Pod notes: WHYY and Princeton launch ‘A.I. Nation’ exploring how the tech plays out in our everyday lives

Public radio station WHYY has teamed up with Princeton University to detail, in a new podcast series, the ways in which AI technology has become ubiquitous in our everyday lives.

“A.I. Nation” will dig into artificial intelligence’s current influence and forecast how it might evolve in the future. Reporter Malcolm Burnley co-hosts the series, which launched April 1, with Ed Felton, a computer science professor and the director of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

The pair will explore what exactly AI is, and how it’s being used — voice and facial recognition, social media algorithms, driverless cars, the list goes on and on. They also discuss what it’s not, dispelling some science fiction-type misconceptions. The pair will also discuss the ethical implications and biases in AI.

“In obvious and invisible ways, AI is humming in the background of all the major events, trends and stories in our modern lives,” Burnley says in the podcast’s inaugural episode.

The show’s first episode, “Hello, World!” dives into natural language processing, or the way computers learn to speak with humans. NLP has gotten better at mirroring humans’ language, pass for human speech or even learn to code. In episode two, the hosts explore how AI is being used in machines like driverless cars, drones and automated weapons.

Check out the first show here, and look out for the roughly 30-minute episodes in upcoming weeks.