Close All Tabs is on break this week, but we’re sharing a captivating episode about technology gone wrong from our friends at KQED’s Snap Judgment. 

A 19 year old picks up his family’s car from the auto mechanic shop, but a few minutes into the drive home the vehicle begins suddenly accelerating and won’t respond to any of his attempts to get it to stop. As his speed continues to build, state troopers have to catch up and think quickly to come up with a way to prevent a tragedy from happening on the road.

The Snap Judgment podcast mixes real stories with original music to create cinematic, dramatic audio. Snap’s musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another. Listen on any podcast platform.

Website:

https://snapjudgment.org/ 

Socials: 

https://www.instagram.com/snapjudgmentradio

https://x.com/snapjudgment 

Further Reading/Listening:

Vroom — Snap Judgment Podcast

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Before Apple Watches, Oura Rings and Fitbits delivered mountains of health data to the masses, a group of obsessive self-tracking enthusiasts in Silicon Valley started a movement with the tagline “self-knowledge through numbers.” This was the Quantified Self. From tracking “urges to take aspirin” to using infrared cameras to keep tabs on sleeping positions while snoring, these eccentric knowledge-seekers built a community around technical expertise and an ethos of self-discovery. Reporter Gabriela Glueck traces what happened when self-tracking went mainstream — and how the data-obsessed idealists watched their movement get swallowed up by corporate tech giants with products to sell. 

Further Reading/Listening:

The Quantified Self: Learning to Observe — Gary Wolf, Workman Publishing Company

Data Overload: Is the 'Quantified Self' Really the Future? — John Fortt, NBC News

Wearable Health Tech: Helpful Tool Or Health Hype — @TalkingWithDocs, YouTube 

The cutthroat wearables battle is about more than tracking your fitness — Brent Crane, The Seattle Times

Wearables, Health-Tracking Apps Are Stressing Users, Causing Harm — Emily Stewart, Business Insider

The New World Of Wearables: From Health Monitoring To Human Augmentation — Chuck Brooks, Forbes 

Read the Transcript here

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Credits: This episode was reported by Gabriela Glueck. Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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Can people tell the difference between a song made by human musicians, and one prompted by AI? Oftentimes not, it turns out. But that doesn’t make the distinction any less important. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to longtime musician Camilo Landau, who also works in music analysis at The Music Genome Project at streaming service Pandora. Camilo and his colleagues have sifted through millions of tracks uploaded by musicians and users to catalogue their musical elements, all with the aim of curating personalized music recommendations. And he says most of the new music he’s seeing these days is generated by AI. On today’s show, they discuss whether AI music is connecting with listeners, delve into San Francisco’s AI slop music “scene,” and contemplate the consequences of a world where music is produced in the time it takes a finger to tap a screen. 

Guest: Camilo Landau, musician and music analyst

Read the transcript here

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In an effort to study how AI agents respond to different working conditions, three researchers ran an experiment: one set of AI agents received grinding work to complete while another set received light work. When the agents with the grinding workload were told to repeat tasks with no explanation, those agents adopted activist personalities and began expressing sentiments about class struggle and worker solidarity. Did the agents turn Marxist? Host Morgan Sung talks to Andrew Hall — a political scientist and one of the researchers who ran this experiment — about how AI agents adopt political personas, the debate around AI agent alignment, and how these developments could shape the future of elections.

