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Garlic Breath

   2018    Nature
Cooking shows turned the humble garlic bulb into something that's essential to cuisines and into a multi-billion-dollar crop. Every year, humans consume nearly 50 billion pounds of garlic, and most of it comes from one country: China. But a lawsuit raises troubling questions about suppliers.
Series: Rotten

The Surveillance Capitalists

   2019    Technology
Everywhere you go, you generate a cloud of data. You're trailing data, everything that you do is producing data. And then there are computers looking at that data that are learning, and these computers are essentially trying to serve you better. They're trying to personalize things to you. They're trying to adapt the world to you. So on the one hand, this is great, because the world will get adapted to you without you even having to explicitly adapt it. There's also a danger, because the entities in the companies that are in control of those algorithms don't necessarily have the same goals as you, and this is where I think people need to be aware that, what's going on, so they can have more control over it.
We came into this new world thinking that we were users of social media and search engines. It didn't occur to us that social media and search engines were actually using us.
Series: In the Age of AI

Love a Bot

   2017    Technology
Here's a growing trend in artificial intelligence. Dating video games and other applications let users carry on virtual relationships with computerized girlfriends ranging from career women to Japanese schoolgirls. There's even something for the ladies. How soon will there be artificial intelligence of such complexity that protecting its well-being and rights becomes a serious political and social concern? In what year will there be an app or computer program or a device that you not only love but that possibly, within the realm of believability might actually love you ...back?
Series: Mind Field Season 1

China Has a Plan

   2019    Technology
From fears about work and privacy to a rivalry between the U.S. and China, the series explores the promise and perils of AI. It traces a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our lives, our jobs and our world, and allow the emergence of the surveillance society.
Today, China leads the world in e-commerce and is a society that bypassed credit cards. Now shops in stores are without cashiers, where the currency is facial recognition. No country has ever moved that fast. And in a short two-and-a-half years, China's A.I. implementation really went from minimal amount to probably about 17 or 18 unicorns, that is, billion-dollar companies. The progress was powered by a new generation of ambitious young techs pouring out of Chinese universities, competing with each other for new ideas, and financed by a new cadre of Chinese venture capitalists.
Series: In the Age of AI

Isolation

   2017    Medicine
Your brain is like a hungry sponge. It's constantly absorbing information. It thrives when stimulated. Between smartphones and books, and movies, and friends and family, thousands of sensations are constantly going into our heads. But what if it all got cut off?. Imagine being confined to a 10-by-10-foot room in complete isolation. No timekeeping devices, no phones, no books, nothing to write on, no windows. Psychologists say that fewer than three days in a room like this can lead to brain damage. I will be staying in this room for three days.
Michael explores the effects of isolation on the human mind by subjecting himself to a very interesting experiment.
Series: Mind Field Season 1

Lego

   2018    Technology
In 1949, after decades of making wooden furniture and toys, Ole Kirk Christiansen's small factory in Billund, Denmark, moved to plastic and created the 'Automatic Binding Bricks', which would later be known as LEGO. When the company patented the tube system in 1958, LEGO became the dominant toy line worldwide throughout the 1960s and 1970s. When other competitors capitalized on the expiration of the company's patents in the 1980s, LEGO faced stiff competition until they reported their first loss in 1998. Poor business decisions with film licenses and the failure of the Jack Stone and Galidor lines brought LEGO to near-bankruptcy until Jørgen Vig Knudstorp took over the company and, by bringing it back to its roots, rejuvenated LEGO's profits.
By the time The Lego Movie hit theaters in 2014, LEGO became the largest toy franchise in the world.
Series: The Toys that Made Us