Charting the true cost of AI

08/29/23 • 27 min

1 Listener

This week, the academic Kate Crawford tells us how she travelled the world to find the true cost of AI. Reporter Chris Vallance updates us on a watermark system - developed by Deepmind, Google's AI arm - which aims to show whether an image was generated by a machine or designed by a human. Mansoor Hamayun, Co-Founder and CEO of Bboxx tells us about the company's smart cooking valve, designed to protect lives - and trees - in Rwanda. We speak to Fu’ad Lawal, the founder of Archivi.ng,and archivist Grace Abraham, about why the key to Nigeria's tech future may lie in digitsing newspapers from its past.

(Picture credit: an imagined digital landscape, by Andriy Onufriyenko, for Getty images)

(Picture credit: an imagined digital landscape, by Andriy Onufriyenko, for Getty images)

Previous Episode

Why do smart speakers get facts wrong?

Have you ever turned to a smart assistant on your phone or a speaker to catch up on the progress of a big sports match? During the Women's Football World Cup one popular device failed to recognise the women's semi-final as a football match. We explore why, and other biases that exist in AI. We also answer another listener question to explore AI in drug and vaccine discovery, and meet the people in Malaysia and Japan who are among Wikipedia’s top editors.

(Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images: Goal picture from the World Cup semi-final match between Australia and England at Stadium Australia on August 16, 2023)

Next Episode

Battery tech goes super miniature - and tear powered

Associate Professor Lee Seok Woo, from NTU, in Singapore, tells us how a Tom Cruise film inspired him to create a battery, powered by tears, that's so small it could be fitted to a contact lens. Ben Derico reports from San Francisco on why Chatbot detectors are mistakenly accusing people for whom English is a second language of cheating in exams. Analyst Ben Wood, from CCS Insight, brings us up to speed on Apple's latest product plans. And journalist Jack Thompson guides us through the farming revolution in Senegal, being powered by WhatsApp voicenotes.