PHILADELPHIA, PA — April 25, 2023 — Aventine Research Institute and Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios today announced the launch of a new eight-part audio series, “Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus,” hosted by leading AI expert, cognitive scientist, 2023 TED speaker, and best-selling author, Gary Marcus. The series will serve as the fourth season of “The World as You’ll Know It,” demystifying AI’s past, present and future and bringing to life some of the technology’s most significant breakthroughs and failures. The documentary and narrative-style podcast will debut on Tuesday, April 25, and is available on the Audacy app and wherever fans get their podcasts. Follow the series HERE. 

Through powerful stories, interviews, first-person accounts, and Marcus’s own perspective, “Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus” provides a framework for how individuals, governments, and businesses can think about AI, the questions we need to ask about it as a society, and the steps we should take to make AI a benefit that can be broadly shared. 

For all the progress in artificial intelligence over the last 70 years, we still don’t know how to build AI we can trust. Examining the technology behind self-driving cars, medical diagnoses, and language models like ChatGPT, he argues that the potential benefits of AI are too great to be ignored, but so are the risks. The subject may be daunting, but Marcus and the producers of “Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus” designed the series to engage even casual listeners. AI, Marcus argues, is too important to be left to technology companies alone.

“We’re living through a defining moment in the history and innovation of artificial intelligence. While we keep hearing about the promises of AI and machine learning, the truth is it’s currently on the wrong path, and we need to rethink how we create and use it. Having a holistic understanding of AI and what existing and future developments mean for society is imperative,” says host Gary Marcus. “It’s an honor to partner with Audacy and Aventine to create a podcast that provides a better understanding of what we need as a society to make sure that we get to the right place with AI.”

Throughout the series, Marcus is joined by engineers, scientists, philosophers, and journalists working at the forefront of AI to explain what its capabilities can mean for society. Guests include Dr. David Ferrucci, who served as the principal investigator for the IBM Watson/Jeopardy! project; Ken Jennings, Jeopardy! host, author, and former contestant who played against IBM’s Watson; Suchi Saria, CEO & Founder Bayesian Health, Inc. and Endowed Chair & AI Prof, Johns Hopkins; Dr. Isaac Kohane, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School; Cade Metz, technology reporter at The New York Times; Missy Cummings, a pioneering Navy fighter pilot, systems analyst and a critic of the self-driving car industry and Yejin Choi, a MacArthur “genius” fellowship awardee, who has developed computer models that detect biases against underrepresented groups, among others.

The podcast is separated into two parts, with the first four episodes (part one) premiering April 25 with a weekly rollout and the last four episodes (part two) debuting later this summer. The new season marks the latest addition to the podcast series “The World as You’ll Know It,” which looks at how current technological and scientific developments will affect the ways in which we live and work in the future.   

“Humans vs. Machines with Gary Marcus” is a production of Aventine Research Institute and Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios. 

Download the podcast cover art and Gary Marcus’ bio here.