TED Tech TED Audio Collective

We may think the complexities of the human mind can only be understood by other humans. Yet research on chatbots and psychology suggests non-human bots can actually help improve mental health. Bilawal talks with Dr. Alison Darcy, the founder of mental health app Woebot, and Brian Chandler, an app user, to learn what chatbots reveal about our inner lives and what they can (and can’t) do when it comes to emotional wellness.Check out the 99% Invisible episode we reference in the show here: For transcripts for The TED AI Show, visit go.ted.com/TTAIS-transcripts 

Buildings are bad news for the climate -- but they don't have to be. While our structures are currently responsible for a third of global energy consumption and emissions, a future where they create more energy than they consume is possible. This week we are revisiting a talk by energy policy analyst Ksenia Petrichenko who has a three-tiered strategy for thinking differently about buildings, transforming them from passive users to active players in the energy system and bringing us closer to our climate targets.

Non Player Characters --NPCs for short-- have always been a huge part of what makes video games engaging, from Cortana in Halo to Navi in The Legend of Zelda. But interactions with NPCs were always limited to a pre-written script. Until now. Purnendu Mukherjee is the CEO of Convai, a platform that enables developers to create NPCs with human-like conversational abilities. He joins Bilawal to chat about our evolving relationship with "AI characters” and what we gain and lose when our digital relationships are so life-like, it almost doesn’t matter who (or what) is on the other end. For transcripts for The TED AI Show, visit go.ted.com/TTAIS-transcripts   

Can AI help us answer life's biggest questions? In this visionary conversation, Google DeepMind cofounder and CEO Demis Hassabis delves into the history and incredible capabilities of AI with head of TED Chris Anderson. Hassabis explains how AI models like AlphaFold — which accurately predicted the shapes of all 200 million proteins known to science in under a year — have already accelerated scientific discovery in ways that will benefit humanity. Next up? Hassabis says AI has the potential to unlock the greatest mysteries surrounding our minds, bodies and the universe.

Technology is supposed to make our lives better – but who gets to decide how that improvement unfolds, and what values it upholds? Tech ethicist Patrick Lin and Bilawal dig into the hidden -- and not so hidden -- biases in AI. From historically inaccurate images to life-and-death decisions in hospitals, human biases reveal how AI mirrors our own flaws…But can we fix bias? Lin argues that technology alone won't suffice...

We're still in the dark about what 95 percent of our universe is made of — and the standard model for understanding particle physics has hit a limit. What's the next step forward? Particle physicist Alex Keshavarzi digs into the first results of the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab in Chicago, which found compelling evidence of new particles or forces existing in our universe — a finding that could act as a window into the subatomic world and deepen our understanding of the fabric of reality.