The Unlearn Project

A new podcast about changing common sense.

We set out to unlearn old wisdoms and discover new ones, starting with computers. When the world changes, we also need to change our common sense. And as it turns out we live in a time when lots of things change, and many of them have to do with technology. Computing is now everywhere. But it didn’t use to be. So maybe the first thing to unlearn is computers: what they are an

We discuss why it’s no longer true that automation and AI will make all our jobs easier. While automation might reduce the amount of work available to humans and leads to job losses, at least the remaining work will be of higher quality. This common wisdom has always underpinned the idea of automation. Yet surprisingly, in many industries AI can leave workers worse off, as th

We discuss how the way we engage with music is fundamentally changing - from something we just listen to, to something we create with. On platforms like TikTok, music is becoming a material for creation, for self-expression, for storytelling. And this very real shift in what people do with music, has implications not only for the music industry and what music is, but ultimately for

In this extra episode, we take a deep dive into the history of the music industry. We go down rabbit holes that take us from Victorian England to Sydney harbour in the 70s and then on to the hip hop culture of New York in the 80s. We trace the music industry as it resisted and adapted to the rise of new technologies and came to understand music as a product. We hear from a leading

Coming soon… we look at retiring retirement. We talk with a leading mental health researcher, an economist, a former Prime Minister, Nobel Prize winners, a linguist, and an octogenarian human computer. Stay tuned in 2022 for more episodes of The Unlearn Project, our podcast about changing common sense. Hosts Sandra Peter and Kai Riemer will continue to unlearn old wisdoms an

We discuss why collecting that gold watch and retiring at 65 might not be the best thing and why it’s time to change the retirement narrative. A lot has changed since Otto von Bismark invented retirement in 1883: we live much longer, more and more of us do knowledge work, and the latest research shows that our brains don’t actually decline as we get older. Could retirement be m