The bomb (part 1): were nuclear weapons inevitable?
Where did the world’s most devastating weapon come from? In a four-part series, we go behind the scenes at America's nuclear laboratories to...
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News & Politics
The Economist: Babbage
Named after Charles Babbage a 19th-century polymath and grandfather of computing, Babbage is a weekly podcast on science and technology. Host Kenneth Cukier talks to our correspondents about...
Episodes
10 episodes
AI and health part one: DrGPT will see you now
Artificial intelligence is already making its mark in health care —but new, bigger, models promise to improve how patients access services,...
Babbage: Teens and their screens
Ever since there have been smartphones and social media, there have been concerns about how they might be affecting children. Over the past...
Babbage: The science that built the AI revolution—part one
What is intelligence? In the middle of the 20th century, the inner workings of the human brain inspired computer scientists to build the fir...
Babbage: The hunt for dark matter
Dark matter is thought to make up around a quarter of the universe, but so far it has eluded detection by all scientific instruments. Scient...
Babbage: Sam Altman and Satya Nadella on their vision for AI
OpenAI and Microsoft are leaders in generative artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI has built GPT-4, one of the world’s most sophisticated l...
Babbage: Science book club
Books are the original medium for communicating science to the masses. In a holiday special, producer Kunal Patel asks Babbage’s family of c...
Babbage: Fei-Fei Li on how to really think about the future of AI
A year ago, the public launch of ChatGPT took the world by storm and it was followed by many more generative artificial intelligence tools,...
Babbage: How to avoid a battery shortage
In the coming decades, electric vehicles will dominate the roads and renewables will provide energy to homes. But for the green transition t...
Babbage: Trailer
Babbage is our weekly podcast on science and technology, named after Charles Babbage—a 19th-century polymath and grandfather of computing. H...