SHIFT

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.

What do you think it would be like to lead AI efforts and the overall digital transformation of the CIA? This week, we find out as we dive into a world of espionage and secrets in the latest installment of our oral history project. We Meet:  Retired Deputy CIA Director for Digital Innovation Jennifer Ewbank 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 we build products, why we build them, and what we think they’re for have always changed, but these days developers and engineers who love things like product roadmaps might find the current AI scene a little disorienting. That’s because there often isn’t a roadmap. If there is? It’s constantly changing.This week, we meet the CTO of IBM Research and she tells us about the current landscape and what she imagines for the future. This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna, Austria. We Meet:  IBM Research CTO Anna Topol Credits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens, and special thanks to Dajana Doskoc and Alina Nikoloau at TEDAI Vienna. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

Agentic AI is one of the hottest topics going in tech circles, but if pinning down exactly what we’re talking about feels a bit like a moving target, it’s not your imagination. What agents are capable of doing is changing almost as quickly as what people want to do with them. We Meet:  VP of Agentic AI at AWS Swami Sivasubramanian Credits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens, and special thanks to Dajana Doskoc and Alina Nikoloau at TEDAI Vienna. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.

What’s an astronaut’s time worth? Answering that question is not a perfect science, but at more than $100,000 an hour (not counting salary - that's just to keep one alive) on the International Space Station, it’s safe to say it’s more than you want to pay for bagging up trash. This week, we take a field trip in New York City to see some space robots that could help with this problem. We Meet:  Icarus Robotics CEO Ethan Barajas Icarus Robotics CTO Jamie Palmer  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.

Might a lack of legacy healthcare tech infrastructure in rural communities offer an advantage over mature markets? A  founder makes the case in the latest installment of our oral history project.We Meet:  Homeward Co-Founder & President Amar Kendale 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.

You've likely heard that artificial intelligence is gobbling up electricity and drinking water, and causing a global race to build more energy capacity. Have you ever stopped to consider why? Or what we’re doing to bring compute power and sustainability closer together?This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at TechBBQ, the largest tech conference in the Nordics. It's held each year in Copenhagen, Denmark.We Meet:  Caspar Høgh, Co-Founding Partner Noon Ventures Yasser Nour, CTO & Co-Founder Lotus MicrosystemsRuben Bryon, CEO & Co-Founder DatacrunchCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco. 

EU AI Act architect and lead author Gabriele Mazzini shares his experience drafting the law. He also talks about his concerns with implementation and its potential impact on European competitiveness, and how that led him to quit his job, in the latest installment of our oral history project.This episode was recorded at TEDAI in Vienna and originally ran in 2024.We Meet:MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate & MIT Connection Science Fellow Gabriele MazziniCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco. 

One of the world's hottest AI startups, Builder.AI, imploded earlier this year. We dig into what actually went down at the company and what journalists and investors can learn from the experience. We Meet:  Journalist Varsha BansalCredits: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.

Despite our best efforts, sometimes what we say we want isn’t precisely what we mean. Nowhere is that felt more acutely than when we’re giving instructions to a machine, whether that’s coding or offering examples to machine learning systems. We unpack the alignment problem in the latest installment of our oral history project.We Meet: Brian Christian, University of Oxford researcher, and author of The Alignment Problem 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.

In all the noise about AI agents it’s easy to miss a fundamental change that’s taking place. For these agents to be effective, people have to feel safe delegating things to them. When we do? How we use this tech starts to feel less like a tool and more like real collaboration. This week, we explore agentic powered legal work in the latest installment of our oral history project.We Meet:  Thomson Reuters Chief Product Officer David WongCredits: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 would you say if someone offered you a taste of a salmon filet that doesn’t contain fish?  The protein content, carbs, and even the omega 3s are basically the same, but what it doesn’t contain are things like microplastics and mercury. Join us for a factory tour of a startup called New School Foods for a peek at the next-generation of plant-based foods.We Meet:  New School Foods CEO Chris BrysonCredits: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.