The Ars Technicast
Ars TechnicaThe Ars Technicast
The Ars Technicast is the official podcast from Ars Technica, where we bring you you the latest in the worlds of computing, technology, science, and everything else in between. Ars publishes original news and reviews, analysis of tech trends, and expert advice on the most fundamental aspects of tech and the many ways it's helping us enjoy our world.
© 2020 Condé Nast. All rights reserved.
The Ars Technicast is the official podcast from Ars Technica, where we bring you you the latest in the worlds of computing, technology, science, and everything else in between. Ars publishes original news and reviews, analysis of tech trends, and expert advice on the most fundamental aspects of tech and the many ways it's helping us enjoy our world.
© 2020 Condé Nast. All rights reserved.
We open today’s conversation talking about bioterrorism. Because that’s not uplifting enough, we then move on the dangers a super AI could present in certain worst-case scenarios. The final part of the podcast is a conversation between me and...
Ars Technicast Special Edition: The Role of Open Systems in Connecting The Joint Force
Ars Technicast Special Edition: The Internet of Military Things
Join Ars Technica editors Sean Gallagher and Lee Hutchinson in this special AI-focused edition of the Ars Technicast, produced in cooperation with Darktrace. In this last of three episodes, we talk with ForAllSecure CEO David Brumley (who is also a...
Join Ars Technica editors Sean Gallagher and Lee Hutchinson in this special AI-focused edition of the Ars Technicast, produced in cooperation with Darktrace. In this second of three episodes, we talk with Carnegie Mellon Director for the Center of...
Join Ars Technica editors Sean Gallagher and Lee Hutchinson in this special AI-focused edition of the Ars Technicast, produced in cooperation with Darktrace. In this first of three episodes, we talk with NTT's Senior Director of Global Advanced...
Today we’re presenting the fourth and final installment of my conversation with Naval Ravikant about existential risks. The theme of today’s installment: there’s hope. Yes, really! If there’s one thing that any religious, national or...
Today we’re presenting the third installment of my conversation with Naval Ravikant about existential risks. In this segment, Naval and I move on from yesterday’s topic of AI risk to the dangers inherent in the rise of synthetic biology, or...
Today we’re presenting the second installment of my conversation with Naval Ravikant about existential risks. Today, we focus on that time-honored Hollywood staple—super AI risk.
This week’s guest is Naval Ravikant. Naval is a renowned angel investor and entrepreneur. But our topic this week is something quite a bit darker than entrepreneurial finance. Specifically, it’s existential risk. This refers to a set of...
Today we present the third and final installment of my interview with Sarah Parcak, a prominent founding figuring the emerging field of astroarchaeology. Most of today’s installment concerns a crowd-enabled detection project Sarah created with...
Today we’re presenting the second installment of my interview with Sarah Parcak, a prominent founding figuring the emerging field of astroarchaeology. Sarah’s team may just have pinpointed a long-lost (and eagerly-sought) pharaonic capital....
This week my guest is Sarah Parcak, a co-founder of the emerging field of astroarchaeology, which enlists satellite imagery to identify ancient, undiscovered sites on our home planet. Sarah’s work in this field won her the 2016 TED prize—which...
Today we present the third and final installment of my interview with Chris Anderson. Today’s episode starts in the greener pastures that Chris’s startup, 3DR, found after Chinese behemoth DJI annihilated its drone manufacturing business. 3DR...
Today we’re presenting the second installment of my wide-ranging interview with Chris Anderson. He was Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief for twelve years, and then started one of the most influential companies in the brief history of consumer...
Our guest is Chris Anderson, who was the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine for twelve years—until he did something quite unusual for an editor and started a high-profile, venture-backed startup, 3D Robotics. Chris Anderson doesn’t have the...
Today, we start off discussing Sam’s first bestselling book, The End of Faith. It was inspired by September 11th attacks. Having recently spent ten years on his own self-styled spiritual journey, “I immediately recognized the spiritual intensity...
In today’s installment, we discuss some of the experiences that shaped Sam's perspectives. As a freshman at Stanford (where he and I happened to overlap as undergraduates), he recalls being irked by the special treatment he felt the Bible received...
This week my guest is Sam Harris: a neuroscientist turned bestselling author turned podcasting colossus. Sam has described his job as “thinking in public.” The uniqueness of Sam’s perspective is evidenced by his ability to trigger...
