Why A.I. Is More “Big Bang Theory” Than Big Bang

EPISODE 94: A non-doomer view.

The reason today’s episode is about artificial intelligence is because pretty much everything seems like it’s on the table. Up to and including the possibility that we’re already floating around in Matrix-style amniotic fluids and living in a simulation.

But even the more grounded takes, like the TED Talk that Microsoft’s head of AI gave just last week, are about how we’re “at an inflection point in the history of humanity.” And how we “cannot control what we don’t understand.”

And so I really wanted to understand where we are, right now.

Not by talking to a tech CEO or a doomer prophet — but to Josh Tyrangiel.

For years, I’ve known Josh to have an especially sharp understanding of power, and capitalism’s winners and losers, which he’d honed as editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, where he interviewed people like Tim Cook and Barack Obama. And later as the creator of the TV show Vice News Tonight, which earned an incomprehensible 41 Emmy nominations for HBO.

But last year, Josh got a brand-new job, as a columnist at The Washington Post, where his whole entire beat is artificial intelligence. Which means he’s studied everything from the Department of Defense to sports through this lens.

And Josh does not see A.I. in a way that I’d heard before.

DKN/YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Optimistically,

Pablo