What You Should Know About Artificial Intelligence (and Why Centaurs Are Our Future)

EPISODE 23: David Epstein, bestselling author of RANGE, explains humanity's biggest advantage in a war with A.I. And the state of our union.

On Monday, Axios reported yesterday, the White House is going to announce an unprecedented and long-awaited executive order about an existentially important subject: artificial intelligence.

Which means that it’s finally time for me to have a conversation on the record — a state of the human-computer union, of sorts — that I’ve long been having in private.

Because nobody reports on the science of human performance better than my old friend and co-worker David Epstein. After leaving Sports Illustrated, Dave became an investigative reporter at ProPublica and, most famously, the author of two New York Times bestsellers: The Sports Gene and Range. (Both of which are genuinely must-read.) But the thing I’ve been talking about most with Dave, for a long time, is A.I.

Which is what various Silicon Valley executives and tech people had also realized, quietly, after the release of Range:

If A.I. is existentially threatening what humanity does, we need to talk to Dave Epstein. Someone who acutely understands what humanity does well.

That’s today’s episode — a tour of the good; the “really bad” (hint: it involves 10% of the global population); and the centaurs that might save us.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Thanks,

Pablo