The main topic today is consciousness. Adam has his own rather eclectic take on this mysterious force and presence. The final chunk of the podcast is a conversation between me and podcasting superstar Tom Merritt. In it, Tom and I discuss my...
Adam and I open today’s installment discussing techniques that mad scientists like him can use thwack the brain (legally, and safely, of course), so as to increase its neuroplasticity. We then talk about the limits of medical imaging—and the...
This week, we’re serializing another episode of the After On Podcast here on Ars. Our guest is UCSF neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, who runs one of the largest academic neuroscience labs on the West Coast and researches tuning videogames to combat...
UC Irvine quantitative psychologist Don Hoffman presents his wildly counterintuitive theory on the nature of reality. We kick off today talking about what’s widely referred to as "the hard problem of consciousness." Don takes a highly...
Don and I open this episode by discussing his take on space-time. He refutes that the notion that space itself existed at all before consciousness. Don essentially believes that if you’re alone in a room and look at a chair, that chair ceases...
Today’s guest is UC Irvine quantitative psychologist Don Hoffman. Don has spent the last few decades honing an extraordinary theory about the nature of reality. In today’s installment, he lays the foundation of this wildly contrarian worldview. An...
In today’s installment, Tim rejects the fashionable forecast that automation will eradicate all human jobs next week. Being closer than most of us to Jeff Bezos, he knows a thing or three about operations at Amazon, which presents a fascinating...
Tim and I start off today talking about "The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog," which he published in 1992. And yup—that’s a two at the end of that number. Jumping forward many years, Tim tells us about convening a small summit of...
Our guest is tech’s preeminent publisher and top prognosticator Tim O’Reilly. O’Reilly Media has published a huge share of our world’s top books for as long as I’ve been around – even as it led the charge with ebooks, digital...
Today, we build on the amazing results Google attained with its experimental eye scan study, and consider the unlikely things that might one day be meaningful early-warning markers for health problems. We close by talking about the Cancer X...
Our guest is pediatric oncologist and medical futurist Daniel Kraft. We begin today discussing Daniel’s background and Singularity University itself. We then delve into the world of advanced quantified-self devices, and how they’re finally...
Today we open with an heartening story about an infant who went through one of Robert’s studies, and may have picked up fifteen IQ points as a direct result (this is neither a metaphor nor an exaggeration)! We then talk about the vast potential of...
Today we present the second installment of my interview with medical geneticist Robert Green, about the promise and pitfalls that could lie in reading out your full genome. In this installment, we discuss why some medical researchers view...
My guest this week is a medical geneticist Robert Green, and our topic is the promise and peril that could come from reading your full genome. Whole-genome sequencing will soon become a mass phenomenon, because it will be better to know something...
Today we present the third and final installment of my interview British astronomer Stephen Webb on the subject of Fermi’s paradox. we open by talking about some of the amazing instruments and projects that are coming online in the coming...
Today we present the second installment of my interview British astronomer Stephen Webb on the subject of Fermi’s paradox. We open by talking about the second large category of possible solutions to the paradox. This is that intelligent aliens...
This week we ponder Fermi's Paradox with British astronomer Stephen Webb. This is the question of why can’t we detect any signs of intelligent alien life when we look to the skies. No signs of astro-engineering projects. No signatures of...
Today we open by talking about some astounding work of UC Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant—in which he trained an AI system to infer what test subjects were viewing on a video screen just by watching their brains light up on an MRI. We then...
This week my guest is a holographer, a one-time academic, a former CTO of Oculus, and a present-day entrepreneur named Mary Lou Jepsen. We open today’s installment discussing the roots of Mary Lou’s new company. Like so many things, it all...
We start today’s installment with the very cliffhanger sentence yesterday’s installment ended with: Rodney saying “Yeah, let’s talk about deep learning.” This leads to an argument similar to yesterday’s point about self-driving cars,...
We start with the new robotic era that dawned when Rethink Robotics launched its Baxter robot. Baxter and its successor, Sawyer, shifted the industry. We then consider the ancient legacy equipment and standards that still plague so much factory...
Today’s segment introduces guest Rodney Brooke and includes a discussion of the rigid segregation between human workers and robots that reigned in almost all factories until recently. Brooks started his latest company to disrupt this status quo. Its...
We start today’s installment by discussing an audacious project to resurrect the wooly mammoth—or at least certain of its genes, which allowed it to thrive in frigid regions. From mammoths, George and I turn to the topic of synthetic meats,...
We begin today’s installment with a discussion of the strengths and shortcomings of the CRISPR gene-editing technique, which George co-invented. Though CRISPR is a great improvement on the nine techniques that preceded it, it isn’t the be-all, and...
In today’s installment, genomicist George Church talks about his disappointment with the Human Genome Project, which believes suffered from a dismaying lack of audacity. He argues that his field’s true golden age began right after the Genome...
Right now the U.S. tech economy is booming, but what will be the long-term effects of automation and AI? Are robots about to steal our jobs? Will Facebook throw the next election? Is social democracy doomed to be a casualty of the tech revolution? To...
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions with Ars Technica about tech, science and culture.
Live discussions about tech, science and culture.
Ars Technica is debuting a weekly TV podcast for our favorite summer show
This year saw an event that only happens every six or seven years, on average: two major gaming consoles released at just about the same time. The , and the launches on Friday. Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been losing many sleep...
Now that we’re closing in on the last few months of the year, movie season ramps up again as Hollywood releases some of its biggest films to close out the year. Just before Halloween, Cesar caught a screening of the Carrie re-boot by director...
In this week’s episode, we take a couple of steps back from the announcement by Apple to look at current pricing strategies and models for some of the giants in computing. Co-hosts Social Editor and Ars Associate...
Spoiler Alert: In this episode, we go into detail about some key plot points from the film Gravity. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’ve been forewarned.
Senior Reviews Editor still hasn’t seen the full film Gravity. Social Editor ...
In this episode, Gaming Editor Kyle visited the show to talk about the this week. It’s big news, because a SteamOS could mean that gamers could have more choices when it comes to playing Steam beyond their gaming rigs. It looks like...
On Tuesday Apple announced two new versions of its iPhone line: (a sleeker revamp of features in the current iPhone 5) and the higher-end iPhone 5s, which includes a . Apple also announced September 18th as the . In this episode, Senior Products...
In this episode Ars Tech Policy Editor joins hosts Social Editor and Ars Writer to talk about Ars Technica’s coverage of NSA and leaker , who is at the center of much of the media coverage. Most recently, Ladar Levinson, the owner of...
Earlier this week, Google’s breakfast event, the tech giant announced several new products and services, including Chromecast, a competitor to Apple TV, as well as the refreshed Nexus 7 tablet, which supersedes its predescessor on several...
In this episode we talk about NASA in light of next week’s 44th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. We are excited to welcome special guest Amy Shira Teitel, who specializes in writing about the history of NASA. According to Amy, the...
In this episode of the Technicast, we set out to take a look back at the announcements we covered at E3 last week. Gaming Editor Kyle Orland and Senior Products Specialist Andrew Cunningham were on site at the event, and they joined me and co-host...
While the Internet’s saturating itself like a wet sponge with rumors about what Apple has in store for iOS at the World Wide Developers conference, the Ars Technicast is staying dry and packing its bags to cover the conference next week. As we...
In this episode we debate the issue of 3D printers and the patterns and designs available to make handgun components. We shed some light on the previous coverage we have written here at Ars Technica on the subject, and we talk about how difficult or...
Ars Technicast, Episode 26–Summer movie season is here: Engage!
Nowadays, when a big story breaks, one of the first places that people go to for information are social sites. Reactions on social media have become part of the headlines themselves, as social networks like Facebook and Twitter are used to both...
Facebook announced Facebook Home last week, and they want users to get really cozy. So cozy that your friends' news feed updates will take over the screen of the phone, putting Facebook interactions and messaging at the forefront of the OS. Will this...
Over the years, some of us have left behind online services. In some cases, we closed out the account, and in others, it languished in the graveyard of the Internet. Today, we talk about the ghosts they left behind. Some of the services we talk about...
Most computer and gadget owners have lived through the nightmares of failed hard drives, fried circuits, cracked screens and other horror tales. Here at the Ars Technicast, we have had our own shares of tech mishapss. On this episode, Senior Apple...
