Life, Automated explores the surreal, exciting, and occasionally terrifying ways AI and automation are reshaping our daily lives.

Through thoughtful conversations with researchers, practitioners, artists, and more, we do our best to make sense of how technology is changing—and how it is changing us.

We ask: What does the economy look like if AI can do much of what humans can? Will AI tools isolate us further, or steer us back toward community and common ground? Can the average person expect to be better off a decade from now? And what the heck should we tell a sixteen year old who wants to know whether learning German (or design, or coding, or the piano) is still worth it?

Life, Automated is grounded and non-ideological, going deep without getting too technical. Because you shouldn’t need to be an “AI person” to understand the future we’re collectively building.

The show is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, distributed by KQED. You can reach us at lifeautomatedpod@gmail.com.