This Machine Kills

It’s a fan cam episode for our favorite tech columnist, Brian Merchant, who had two pieces come out recently that are back-to-back bangers. First is about why all the people making and selling AI keep...

7 Apr 20231h 23min

We give ourselves a concussion by talking about yet another opinion essay about AI written by three “experts” and published by a major newspaper. How is AI doing neuro-linguistic programming? What hap...

4 Apr 20235min

We are joined by Abeba Birhane — Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at the Mozilla Foundation — for a critical discussion about the release of GPT-4 and OpenAI. We also get into the excellent work that A...

30 Mar 20231h 18min

We discuss the clear and present danger throughout the global financial system, with crises happening in the banking sector that have not been seen since the 2008 crash. However, these are not sudden ...

23 Mar 20237min

We've unlocked this episode for the free feed. It's been a long time since we’ve seen a good old fashioned bank run lead to the collapse of a venerable financial institution, but leave it to Silicon V...

23 Mar 20231h 13min

Been a long time since we’ve seen a good old fashioned bank run lead to the collapse of a venerable financial institution, but leave it to Silicon Valley to rediscover something old and call it new ag...

18 Mar 20238min

We are joined by Nick Sever – author of the new book Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation – to discuss his excellent ethnographic research on the creation of algorithmic ...

17 Mar 20231h 27min

Disclaimer: this episode was recorded before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. We will do a post-mortem on that debacle in the next premium episode. In part 2 of our discussion on venture capitalism, we...

14 Mar 20238min