetic? You might have these questions when you meet the robot caregivers who roam the halls at retirement homes, doing basic tasks for residents and keeping them connected. Is elder care something we want a robot to do? Roboticist Conor McGinn from Trinity College Dublin actually moved into a retirement home in Washington, DC, to gain a deeper understanding of what residents might want from a robot. The answer surprised him, and it prompts deeper questions: As humans, what responsibility do we have toward our elders? When we fail them, should robots close the gap? And is that the future we want for ourselves?

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It’s one of the best weapons we have to contain a pandemic. But can it defeat the disease without spying on people who might carry it? MIT’s Kevin Esvelt has a bold idea: Let’s try a new form of contact tracing that could more than double the program’s impact. Bi-directional tracing looks both forward and backward from a known transmission, building a chart of the “undiscovered branches of the viral family tree,” and identifying potential spreaders other systems can’t see. But how much of our data are we willing to give the government, even if it’s to fight Covid-19? 

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Chances are, you’ve seen a “deepfake” video. But did you know it? A new breed of tech detectives are building tools to spot these hyper-realistic videos – built with AI – where people say things they didn’t say or do things they’d never do. Some of these clips are just good, fanciful fun. But a deepfake deployed at the right moment could sway an election, or wreck a life. That’s why UC Berkeley professor Hany Farid is working on a “deepfake detective" – a tool to help media outlets know what’s real and what isn’t. But the same program could also give deepfakers a blueprint for how to make their work undetectable. Deepfake technology already exists. This episode asks: What should we do now? 

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How is technology impacting our humanity? It’s the question of our times. Join host Caterina Fake for Season 2 of Should This Exist – where each week we take a single technology and ask: What’s its greatest potential? And what could possibly go wrong? 

With fascinating guests telling great stories, we’ll talk about some astounding technologies. Robots who could become our caregivers in old age. Video games that aim to replace the SAT. And virtual reality that could heal our trauma and rewire our brains.

Our boldest new technologies can help us flourish as human beings. Or destroy the very thing that makes us human. You can’t uninvent these technologies. So what are we going to do with them now?

Season 2 of Should This Exist? starts October 14, with 11 all-new episodes. Subscribe now, wherever you listen. And join the Should This Exist newsletter at shouldthisexist.com

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The web is broken. Data is mined, sold, and exploited. Social media is an endless and biased scroll through the worst of humanity. Nobody’s personal information is safe. And worst of all, it’s inescapable. The web is a cornerstone of our lives. It’s how we work, communicate with each other, and get information. And it wasn’t supposed to be like this. How did a utopian vision of a free, open, and democratic internet turn into nothing more than a machine for marketing and surveillance? In the season finale of Should This Exist?, Caterina Fake is joined by early web adopters Steven Berlin Johnson, Anil Dash, and Kevin Delaney to ask: Where did the web go wrong? Could we have prevented it? And what, if anything, can we now do to fix it? It’s a question that affects us all and will determine the future of our lives online… and off.

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Imagine meeting your great-great-great-grandkids. Or going to law school in your 80s, learning to snowboard at 110, taking a gap decade instead of a gap year. Greg Bailey dreams of a world where everybody lives twice as long, and no one gets sick. His startup, Juvenescence, is developing a whole ecosystem of anti-aging medications to help you live longer, healthier. Which sounds great. But would this world of perky centenarians wreak havoc on our already strained resources? Would natural aging become taboo? Would dying? It's a technology that prompts us to ask some of the biggest questions of all.

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Imagine biting into a steak that didn’t come from a cow. Or a chicken breast that did not come from a chicken. Imagine if your favorite meat dish did not involve an animal getting killed. This is Isha Datar’s dream. She is a scientist on a mission to not only reinvent meat but the entire meat industry. If Isha's dream comes true, we'll live in a post-animal bioeconomy where animal products – from meat to leather and wool – are harvested from cell cultures, not animals. And we're able to feed a growing global population sustainably, affordably and safely.

But does meat grown in a lab really take animals out of the picture? And do we want to step further into a landscape of man-made, mass-produced food? Host Caterina Fake discusses the possibilities and pitfalls with Isha Datar, executive director of New Harvest, and Kevin Delaney (Quartz Editor-in-Chief); Ben Turley and Brent Young (owners, The Meat Hook); and Andrew Pelling (biophysicist).

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Mike Pappas and Carter Huffman believe their invention fulfills the promise of the digital world: the complete freedom to design your identity. But what if we all used it? The human voice is a key marker of authenticity and individuality, and Modulate uses A.I to transform your voice into anything you want it to be. In real time. If you’re a woman and want to sound like a man, Modulate can help you. If you’re a teen and want to sound like a grandparent, Modulate can do that. If you’re from Italy but want to adopt a French accent, speak into Modulate, and you will. Should this exist? The gift of free expression also comes with a price. Yes: Modulate could allow people to be their true selves and speak in a voice that represents who they are. Yes: Modulate could expose institutional vocal bias against certain sounds and accents. But it also could contribute to the world of deep faking and harassment. At what point is digitizing our real-world identity too much?

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