Marketplace Tech

Many scientists believe we’re in the midst of a sixth mass extinction brought on by factors like climate change, deforestation, fishing and hunting. The Texas-based company Colossal Biosciences claims its technology could help prevent some of those losses, and even bring back long-extinct species. For the new season of the Marketplace climate podcast, “How We Survive,” host Amy Scott got a virtual tour of their labs.

AI is the buzzy tech of the moment. It's made plenty of money not only for companies but the cities and states where investment is pouring in. Illinois and specifically Chicago are betting that quantum computing will be the next major tech breakthrough to transform the economy. And they're trying to get in on the ground floor. So they’ve turned a former steel mill site into a tech hub, called the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, with the hope of attracting as much talent and investment as possible. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jeanne Whalen, economics reporter at The Wall Street Journal, to learn more.

Who is using AI? And what are they using it for? Anthropic, the AI company behind Claude, has been trying to answer these questions to better understand how AI is reshaping the economy. The firm’s latest Economic Index report offers new insights on how people are using Claude and how they feel about AI’s potential effects on the labor market. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anthropic’s head of economics Peter McCrory to learn more about what the data reveals.

The resemblance to an actual dog is loose but the quadrupedal robot dogs known as “Spot” from Boston Dynamics do have four legs. They're often used to do reconnaissance in hazardous environments. And four of them are working security at the World Cup games in Dallas and New York. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Merry Frayne, at Boston Dynamics about Spot’s capabilities and why they wanted to deploy them at live sporting events.

There’s a longstanding nursing shortage in the U.S. that's only expected to get worse. Some hospitals have experimented with robotic nursing assistants to lighten the load, like a model known as Moxi that rolled out in 2019. They’re kind of R2D2-meets-Rosie-the-robots and were designed to handle non-patient-facing tasks like transporting lab samples. But many hospitals eventually pulled them from operation. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Varsha Bansal, reporter at Proof News, about what went wrong.