#142 Classic episode – John McWhorter on why the optimal number of languages might be one, and other provocative claims about language
John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything...
6 Jan 1h 35min
2025 Highlight-o-thon: Oops! All Bests
It’s that magical time of year once again — highlightapalooza! Stick around for one top bit from each episode we recorded this year, including:Kyle Fish explaining how Anthropic’s AI Claude descends i...
29 Dec 20251h 40min
#232 – Andreas Mogensen on what we owe 'philosophical Vulcans' and unconscious beings
Most debates about the moral status of AI systems circle the same question: is there something that it feels like to be them? But what if that’s the wrong question to ask? Andreas Mogensen — a senior ...
19 Dec 20252h 37min
#231 – Paul Scharre on how AI-controlled robots will and won't change war
In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet lieutenant colonel, sat in a bunker watching a red screen flash “MISSILE LAUNCH.” Protocol demanded he report it to superiors, which would very likely trigger a ret...
17 Dec 20252h 45min
AI might let a few people control everything — permanently (article by Rose Hadshar)
Power is already concentrated today: over 800 million people live on less than $3 a day, the three richest men in the world are worth over $1 trillion, and almost six billion people live in countries ...
12 Dec 20251h
#230 – Dean Ball on how AI is a huge deal — but we shouldn’t regulate it yet
Former White House staffer Dean Ball thinks it's very likely some form of 'superintelligence' arrives in under 20 years. He thinks AI being used for bioweapon research is "a real threat model, obvious...
10 Dec 20252h 54min
#229 – Marius Hobbhahn on the race to solve AI scheming before models go superhuman
We often worry about AI models “hallucinating” or making honest mistakes. But what happens when a model knows the truth, but decides to deceive you anyway to achieve a goal of its own? This isn’t sci-...
3 Dec 20253h 3min
Rob & Luisa chat kids, the 2016 fertility crash, and how the 50s invented parenting that makes us miserable
Global fertility rates aren’t just falling: the rate of decline is accelerating. From 2006 to 2016, fertility dropped gradually, but since 2016 the rate of decline has increased 4.5-fold. In many weal...
25 Nov 20251h 59min
