The host of 'Codebreaker' — a podcast about technology from Business Insider and Marketplace — explains what to expect from the new season by Ben Johnson on Dec 5, 2016, 10:33 AM  I swear my phone is listening to me.
When I asked Google Now's product director Aparna Chennapragada about this for season two of our podcast Codebreaker, she assured me that the company's voice assistant software only listens for the wakeup phrase "OK Google," before listening more deeply to what I'm asking. It's also a service you have to opt into--just like Siri, Amazon's Echo or Microsoft's Cortana.
But the other day when I was talking with friends about the late 1990s platformer video game Banjo-Kazooie, I went to my phone and typed in "banjo." It auto-corrected to "banjo-kazooie" without prompt. So the creeping feeling continues. And I continue to Google things despite that feeling.
Codebreaker's mission is to decipher our complicated feelings about technology by asking straightforward questions with a sense of humor, a sense of awe, and a sense of dread. In our first season we asked the question "Is it evil?" This time around, we're asking "Can it save us?" With the help of Business Insider reporters, our second podcast season tackles topics and issues facing the tech industry and the larger world, including cyborgism, voice and face recognition software, virtual reality, and unregulated surveillance.  Because Marketplace and Business Insider are focused on business, tech and the economy, the subtext of Codebreaker is business—but we're also focused on compelling storytelling that is surprising and oftentimes a little bit strange.
We like to describe Codebreaker as radio journalism inspired by "The Twilight Zone." We know that tech is a tool that mirrors and amplifies our own motivations, abilities and failures. By asking "Can it save us?" we're not assuming the answer is a simple yes or no, but that we need a better understanding of modern technology if we plan to save ourselves; save ourselves money, save ourselves time, or something even more important. On our list of eye-and-ear-opening stories this season: How Siri saved a woman's life, how virtual reality might save you in the courtroom, and how a bioethicist wants to save us all by engineering humans to be hobbit-sized and cat-eyed.
As technology gets woven deeper and deeper into our lives it becomes both a problem and potential solution. On Codebreaker our goal is to help us be aware of the pitfalls so we can find a way forward. Come along with us. Listen, decode, and decide. Find episodes here and subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. SEE ALSO: Virtual reality is being used to recreate crime scenes in the courtroom SEE ALSO: More Codebreaker stories
| 
0 comments:
Post a Comment