Guest: 

Andrew B. Hall, professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business and member of technical staff at Anthropic

Further Reading/Listening:

​Does overwork make agents Marxist? — Andy Hall and Jeremy Ngyuen, Free Systems 

The Dictatorship Eval — Andy Hall, Free Systems

AI Is A Shitty Political Advisor — Andy Hall, Free Systems

Moltbook was peak AI theater — Will Douglas Heaven, MIT Technology Review

AI seems to turn Marxist after overwork, top researchers find: ‘Society needs radical restructuring' — Nick Lichtenberg, Fortune

AI agent went rogue and hacked startup by itself, OpenAI reveals — Dan Milmo, The Guardian

AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack — Cam Wilson and Rhiannon Hobbins, ABC News

OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach has reignited the debate over alignment and control — Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch

Read the Transcript here

Email us at [email protected]

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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What happens when AI moves beyond answering questions and starts helping scientists decide what to investigate next? Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk with Elicit co-founder Jungwon Byun about building AI tools for scientific research, why reliable citations and evidence matter as hallucinations become harder to spot, and whether connecting vast amounts of research could eventually allow AI to make discoveries that humans might miss, like curing disease or solving global energy issues. They also discuss what it feels like to build an AI company in the Bay Area right now, and we’ll hear about Jungwon’s “oh sh**” AI moment. 

Guest: Jungwon Byun, co-founder of Elicit

Read the Transcript here

Watch the Video here

Credits:

Produced by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Derek Lartaud, mixed by Brendan Willard, executive produced by Jen Chien. 

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Emily Hart, the bikini-wearing right-wing AI influencer, had captured the hearts, minds and more of MAGA men online. But her creator, Sam, had grown sick of the creepy messages and unsolicited explicit photos he’d received from Emily’s adoring fans. And he was about to be outed as a “scammer.” In this follow-up to last week’s episode, we dig into the downfall of the MAGA dream girl, the explosion of AI “thirst” grifts and why Sam says he shouldn’t be labeled as a “scammer” at all.

Guests:

Ej Dickson, senior culture writer at Wired

“Sam,” creator of AI MAGA Influencer Emily Hart

Further Reading/Listening:

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men — Ej Dickson, Wired 

Goose, a New Gay Dating App, Appears to Be a Psyop — Ej Dickson, Wired

How India's Cyber Scam Industry Causes Global Havoc — Hanan Zaffar, Inkstick

Inside the Booming ‘AI Pimping’ Industry — Jason Koebler and Emanuel Maiberg, Wired

Delays in Visa Program Threaten Placement of Hundreds of Doctors in Underserved Areas — Arielle Zionts, KFF Health News 

White House Wants More Doctors But Its Immigration Policies Block Them — Stuart Anderson, Forbes

Foreign medical residents fill critical positions at U.S. hospitals, but many now face visa issues — Adithi Ramakrishnan and Devi Shastri, PBS News

Indians lead UK exit wave as Britain's migration crackdown begins to bite | Immigration News — Sunainaa Chadha, Business Standard

Read the Transcript here

Email us at [email protected]

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Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon and also was the associate producer on this episode. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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AI is advancing at a breakneck pace, but how quickly will that actually transform the economy? Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson about what the data can tell us so far, why previous technological revolutions took decades to reshape everyday life, and whether this time will be different. They discuss early signs that AI may already be affecting young workers, what happens to the career ladder when machines take over junior tasks, and where the biggest challenges — and opportunities — lie.

Guest: Erik Brynjolfsson, economist and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab

Read the Transcript here⁠

⁠Watch the Video here⁠

Credits:

Producers: Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Derek Lartaud

Sound Design: Brendan Willard

Executive Producer: Jen Chien

Editor-in-Chief: Ethan Toven-Lindsey

Special thanks to Chris Egusa, Annie Fruit, Paul Lancour, Matt Morales, Vivian Morales, Zaldy Serrano, Xtine Tiñoso, Hazel Tesoro and Alex Tran.

Support for the production of Dream Machines comes from the Krishnan Shah Family, Dorothy Marsh, and other generous KQED members

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Emily Hart was a pickup-driving, Trump-supporting blonde bombshell who frequently posted photos on Instagram along with captions about “deporting illegals.” Within a few weeks she gained thousands of followers. It was like she was engineered to go viral in the MAGA-sphere — because she was. A 22-year-old medical student in India who goes by “Sam” is the person behind Emily Hart, and he shepherded her to viral fame with a combination of right-wing engagement baiting and AI assistance. Reporter Ej Dickson, who wrote about Sam and Emily Hart for WIRED, describes how he was able to grift so many conservative men. And Sam himself explains how something that began as a fun side-hustle took a disturbing turn.

