Invisible Machines podcast by UX Magazine

Product design sage Tim Wood returns to the podcast for a conversation about the deepening integrations between experience design and AI, including a dissection of the trending term “vibe coding.” Currently a design lead at Meta, Tim has hands-on experience leading AI-first design and this episode explores what that means on a tactical level. Having been the Principal Product Designer for AI Platf...

What is the explosion of AI solutions in the marketplace doing to pillars of experience design? On this Ask Us Anything episode of Invisible Machines, Robb and Josh respond to a question from Dr. Irina Wagner,  listener who works as a generative AI UX researcher at a massive US healthcare company. The answer to her question has connections to Robb’s time working in the sound department at War...

As NASA’s longest-running Chief Administrator, Dan Goldin ushered in an era of “faster, better, cheaper” that prioritized safety while pushing the organization forward. He joins Robb and Josh to discuss his approach to innovation and kick some holes in fallacies like the iron triangle, which he calls “horsepuckey.” Goldin was at the helm of major projects, including a redesign of the International...

Did the US Copyright office just declare that AI is the artist, not the tool? Does their new report raise more questions than it answers? Robb and Josh welcome back Ed Klaris, Managing Partner at Klaris Law and Columbia Law professor, for part two of their discussion on the office’s ongoing Copyright and Artificial Intelligence report, focusing on copyrightability. Klaris returns with critical ins...

Blaise Agüera y Arcas, author and CTO of Technology & Society at Google, returns to the podcast to talk about his new work, What is Life? . This limited-edition, pocket-sized book is the first part of a larger print project with MIT Press and Antikythera titled What Is Intelligence? . What is Life? draws fascinating parallels between the life-building chemical reactions taking place in natural...

Anna Lembke, MD, author of the New York Times bestseller Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence , joins Robb and Josh for a discussion about the perils and promise of AI. As a psychiatrist and Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University, Dr. Lembke shares critical insights into the power and nature of behavioral addiction, and how techno...

Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The free energy principle describes systems that pursue paths of least surprise, minimizing the difference between predictions based on their model of the world and their sense and associated perception.  Dr. Thomas Parr is a practicing cli...

Despite being a massive piece of the bigger AI puzzle, computer vision doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. Robb and Josh welcome Dr. Jason Corso, Professor of Robotics at University of Michigan for an In Action episode that explores the complexity and power of machines that can see.  Jason is the Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer of Voxel51, which is backed by Bessemer Venture...

What’s it like to build an AI agent? Daniel Lametti, Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics at Acadia University, Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, and Senior Academic Advisor to OneReach.ai, returns to Invisible Machines to demonstrate how easy it can be to create and iterate on AI agents. Like other In Action episodes, you’ll watch as we walk through the practical realities of build...

Robb and Josh are joined by Ed Klaris, Managing Partner at Klaris Law, Columbia Law professor, and CEO of KlarisIP, for a conversation about the fate of generative tools like LLMs and AI models that produce audio and video. From Ed’s viewpoint, giant tech companies used stolen content to train the powerful AI models that have quickly changed the world around us. The trio discuss the question of wh...

Jieun Kiaer is the Professor of Korean Linguistics at Oxford and her new book, The Future of Syntax: Asian Perspectives in an AI Age, explores the complexity within Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, arriving at insights that veer away from traditional approaches to formal syntax. The book also revisits Marc Prensky’s “digital native” concept, laying the groundwork for a new generation of te...

Marc Prensky is widely known for coining the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant”—both now in the Oxford English Dictionary. In this episode, Marc joins Josh for a conversation about the shortcomings of our current education system and how AI might help inspire and enable a new generation of "AI natives" to design their own future. The two discuss the challenges that companies face in ad...

With consumer use of AI technology outpacing enterprise adoption, the fear of companies using AI to get rid of employees has been flipped on its head into legitimate threat to the existence of companies as we know them. There’s nothing preventing consumers from using generative tools to disrupt large companies—for example, using a fleet of AI agents to flood and debilitate a call center to take ad...

