I’ve been doing a computer science PhD and I have a particular interest in AI. Over the last few years I’ve tried quite a lot of different podcasts to keep up to date with relevant developments and discussions. This is a personally curated list (that I’ll aim to keep updated) of the podcasts that have worked for my interests, taste, and focus.
Something I’ve observed whilst compiling this list is that my favourite podcasts tend to be created by journalists rather than computer scientists working at the coal face. I think this is because I have other sources for my technical knowledge (documentation/books/Stack Overflow/GitHub/blog posts/etc.) and what I look for in a podcast is a broader understanding of the field and how it’s being applied in the outside world.
Hard Fork
When I first wrote this post, this podcast was hot off the press, and is now a firm favourite. From The New York Times, it takes the form of hour-long discussions on the latest in tech between hosts Kevin Roose and Casey Newton. Notably, this is currently the only conversational podcast on my list. With other conversational podcasts my attention has tended to drift: sometimes due to the length, sometimes due to the lack of variety, sometimes due to a lower production quality. But all the episodes of Hard Fork have held my attention. The segmented discussions are enthusiastic and focused, and have been neatly interspersed with guest interviews. The podcast covers topics ranging from social media to cryptocurrency to AI to streaming platforms.
In Machines We Trust
This was a podcast “about the automation of everything”. I managed to catch it at its inception in 2020, and was a fan until it ended in 2023. In episodes that were generally around 20 minutes long, host Jennifer Strong and a team from MIT Technology Review explored the implications of handing decision-making over to machines. They covered topics such as facial recognition, autonomous vehicles, surveillance, and automated hiring practices. The episodes were well-edited pieces incorporating interviews, investigations, summaries, etc., and the production quality was very high. It’s a shame that it’s finished, as I felt the podcast had a lot more life in it. The team now produce a podcast called Shift about the effect of automation on our lives – but when I tried the first few episodes I didn’t think the quality was as high.
The Digital Human
This is a programme from Radio 4 which has been on air for over 10 years. One of the problems I have with discovering new podcasts is that I’m put off by a massive backlog (the completionist in me gets very anxious seeing that hovering label that indicates that there are “99+” unheard episodes!), so it is an indication of the high calibre of this series that I was willing to tolerate the backlog, and indeed have now worked my way through it. In this podcast, host Aleks Krotoski explores what it means to be human in an increasingly digital world. It is an enormous scope. Each 30-minute episode takes a one-word theme (recent examples include “disinhibition”, “power” and “solitary”), which is investigated through interviews and examples. What I find particularly impressive is the lateral thinking: the themes allow links to be made between seemingly unlikely things. It is quite beautifully written, and I am gratified to find (another) excellent technology podcast being fronted by a female presenter.
This podcast seems to be on hiatus at the moment, with the focus being on its spin-off The Artificial Human instead, a podcast specifically about AI. You would have thought that this would be right up my street – but I don’t think the format is as good!
DeepMind: The Podcast
DeepMind is the AI research laboratory behind AlphaGo (a program which beat a world champion Go player) and AlphaFold (a program which effectively solved the problem of protein folding). In this podcast series, Hannah Fry gives us a glimpse into the inner workings of this world-leading laboratory. As we would expect from Hannah Fry (mathematician and presenter of various BBC programmes), all of the complicated concepts of AI are clearly and engagingly communicated. This is another high-quality series, populated with interesting conversations with DeepMind researchers. It’s important to understand that this podcast is naturally going to be biased in favour of DeepMind and AI generally, but they still haven’t shied away from some of the trickier conversations. All seasons so far have included interviews with founder Demis Hassabis, who always speaks well on the potentials of AI.
Bonus: The Missing Crypto Queen and The Dropout
These aren’t really tech podcasts, but they’re tangentially related and brilliant! In The Missing Crypto Queen, BBC reporter Jamie Bartlett explores the (still unresolved) disappearance of Dr Ruja Ignatova in 2017. Dr Ruja had founded a cryptocurrency called OneCoin which attracted billions in investment, but after her disappearance it transpired that it was a Ponzi scheme. She now faces fraud and money-laundering charges, and is on the FBI’s top 10 most wanted list. It’s a fascinating mystery with all sorts of twists and turns in the investigation. In The Dropout (now also a great TV series starring Amanda Seyfried), Rebecca Jarvis investigates the story of Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford University dropout who founded Theranos, a company which claimed for years that it could use a single drop of blood to conduct a broad range of medical tests. Elizabeth Holmes has since been found guilty of defrauding investors, and has been handed an 11-year prison sentence. These podcasts both reveal the darker side of tech: how ambitious start-ups can prey on people’s hopes and fears.
Cryptic Meg 