Jonquilyn Hill

The name of the show is Explain It To Me.

We're off for the next two days to celebrate the new year, but we will be back on Friday.

This is Today Explained.

If you don't know what tinnitus is, it's like that ringing you hear in your ears after getting out of a loud concert, but it's all the time.

When you were a kid, did you daydream about the future?

I thought it was gonna look like the Jetsons.

Flying cars, video phones, robots to do our grocery shopping.

Well, we're still waiting on those flying cars, but video phones are here, and so are the robots.

In Austin, Texas, they're sort of everywhere, rolling down the sidewalk on their way to deliver food.

You'll also see autonomous cars on the street, and AI is even showing up in city government.

Daniel Collado works for the city's Department of Organizational Excellence, and he says AI is cutting through red tape and making things way more efficient.

So that's AI operating on a large scale.

But what about the labor we do in our day-to-day lives?

It has the ability to transform that too.

And so what happened is my mother became, or she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

And so those robots allowed me to stay with her and meet her needs, but also still get those supplies from the store.

This is a resident named Snow White.

If she got up and I wasn't there and she slipped and she fell and she wouldn't be able to get up till I was there.

I mean, for me, for that specific time, it was really needed and it helped so much.

She says those little delivery robots really came through for her.