Real Robots, Real Life

With Good Reason

There’s a new robot in town. Nathan Sprague and the JMU X-Lab faculty are in their fifth year of retrofitting a golf cart. The automated machine will ideally transport seniors around senior citizen communities. And: What’s real? A documentarian used AI to generate the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s voice in a documentary. William Little says the controversy illuminates our celebrity worship. Later in the show: Technology is only as good as the minds that make it. Daphne Yao is improving medical data bias by simply introducing data of more marginalized people. Plus: Google’s “Alpha Fold 2” allows scientists to see what they’re targeting when creating medicine. Amarda Shehu says this dramatically transforms the field of molecular biology, where scientists have worked without this “structure prediction miracle.”