The World as You’ll Know It: The Great Rebuild

The Paris Climate Agreement says we need to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. That means for every new carbon molecule we put in the air, we have to take one out. Even the most optimistic forecasts still anticipate burning fossil fuels well past that date. So how do we balance the carbon books? Enter direct air capture, or DAC — a mechanical process that sucks carbon out of the atmosphere — which many believe will be crucial to controlling climate change. Right now the technology is extremely expensive, energy intensive, and has never been deployed at the scale necessary to make a difference. Host Arielle Duhaime-Ross speaks with the Dr. Klaus Lackner, known as the “godfather of carbon removal”; Dr. Susan Hovorka, a professor of geology who has been burying carbon underground for decades; and Dr. Emily Grubert, associate professor of sustainable energy policy at Notre Dame.

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Hydrogen has long been the great hope of the environmental movement. Hydrogen-powered cars; airplanes; even home heating. A single molecule could power it all. Much of that has gone nowhere. But now, hydrogen is being touted as the answer to carbon-free steel. Can we trust in our hydrogen future this time? To explore that question, host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks to Rachael Fahkry, policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Jason Mortimer, from the company Electric Hydrogen.

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Heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather event, and scientists expect the earth to continue to get hotter. Unfortunately, one of the most effective tools we have to combat heat — air-conditioning — also contributes to global warming. The hotter we get, the more AC we’ll need: It’s a conundrum. So how do we keep cool without making the planet hotter at the same time? Host Arielle Duhaime-Ross speaks to Dr. David Hondula, the Director of Heat Response and Mitigation for the city of Phoenix, Arizona; Rachel Kyte, a former U.N. Special Representative, and professor in climate policy and sustainability; and Dr. Daniel Betts, an engineer and founder of the air-conditioning company Blue Frontier.

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The United States was once on track to be a world leader in nuclear power, building more than 100 plants in the 1970s and 1980s. But cost and safety concerns led to decades of decommissioning old plants and canceling plans to build new ones. Now, with clean energy production a top priority, there are signs of a revival. Reactors at the first new nuclear plant to be built in almost 30 years went online last year, and the Biden administration wants to triple the country’s nuclear capacity. Host Arielle Duhaime-Ross discusses the hurdles facing nuclear power, as well as a new vision for smaller, more adaptable reactors with Dr. Kathryn Huff, former assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy; historian and Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Rhodes; and the undergraduates – that’s right, undergraduates – who run their own nuclear reactor.

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Americans drive more, drive further, and pay less for fuel than people in other developed countries. Partly for this reason, our vehicles are more than just a means of transportation — they’re extensions of who we are. So persuading Americans to swap out gas-dependent cars for EVs is a different — and in many ways more difficult — challenge. What’s it going to take to get more Americans into electric vehicles?  Host Arielle Duhaime-Ross explores the obstacles and possible solutions to EV adoption with guests David Ferris, a reporter covering transportation and energy for E&E News and Politico; Joseph Barletta, the founder and CEO of Smart Charge America, a company that installs EV chargers; and Dr. Linda Nazar, an expert in battery chemistry and professor of chemistry at the University of Waterloo.

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In the past 50 years, solar energy has surpassed all expectations. Even early solar experts couldn’t predict how affordable and widespread it would become. The story behind its success involves Einstein, US presidents, obscure legislation and a global relay race.  Now the question is – What can the rise of solar power teach us about the future of other climate technologies? Join this season’s host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross, in conversations with Greg Nemet, author of “How Solar Became Cheap,” and Nathanael Greene, from the National Resources Defense Council, to discuss today’s solar landscape, its future potential, and the challenges we face in getting there.

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We’re currently involved in one of the most ambitious projects we, as humans, have ever attempted: Rebuilding the world, pretty much from the ground up, in order to switch from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. In this season of The World as You'll Know It, science journalist Arielle Duhaime-Ross goes deep inside the world of cutting-edge climate technologies and asks: How is this going to work? The answers — from some of the world’s most innovative and audacious thinkers, builders and investors — reveal the promise, obstacles and tradeoffs of a new clean-energy landscape that will shape the way we live.

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In our final episode, Host Gary Marcus shares his hopes for and fears about an AI-driven future. On the one hand, AI could accelerate solutions to some of society’s most difficult problems; on the other, it could deepen existing problems and create new existential risks to humanity. Getting it right, Marcus emphasizes, depends on establishing both national and international standards for the industry as soon as possible. He is joined by Dr. Alondra Nelson, who led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in 2021, and Brian Christian an AI researcher and the author of The Alignment Problem; Machine Learning and Human Values.

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Some people use chatbots for therapy. Others have fallen in love with them. And some people argue that AI systems have become sentient and are entitled to certain rights. In this episode, Gary Marcus explores our relationship with AI technology —  how it’s changing and where it might lead. He speaks with Blake Lemoine, an engineer who believes that a Google program has achieved sentience and even has feelings, Eugenia Kuyda, the founder and CEO of Replika, Anna Oakes, a lead producer and co-host of Bot Love, and Paul Bloom, a cognitive psychologist who believes we are on the forefront of a new age of human-machine interaction.

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The emergence of generative AI threatens to automate millions of jobs, potentially ushering in a new and unprecedented wave of job displacement. In the past, newly created jobs replaced those lost. Will that happen this time? To discuss this, Gary Marcus is joined by Amy Winter, a concept artist who sees generative AI as a threat to her career, Brian Merchant, the technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of “Blood in the Machine: the Origins of the Rebellion against Big Tech”, and Dr. Erik Brynjolffson, an economist and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, that studies the effects of technology on the workforce. 