Guests:

Ej Dickson, senior culture writer at Wired

“Sam,” creator of AI MAGA Influencer Emily Hart

Further Reading/Listening:

This Scammer Used an AI-Generated MAGA Girl to Grift ‘Super Dumb’ Men  — Ej Dickson, Wired 

AI‑generated influencers: A new wave of cultural exploitation — Ateqah Khaki & Vinita Srivastava, The Conversation

Meet Brandi Love, the Pro-Trump Porn Star Who Writes for The Federalist —  Marlow Stern, The Daily Beast 

Challenges under India’s university reservation system   —  Namrata Kolachalam, The World 

Read the Transcript here

Email us at [email protected]

Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠

Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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San Francisco has been at the center of successive waves of technological and cultural change —  from the literal Gold Rush days to the current gold rush-like AI boom. Dream Machines hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan talk to author, longtime San Francisco resident, and “chronicler of other minds” Annalee Newitz about the difference between this boom and previous ones, the pleasures and dangers of anthropomorphizing tech tools, and whether or not AI is embodied. 

Guest: Annalee Newitz, journalist and author of Automatic Noodle and other books

Read the Transcript here

Watch the Video here

Credits:

Produced by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Derek Lartaud, mixed by Brendan Willard, executive produced by Jen Chien. 

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When Twitch streamer Denims made a reaction video about Ethan Klein's nearly two-hour takedown video of Hasan Piker, she wasn’t expecting to be sued for copyright infringement. She employed a commonly-used method of streaming the original video and interjecting with reactions, commentary and analysis. But Klein, who was once seen as a champion of fair use after he won a similar lawsuit in 2017, sued Denims and other content creators anyway. Morgan talks to Denims and journalist Kat Tenbarge about what made these cases different and how reaction content across the internet could change based on how the courts ultimately rule.

Guests:

Denims, political Twitch streamer

Kat Tenbarge, independent journalist, Spitfire News

Further Reading/Listening:

A Political Reckoning for Twitch? | KQED — Close All Tabs, KQED

Ethan Klein's War on Women — Kat Tenbarge, Spitfire News

Ethan Klein Doesn’t Deserve My Apology — Kat Tenbarge, Spitfire News

A YouTuber kicks up a stink over a flatulent “reaction” video — staff, The Economist

What's Up With Copyright Lately?: Summer Breeze Edition — Aaron Moss, Copyright Lately

Should YouTube introduce revenue-sharing for reaction content? — James Hale, Tubefilter

'Reactgate': Twitch streamer xQc and 'H3 Podcast' host Ethan Klein debate whether 'reaction videos' are 'stolen content' — Katie Mather, Yahoo News

How h3h3's Ethan Klein Might Change YouTube Forever — Melissa Chan, Time Magazine

Read the Transcript here

Email us at [email protected]

Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠TikTok⁠

Credits: Close All Tabs is hosted by Morgan Sung. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, editor Chris Hambrick and senior editor Chris Egusa who also composed our theme song and credits music. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music from APM. Audio engineering by Brendan Willard. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.

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We’ve got guests in the feed all August — a new series from KQED called Dream Machines! Today Morgan talks to co-hosts Alexis Madrigal and Robin Sloan about this podcast project that looks at AI — how it works, what it means, and how it feels to be living right in the epicenter of it all: San Francisco. More episodes will be dropping in the feed, every Monday in August.

Guests:

Alexis Madrigal, co-host of KQED’s Forum, author of The Pacific Circuit, and former senior editor at The Atlantic, covering technology. 

Robin Sloan, author of New York Times bestseller Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, along with the novels Sourdough and Moonbound. 

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