Digital twins are critical to the orchestration of AI agents, providing the context they need to create meaningful experiences quickly and efficiently. Robb and Josh welcome Dr. Michael Grieves for a conversation about the origins of the concept, which he developed while working with NASA in the 2010s. The architecture required for orchestrating AI agents relies on different types of digital twins...

As AI agents continue to alter the way people interface with technology, Robb and Josh were eager to speak with journalist Matt Alston about his popular Business Insider article “Everyone hates Workday.” In this deep exploration of our multifaceted interactions with machines, Matt reminds us that Workday’s UX is different across a whole spectrum of users, and that generally speaking, people don’t...

As AI agents continue to remake the way we communicate with machines, what will become of SaaS companies? In this episode, Robb and Josh are joined by Janelle Teng, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners’ San Francisco office, who recently noted that “2024 has not been kind to SaaS companies” on her Next Big Teng blog. A Stanford scientist and former product manager at Salesforce, Janelle exp...

Sophie Bushwick is a regular contributor to Science Friday on NPR and has previously worked for Scientific American and Popular Science. As the Senior News Editor at New Scientist, she joined Robb and Josh in exploring anthropomorphism and AI. Sophie’s work reminds us that our introduction to pocket computers came with the heavily anthropomorphized Tamagotchi pets of the late '90s. As we head into...

Micro UIs are powerful interfaces built on-the-fly by. We've talked about micro UIs a lot on this podcast, as they are a critical component of AI agents, adding graphical functionalities to an automated conversational experience. Micro UIs let AI agents show users interactive elements—like maps, secure payment interfaces, dynamic graphs, and explainer videos—rather than just describing them. In th...

There are many lenses through which we can view the world, and that's especially true when considering the technologies associated with artificial intelligence. In this episode, James Bridle, author of Ways of Being, joins to explore a multitude of perspectives relating to our ongoing relationship with technology. James’ book explores the interplay between animals, plants, and machines in the sear...

We're rounding out our deep dive on organizational AGI with Aaron De Smet, a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company who helped identify "The keys to organizational agility" with colleagues back in 2015. As we discussed in our first episode on organizational AGI, agility is a key component to making the journey feasible. Aaron has been exploring organizational AGI for years and connects the dots betw...

We're entering an age when software will be written on-the-fly, by machines, to meet individual needs—an era of ephemeral applications. This will have a massive impact on the emergence of artificial general intelligence (also called AGI or singularity) and Ben Goertzel returns for a lively discussion about the scope of this dawning era. Ben helped to popularize the term singularity and, as the fou...

How do AI agents fit into a strategy for increasing a business' longevity? Imagine having a conversational operating system for your organization that was always learning. The advanced orchestration of AI agents can create a broader technology ecosystem that sets a trajectory for organizational AGI. Whereas artificial general intelligence, or AGI, refers to a system of artificial intelligence that...

In April, our co-host Robb Wilson was asked to join Jess Larsen on the Innovation & Leadership podcast to discuss AI agents and taking an agentic approach to workflow automation at an organizational level. As AI agents take center stage, we're reposting this conversation here to spread the word on the pitfalls orgs can avoid—and the best practices they can follow. Robb shares his hard-wrought less...

Tanmay Bakshi is a technology wunderkind. He started coding when he was only four years old and his first iOS app was released just five years later, when he was nine. An autodidact and deeply curious technologist, Tanmay works as an AI and application architect for IBM, where he's been involved with ongoing automation efforts with McDonald's. Tanmay joins Robb and Josh for an exploration of anthr...

Journey into the innovative mind of Tom Gruber, co-founder of Siri and Chief AI Strategy Officer of Sherpa.ai. Robb and Josh welcome Tom for an enlightening exploration of humanistic AI—systems that augment and collaborate with humans, rather than replacing or competing with them. Using federated machine learning, Tom is working with Sherpa.ai to train advanced generative models on data in ways th...