Babbage from The Economist

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America from France in 1831 he saw a new kind of society. Not just a country, but an idea that would change the world. His book “Democracy in America” was a big influence on later generations of writers and thinkers, including The Economist ’s US Editor John Prideaux. Now, 250 years after its birth, the vitality of that democracy is under question. In this series...

Where did the world’s most devastating weapon come from? In a four-part series, we go behind the scenes at America's nuclear laboratories to understand how a scientific-mystery story about the ingredients of matter led to a world-changing (and second-world-war -ending) bomb less than five decades later.  Nuclear weapons have been central to geopolitical power ever since. Now America is seekin...

Artificial intelligence is already making its mark in health care —but new, bigger, models promise to improve how patients access services, help doctors spot diseases faster and transform how medical research is done. In the first of two episodes on the potential of AI in health care , we ask: how will patients benefit from the technology behind ChatGPT ?  Host: Alok Jha, The Economist ’s sci...

Ever since there have been smartphones and social media, there have been concerns about how they might be affecting children. Over the past decade, doctors have seen a decline in mental health in the young in much of the rich world. But whether that rise can be attributed to technology is still a matter of fierce debate. Nevertheless, demands are growing to proactively restrict teenagers’ access t...

What is intelligence? In the middle of the 20th century, the inner workings of the human brain inspired computer scientists to build the first “thinking machines”. But how does human intelligence actually relate to the artificial kind? This is the first episode in a four-part series on the evolution of modern generative AI. What were the scientific and technological developments that took the very...

Dark matter is thought to make up around a quarter of the universe, but so far it has eluded detection by all scientific instruments. Scientists know it must exist because of the ways galaxies move and it also explains the large-scale structure of the modern universe. But no-one knows what dark matter actually is . Scientists have been hunting for dark matter particles for decades, but have so far...

OpenAI and Microsoft are leaders in generative artificial intelligence (AI). OpenAI has built GPT-4, one of the world’s most sophisticated large language models (LLMs) and Microsoft is injecting those algorithms into its products, from Word to Windows.  At the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Zanny Minton Beddoes, The Economist ’s editor-in-chief, interviewed Sam Altman and Satya Nade...

Books are the original medium for communicating science to the masses. In a holiday special, producer Kunal Patel asks Babbage’s family of correspondents about the books that have inspired them in their careers as science journalists. Host: Alok Jha, The Economist ’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Rachel Dobbs, The Economist ’s climate correspondent; Kenneth Cukier, our deputy execut...

A year ago, the public launch of ChatGPT took the world by storm and it was followed by many more generative artificial intelligence tools, all with remarkable, human-like abilities. Fears over the existential risks posed by AI have dominated the global conversation around the technology ever since. Fei-Fei Li, a pioneer that helped lay the groundwork that underpins modern generative AI models, ta...

In the coming decades, electric vehicles will dominate the roads and renewables will provide energy to homes. But for the green transition to be successful, unprecedented amounts of energy storage is needed. Batteries will be used everywhere—from powering electric vehicles, to providing electricity when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. The current generation of batteries are lacking...

Babbage is our weekly podcast on science and technology, named after Charles Babbage—a 19th-century polymath and grandfather of computing. Host Alok Jha talks to our correspondents about the innovations, discoveries and gadgetry shaping the world. Published every Wednesday. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.