Babbage from The Economist (subscriber edition)

A highlight from The Economist in 2023 read aloud. In science, no model is perfect—but that doesn’t stop them being useful. Artificial brains are helping scientists study the real thing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is edging closer to doing things that are recognised as human intelligence. Daniel Dennett, a celebrated philosopher who has spent decades considering what makes a mind, is concerned about giving AI too much autonomy, and about what he calls “counterfeit people”—how will real humans deal with an influx of the fake kind?The latest of Daniel Dennett’s many books is “I’ve Been Thinking”, a memoir offering advice on how to be a good thinker. He is Professor Emeritus at Tufts University.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

Books are the original medium for communicating science to the masses. In a holiday special, producer Kunal Patel asks Babbage’s family of correspondents about the books that have inspired them in their careers as science journalists.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Rachel Dobbs, The Economist’s climate correspondent; Kenneth Cukier, our deputy executive editor; The Economist’s Emilie Steinmark; Geoff Carr, our senior editor for science and technology; and Abby Bertics, The Economist’s science correspondent. Reading list: “The Periodic Table” by Primo Levi; “When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamín Labatut; “A Theory of Everyone” by Michael Muthukrishna; “Madame Curie” by Ève Curie; “Sociobiology” by E. O. Wilson; “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins; “Why Fish Don't Exist” by Lulu Miller; and “How Far the Light Reaches” by Sabrina Imbler.Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

An article from The Economist read aloud. The excitement of 70,000 Swifties can shake the Earth, as recorded by the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

The kind of emissions reductions promised in this week’s sweeping COP28 agreement will not suffice to meet the most ambitious climate goals. So other plans to slow the warming are coming to the fore. Solar geoengineering—modifying the amount of Earth’s incoming sunlight—is a once-fringe idea that is at last being taken seriously. It is a strategy with considerable promise, and considerable potential risks. Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Rachel Dobbs, The Economist’s climate correspondent; Oliver Morton, a senior editor at The Economist; Douglas MacMartin, a geoengineering researcher at Cornell University; and Shuchi Talati, who leads the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering. Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

COP28 is underway in Dubai, and delegates are negotiating policies to slow the rise of global temperatures. While reducing CO2 emissions is the main focus, another, more potent, greenhouse gas—which leaks from cows' bellies, rice fields and oil and gas fields—has mostly been ignored. But this week, a long-awaited deal on methane was reached at the conference. Will it do enough to get emissions of the gas under control?Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Vijay Vaitheeswaran, The Economist’s global energy and climate innovation editor; Bryony Worthington, a climate campaigner; Claus Zehner, a mission manager at the European Space AgencySign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

An article from The Economist read aloud. Google DeepMind has once again demonstrated how AI is transforming scientific discovery. We report that over two million materials unknown to science have been found

As the COP28 climate summit kicks off, countries will be assessing and renewing their efforts to cut carbon emissions. But to meet the goal of keeping warming well below 2°C, as set out at the Paris agreement eight years ago, carbon dioxide will also need to be removed from the atmosphere at an unprecedented scale. How can carbon capture technologies be made attractive and cost-effective, so that people will scale them up in the future? Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Oliver Morton, a senior editor at The Economist; Rachel Dobbs, our climate correspondent; Colin Hale, a chemical engineer at Imperial College London; Gavin Jackson, The Economist’s economics and finance correspondent.Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

A year ago, the public launch of ChatGPT took the world by storm and it was followed by many more generative artificial intelligence tools, all with remarkable, human-like abilities. Fears over the existential risks posed by AI have dominated the global conversation around the technology ever since. Fei-Fei Li, a pioneer that helped lay the groundwork that underpins modern generative AI models, takes a more nuanced approach. She’s pushing for a human-centred way of dealing with AI—treating it as a tool to help enhance—and not replace—humanity, while focussing on the pressing challenges of disinformation, bias and job disruption.Fei-Fei Li is the founding co-director of Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence. Fei-Fei and her research group created ImageNet, a huge database of images that enabled computers scientists to build algorithms that were able to see and recognise objects in the real world. That endeavour also introduced the world to deep learning, a type of machine learning that is fundamental part of how large-language and image-creation models work.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

An article from The Economist read aloud. Scientific innovation has been waning in recent years. To combat this, we argue that it’s time to experiment with how science is funded.