461. How to Stop Worrying and Love the Robot ...

A ruthless (and ruthlessly efficient) industry is using digital tools to supercharge one of the world’s oldest behaviors. We look at how the industry works, and ask the scam-fighters what they’re doing about it. SOURCES: Kati Daffan, former assistant director at the Federal Trade ...  Show more

Economists don’t usually talk about “culture.” But Joel Mokyr argues that it’s the engine of innovation — and the Nobel Prize committee agreed. Stephen Dubner sits down for a thousand-year conversation (including advice!) with the new Nobel laureate. SOURCES: Joel Mokyr, economic ...  Show more

When a robot goes bad, who is responsible? It’s not always clear if the user or the manufacturer is liable when a robot leaves the lot. Human behavior can be complex—and often contradictory. Asking machines to interpret that behavior is quite the task. Will it one day be possible ...  Show more

In recent years Amazon has quietly become one of the leaders in automation, reshaping its workforce of nearly 600,000 workers, and the way humans work with robots. We fear robots taking over the world, but do we understand just how we as consumers are making that future happen? L ...  Show more

Robots threaten the human workforce, but their ubiquity and growing competence make them crucial to the modern economy. In 1961 General Motors installed the first Unimate at one of its plants. It was a one-armed robot resembling a small tank that was used for tasks like welding. ...  Show more

Will we see robots that look, feel, and communicate in such lifelike ways that we won’t be able to tell them apart from other humans in our lifetime? When did the artificial intelligence movement begin? Is our progress with artificial intelligence leading to an inevitable, Sky ...