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Misinformation has already influenced our elections, ruined reputations and fundamentally changed society’s relationship with the truth. Now, large language models like GPT have the potential to create and spread misinformation at a speed and scale we’ve never seen before. As new technologies allow bad actors to imitate the way we write, the way we speak and the way we appear in photos and videos, the question won’t be, ‘What we can believe in?’ but whether we’ll be able to believe in anything at all. To discuss how we got here and what we must do to fix it, host Gary Marcus talks to Pranshu Verma and Will Oremus, two technology writers from the Washington Post, and Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, a leading expert in Ethical AI and former Director of the Ethics and Transparency team at Twitter.

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New large language models are capable of writing essays, drafting marketing pitches and having human-like exchanges on chat apps. But can they make us laugh the way a human can? To explore this, host Gary Marcus is joined by Dr. Naomi Saphra, an AI researcher and comedian, Bob Mankoff, former Cartoon Editor of The New Yorker magazine and Yejin Choi, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and 2022 MacArthur Fellow. While artificial intelligence systems can generate far more jokes than humans can, knowing what’s funny remains — at least for now — a uniquely human ability.

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We've been promised wide-scale driverless cars for more than a decade, but a true driverless experience still remains out of reach. It turns out that taking humans out of the loop is putting everyone on the road at risk. Host Gary Marcus talks to Cade Metz, a tech reporter for The New York Times and Dr. Missy Cummings, former senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to explore requirements that would make self-driving cars reliable and secure for everyone.

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After its victory on Jeopardy, IBM made a billion-dollar bet on Watson: cancer. But it turned out that diagnosing patients isn’t the same as answering questions on a game show. Gary Marcus talks to journalists, doctors and computer scientists to find out how and why IBM’s experiment failed to live up to expectations, then looks at a new AI project that is showing promise at treating one of the world’s leading causes of hospital death. 

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In 2011, Watson, a computer built by IBM, shocked the world by becoming the first non-human contestant to win Jeopardy. An immediate sensation, Watson became the symbol of the seemingly limitless horizons of artificial intelligence. Host Gary Marcus retells this amazing story with the help of Dave Ferrucci, the genius behind Watson’s success, and Ken Jennings, the all-time Jeopardy champion and the inspiration behind IBM’s project.

A transcript of their conversation can be found at Aventine.org/podcast. 

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From the producers of The World as You’ll Know It, a new series about the perils and promise of artificial intelligence with cognitive scientist, Gary Marcus. For all the progress in artificial intelligence over the last 70 years — computers can now beat people at chess and Go, detect fraud, give driving instructions and write like Shakespeare — we still don’t know how to build AI we can trust. The risks are serious, but the potential benefits of AI are too great to be ignored. In this special edition series, host Gary Marcus — cognitive scientist, best-selling author and AI entrepreneur — digs into AI’s history, present and future, bringing to life some of the technology’s most significant breakthroughs and failures. He enlists engineers, scientists, philosophers and journalists working at the forefront of AI to explore what’s wrong with our current approach and ways we might change it. Humans vs. Machines debuts this spring.

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Judith Warner speaks with Dr. Matthew Johnson about the state of psychedelic research today and the likelihood that certain drugs — MDMA and psilocybin specifically — could soon be approved for the treatment of conditions like addiction and PTSD. Psychedelics have long been known for their abilities to alter perception, but renewed interest by major research institutions in psychedelics’ ability to treat a range of common disorders has brought some of them to the precipice of FDA approval.

DR. JOHNSON is a professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and a leader in the study of psychedelics for the treatment of addiction.

A transcript of their conversation can be found at Aventine.org/podcast.

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One out of five Americans suffer from chronic pain and a new approach to treatment could transform their lives. Judith Warner speaks with Drs. Yoni Ashar and Tor Wager, neuroscientists who are at the forefront of a new way to understand and treat chronic pain that looks to the brain rather than the body as pain’s source. The treatment is relatively new, but growing rapidly in acceptance, thanks in part to a groundbreaking study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association earlier this year in which two-thirds of participants who were treated with the new approach were pain free or nearly pain free after a month.

DR. ASHAR is a clinical psychologist and an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz medical campus; DR. WAGER is a neuroscientist and a professor at Dartmouth.

A transcript of their conversation can be found at Aventine.org/podcast.

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Judith Warner speaks with Dr. Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, about the failures in mental healthcare and how technology could be an important tool in addressing them. 

DR. THOMAS INSEL was the head of the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002 to 2015, during which time he grew concerned about the lack of improvement in mental health outcomes despite great leaps forward in technology and brain science. He left for Silicon Valley, where, most recently, he founded Vanna Health, a company looking for community-based solutions for people with serious mental illness. In February, 2022 he published Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health.

A transcript of their conversation can be found at Aventine.org/podcast.

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Judith Warner speaks with Dr. Rudolph Tanzi, a neurologist and professor at Harvard University, about the possible causes of and coming treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease. One of the most complex and mysterious diseases ever known, Alzheimer’s has been the focus of Dr. Tanzi’s professional life for forty years; in 1987 he co-discovered the first gene that causes early onset Alzheimer's as a graduate student. 

DR. RUDOLPH TANZIi is the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Vice-Chair of the Neurology Department at Massachusetts General Hospital where he also serves as the Director of the Genetics and Aging Research Unit.

A transcript of their conversation can be found at Aventine.org/podcast.

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