Lauren Goode: Our guest this week is Chris Urmson. He was one of the early leaders of Google's self-driving-car project, and he's the current CEO of Aurora, a company that does automated trucking. Chris Urmson (audio clip): I think it's much less a desire about making things autonomous and much more about improving quality of life. Gideon Lichfield: So Lauren, is this your first time? Lauren Goode: Are you asking me if I've been around the block before?

Gideon Lichfield: He's also the author of an upcoming book about how AI and other technologies will take over the world and possibly threaten the very structure of the nation-state. Mustafa Suleyman (audio clip): We're now going to have access to highly capable, persuasive teaching AIs that might help us to carry out whatever, you know, sort of dark intention we have. And it is definitely going to accelerate harms--no question about it. And that's what we have to confront. Lauren Goode: So, Gideon, Mustafa is a guest who we both wanted to bring on the podcast, though I think for slightly different reasons.

ON THIS WEEK'S episode of Have a Nice Future, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode are joined by c, or as she is more widely known, Grimes. Earlier this year, she launched Elf.tech, a website where her fans can use AI to build their own Grimes songs based on her vocals and stems. They talk about why c wants to push the boundaries of AI art and why, despite being a techno-optimist at heart, she's worried about our AI future. Check out the Big Interview with c by Steven Levy in the September issue of WIRED. If you missed our episode with Puja Patel, the editor in chief of Pitchfork, about the new wave of generative AI in music--and AI-generated Drake--you can catch up here.

Lauren Goode: Alright, I'm gonna ask the question that everyone's wondering about: What is a futurist? Gideon Lichfield: Well, I mean, I think some people imagine it's just, you know, a guy who sits around making predictions about the future, and there are probably some people who do just that. But Noah calls himself an applied futurist by which he means that he studies trends--technological, economic, demographic, political, you name it. And then he works within institutions like the government to help them take those trends into account in their decision-making and their policies. So how should they think about the impact of AI, for instance?

Welcome to the premiere of WIRED's new podcast, Have a Nice Future. In this first episode, Gideon Lichfield and Lauren Goode talk to the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, about how she plans to address the city's problems, from homelessness to crime to abandoned downtowns, and how the changes she's proposing could shape not just San Francisco but the cities of the future. Read more about the city WIRED calls home. Our coverage of San Francisco includes stories about self-driving cars, infrastructure, the tech industry, health care, and homelessness. You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, just tap this link, or open the app called Podcasts and search for Have a Nice Future.

Artificial intelligence has become such a big part of our lives, you'd be forgiven for losing count of the algorithms you interact with. But the AI powering your weather forecast, Instagram filter, or favorite Spotify playlist is a far cry from the hyper-intelligent thinking machines industry pioneers have been musing about for decades. Deep learning, the technology driving the current AI boom, can train machines to become masters at all sorts of tasks. But it can only learn only one at a time. And because most AI models train their skillset on thousands or millions of existing examples, they end up replicating patterns within historical data--including the many bad decisions people have made, like marginalizing people of color and women. Still, systems like the board-game champion AlphaZero and the increasingly convincing fake-text generator GPT-3 have stoked the flames of debate regarding when humans will create an artificial general intelligence--machines that can multitask, think, and reason for themselves. Beyond the answer to how we might develop technologies capable of common sense or self-improvement lies yet another question: who really benefits from the replication of human intelligence in an artificial mind? "Most of the value that's being generated by AI today is returning back to the billion dollar companies that already have a fantastical amount of resources at their disposal," says Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review's senior AI reporter and the writer of The Algorithm. "And we haven't really figured out how to convert that value or distribute that value to other people."

Technology companies provide much of the critical infrastructure of the modern state and develop products that affect fundamental rights. Search and social media companies, for example, have set de facto norms on privacy, while facial recognition and predictive policing software used by law enforcement agencies can contain racial bias. In this episode of Deep Tech, Marietje Schaake argues that national regulators aren't doing enough to enforce democratic values in technology, and it will take an international effort to fight back. Schaake--a Dutch politician who used to be a member of the European parliament and is now international policy director at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center--joins our editor-in-chief, Gideon Lichfield, to discuss how decisions made in the interests of business are dictating the lives of billions of people. Also this week, we get the latest on the hunt to locate an air leak aboard the International Space Station--which has grown larger in recent weeks. Elsewhere in space, new findings suggest there is even more liquid water on Mars than we thought. It's located in deep underground lakes and there's a chance it could be home to Martian life. Space reporter Neel Patel explains how we might find out. Back on Earth, the US election is heating up. Data reporter Tate Ryan-Mosley breaks down how technologies like microtargeting and data analytics have improved since 2016. Check out more episodes of Deep Tech here. Gideon Lichfield: There's a situation playing out onboard the International Space Station that sounds like something out of Star Trek… But there is an air leak in the space station.

Russia's biggest technology company enjoys a level of dominance that is unparalleled by any one of its Western counterparts. Think Google mixed with equal parts Amazon, Spotify and Uber and you're getting close to the sprawling empire that is Yandex--a single, mega-corporation with its hands in everything from search to ecommerce to driverless cars. But being the crown jewel of Russia's silicon valley has its drawbacks. The country's government sees the internet as contested territory amid ever-present tensions with US and other Western interests. As such, it wants influence over how Yandex uses its massive trove of data on Russian citizens. Foreign investors, meanwhile, are more interested in how that data can be turned into growth and profit. For the September/October issue of MIT Technology Review, Moscow-based journalist Evan Gershkovich explains how Yandex's ability to walk a highwire between the Kremlin and Wall Street could potentially serve as a kind of template for Big Tech.

In June, TechCrunch Ethicist in Residence Greg M. Epstein attended EmTech Next, a conference organized by the MIT Technology Review. The conference, which took place at MIT's famous Media Lab, examined how AI and robotics are changing the future of work. Greg's essay, Will the Future of Work Be Ethical? reflects on his experiences at the conference, which produced what he calls "a religious crisis, despite the fact that I am not just a confirmed atheist but a professional one as well." In it, Greg explores themes of inequality, inclusion and what it means to work in technology ethically, within a capitalist system and market economy. Accompanying the story for Extra Crunch are a series of in-depth interviews Greg conducted around the conference, with scholars, journalists, founders and attendees. Below he speaks to two key organizers: Gideon Lichfield, the editor in chief of the MIT Technology Review, and Karen Hao, its artificial intelligence reporter.