Future Perfect explores provocative ideas with the potential to radically improve the world. We tackle big questions about the most effective ways to save lives, control new and potentially dangerous technology, and address world poverty to create a more perfect future. Good Robot is a new series about AI from Unexplainable and Future Perfect.Produced by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Latest episodes
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49 min
Good Robot #4: Who, me?
What can we actually do as our world gets populated with more and more robots? How can we take control? Can we take control?This is the final episode of our four-part series, Good…
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45 min
Good Robot #3: Let's fix everything
A simple parable about a drowning child sparks a moral revolution. Can AI help us do the most good in the world?Good Robot was made in partnership with Vox’s Unexplainable team. Ep…
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53 min
Good Robot #2: Everything is not awesome
When a robot does bad things, who is responsible? A group of technologists sounds the alarm about the ways AI is already harming us today. Are their concerns being taken seriously?…
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49 min
Good Robot #1: The Magic Intelligence in the Sky
Before AI became a mainstream obsession, one thinker sounded the alarm about its catastrophic potential. So why are so many billionaires and tech leaders worried about… paper clips…
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4 min
Introducing: Good Robot
A new series about AI from Unexplainable and Future Perfect Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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44 min
Sucking the carbon out of the sky
Most of our efforts to fight climate change, from electric cars to wind turbines, are about pumping fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. But what if we could pull out the ga…
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1 h 02
Should I still have kids if I’m worried about climate change?
Climate scientist Kimberly Nicholas co-led a study that showed the single most effective thing an individual can do to decrease their carbon footprint is have fewer kids. Despite t…
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36 min
Engineering our way out of the climate crisis
In an ideal world, cutting carbon emissions would be enough to stop global warming. But after dithering for decades, the world needs a back-up plan. Kelly Wanser is the leader of a…
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29 min
Unexplainable
Unexplainable is a new podcast from Vox about everything we don’t know. Each week, the team looks at the most fascinating unanswered questions in science and the mind-bending ways…
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22 min
Rethinking meat
How can we convince people to change their relationship with meat?Melanie Joy has been grappling with this question for a long time. To answer it, she takes us back to other points…
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24 min
Can we raise better beef?
Beef cattle take a huge toll on the environment. In Brazil, a huge chunk of greenhouse gas emissions comes from ranching alone. And a California-sized chunk of the Amazon rainfores…
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25 min
How to prevent a factory farmed pandemic
What if the next pandemic comes, not from wet markets overseas, but from our own factory farms? Martha Nelson, who studies viruses at the NIH, says we are playing Russian roulette…
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23 min
These bacteria wear chicken shoes
Right now, we can fight off a wide range of bacterial infections using antibiotics. But those antibiotics are becoming increasingly ineffective, and antibiotic use on factory farms…
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25 min
Life on the fast line
Workers in meatpacking plants already process our pigs and beef and chickens extremely fast, but recently, there’s been a push to make the meatpacking factory line move even faster…
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29 min
Chicken Big
In 1992, Craig Watts got into growing chickens for Perdue Farms because he was told he could turn a good profit. Instead, he found himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt,…
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25 min
The paradox on our plates
In the US, we spend billions of dollars a year pampering our pets. We have laws to protect them from harm and to punish those who inflict it on them. And yet, we routinely abuse pi…
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29 min
Pig poop lagoon
North Carolina is home to around 9 million pigs. Many of those pigs live in big factory farms, and all of those pigs produce a lot of waste. On these factory farms, that waste is c…
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2 min
Season 3: The beef with meat
The meat we eat affects us all. It affects non-human animals, but also the farmers and factory workers who raise those animals and slaughter them. It affects the communities living…
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59 min
What the housing crisis means for the climate
Dylan Matthews sits down with housing policy experts and advocates Leonora Camner and Annie Fryman to discuss California’s housing crisis, climate catastrophe, and how more sustain…
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1 h 13
What MLK and Malcolm X would do today
Co-host Sean Illing talks to Peniel Joseph, a University of Texas at Austin historian of Black Power movementsRelevant resources: The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives…