Human Stories of A.I.

How is AI impacting people’s lives today? In this first installment of “Human Stories of AI,” meet 3 people who regularly text an AI chatbot. One tells the chatbot about her struggles with PTSD and depression; another is a single mom who draws parallels between teaching her chatbot how to respond to her and raising her son; and the third is a widower who texts his chatbot as a way to help him process grief. Replika is a tool that, for various reasons, helps each of them feel less alone.

One of the most common questions about AI today is whether or not it will take over people’s jobs. This episode is about someone grappling with that quandary: He’s a truck driver anxious about whether self-driving trucks will displace jobs in the very near future. For someone who loves what he does, what does it mean for his industry to be on an inexorable march toward technological development if that progress could push his colleagues out of the driver’s seat?

Healthcare is a field that has, in many ways, already embraced AI — medical researchers seem to be developing new AI applications every day. In this episode, we zoom in on one doctor and the stories of two of her cases. Dr. March is a dysmorphologist, a physician who studies birth defects. With two of her recent patients, she was able to use an AI tool called Face2Gene in her diagnostic process, a process that changed her patients’ lives.