Sure, a little bit of mystery is not a bad thing. Mystery helps us feel a bit of anticipation, and in the case of Sony, they are teasing us with the PlayStation 4, the follow-up to the Playstation 3. It’s been seven years since the release of...
Automation has long been relegated to the nerd realm and the home tinkerer. Back in 2008 we reviewed automated thermostats like the , and the Ars OpenForum also it. Fast forward to 2013, and now general consumers can now also enjoy a lot of...
According to our gaming editor , video games are in a real transition point. Nintendo just released the , its next generation console, but many of us are speculating about what’s to come from other major players like Sony and Microsoft....
CES 2013, of a consumer electronic show, concluded last week, and the Ars Technica crew was there to cover it. But now that it’s over, we took some time to think about what makes this giant trade show useful, and the ways in which it has...
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey finally arrived a week ago. For fans of J.R.R. Tolkien, the new film could be the best adaptation ever—or perhaps a movie that has lost the tone of the source material. In this episode of the Ars...
This week we discuss PC vs. console gaming, Which platform holds the crown?
Gaming Editor Kyle Orland and Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson talk about their dedication to each platform. Thouygh gamers cans sometimes live squarely on one side of the PC...
Why is it that so many people have not read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species? This seminal work of science and literature has been one of the most influential and hotly debated works of the modern age, and yet, not everyone has read it. In...
This week, Microsoft Editor Peter Bright shares his honest opinions on what the Microsoft Surface lacks, and why. There’s niggling small details that don’t make the cut, and there’s some big problems with it as well. But...
This week in the Ars Technicast we talk about the , which Apple announced earlier this week, along with an . Senior Apple Editor , who the event, shared her first-hand impressions with Apple's new tablet, and we discuss the merit of a smaller screen...
In this episode of the Ars Technicast we talk about the fine art of the scam. Recently, Deputy Editor and Ars Senior Writer wrote about the ways in which Internet scammers have taken to use the telephone to solicit users to allow them Nate to one...
Muua-ha-ha-ha!
What makes for an amazing and iconic video game villain? Is it looks, evil laughter, or a singularly creepy name? Following the success of our previous podcast episode, “Our most memorable video game characters,” we are...
Video game characters have been with us for decades, and many have evolved into household names. That list of characters includes Pac-Man, Mario, Samus, Sonic the Heddgehog, and many more. But what does is take to create a memorable character? In the...
Though not all of us Ars Technica editors were introduced to the Internet at the same time, there’s no doubt that it has an effect on our social interactions everyday. In fact, some our social interaction is dependent on having at least a...
The enticing promise of cloud computing is one plays on our human desire for convenience. Your data, which can include photos, music, health records –– in essence, your digital life –– is hosted in the cloud, synced to...
A desk is more than just a place to sit and work. For many of us, it’s a whole way of life. On this episode of the Ars Technicast, we share details about our own desk setups. We discuss ergonomics, elevatable desks, minimalism and even DIY...
In this week’s episode we get up close and personal with music. Ryan and Jacqui trade stories about using digital upright pianos and evaluate the quality of their sound. We also discuss iPad apps used for music making and performance. Not all of...
This week we’re dedicating our show to retro gaming. As we discussed the games of our youth, we discovered that we’re still in love with many of those early games. Gaming editor joins Senior Apple Editor , Open Source Editor , Social...
This week we devote the show to science fiction, and in particular Ridley Scott’s new film Prometheus. Warning: This show is extremely spoiler heavy, so if you don’t want to know details about the film, wait until you see it first, since...
This week we are dedicating our show to summer travel and gadgets. What kind of gadgets do you bring when you travel for work, and which ones do you bring when you're on vacation? Host and Senior Apple Editor is joined in this epsiode...
The Ars Technicast Episode 2 | Internet: Huh, yeah, what is it good for?
Original news and reviews, analysis of tech trends, and expert advice on the most fundamental aspects of tech and the many ways it's helping us enjoy our world.
Ars Technicast Experimental #10.4: Rob Reid and Sam Harris, 4 of 4
October 19, 201830min 53sec
We open today’s conversation talking about bioterrorism. Because that’s not uplifting enough, we then move on the dangers a super AI could present in certain worst-case scenarios. The final part of the podcast is a conversation between me and podcasting superstar Tom Merritt. In it, Tom and I discuss my interview with Sam—as well as a chunk of the novel After On.