Podcasts about luddites

Send us a textWatch the video!https://youtu.be/QIWT5gWQ_Rw00:00 Welcome Stephen Embry!03:32 Steve's Daily Tech08:00 Meta Vision Spectacles15:57 Approved AI Attorney Apocalypse41:09 Best Bathroom Breaks on a Plane46:17 The Amazing Benefits of AnalogAbout Stephen Embryhttps://www.techlawcrossroads.com/about/Dear ChatGPT: Words Matterhttps://abovethelaw.com/2025/09/dear-chatgpt-words-matter/Some Travel Tips You May Know by Heart and Some You Don'thttps://www.techlawcrossroads.com/2025/09/some-travel-tips-you-may-know-by-heart-and-some-you-dont/My Second Top Ten Travel Tipshttps://www.techlawcrossroads.com/2025/09/my-second-top-ten-travel-tips/Going Analog: Is It Just for Luddites?https://www.techlawcrossroads.com/2025/10/going-analog-is-it-just-for-luddites/Support the showBrett Burney from http://www.appsinlaw.comJeff Richardson from http://www.iphonejd.com

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. New hosts Welcome to our new hosts: Kirbotica, Thibaut, candycanearter. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4478 Wed 2025-10-01 YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #6 Ahuka 4479 Thu 2025-10-02 Who is the Algernon for Whom are the Flowers? Antoine 4480 Fri 2025-10-03 Arthur C. Clarke Becomes Successful Ahuka 4481 Mon 2025-10-06 HPR Community News for September 2025 HPR Volunteers 4482 Tue 2025-10-07 doodoo 4 the double deuce Jezra 4483 Wed 2025-10-08 HPR Beer Garden 3 - Porters Kevie 4484 Thu 2025-10-09 When Your Dentist Uses ChatControl Logic Trollercoaster 4485 Fri 2025-10-10 Git for Github and Gitlab Archer72 4486 Mon 2025-10-13 A code off my mind Lee 4487 Tue 2025-10-14 Is AI autistic? Antoine 4488 Wed 2025-10-15 Cheap Yellow Display Project Part 2: What is the problem? Trey 4489 Thu 2025-10-16 Hacks Poetic - Pilot Episode Kirbotica 4490 Fri 2025-10-17 Playing Civilization V, Part 4 Ahuka 4491 Mon 2025-10-20 Thibaut and Ken Interview David Revoy Thibaut 4492 Tue 2025-10-21 How to do a distribution upgrade of an Ubuntu LTS on a Digital Ocean droplet Rho`n 4493 Wed 2025-10-22 HPR Beer Garden 4 - Weissbier Kevie 4494 Thu 2025-10-23 Exploring FUTO Keyboard Antoine 4495 Fri 2025-10-24 An introduction to Taskwarrior candycanearter 4496 Mon 2025-10-27 Stroopwafel Lee 4497 Tue 2025-10-28 fixing 328eforth Brian-in-Ohio 4498 Wed 2025-10-29 Living the Tux Life Episode 1 Al 4499 Thu 2025-10-30 Greg Farough and Zoë Kooyman of the FSF interview Librephone lead developer Rob Savoye Ken Fallon 4500 Fri 2025-10-31 Arthur C. Clarke: 2001 and Sequels Ahuka Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 41 comments in total. Past shows There are 12 comments on 7 previous shows: hpr4238 (2024-10-30) "Snaps are better than flatpaks" by Some Guy On The Internet. Comment 4: BA on 2025-10-05: "Not a fan of any of them." hpr4453 (2025-08-27) "IPv6 for Luddites" by beni. Comment 7: Beni on 2025-10-22: "Link to the mentioned IPv6 talk on EuroBSDcon 2025" hpr4470 (2025-09-19) "HPR is twenty years old today. " by Lee. Comment 3: Steve Barnes on 2025-10-12: "Les petites félicites!" hpr4474 (2025-09-25) "Hacker Poetry - 001" by Major_Ursa. Comment 1: candycanearter07 on 2025-10-01: "love it" hpr4475 (2025-09-26) "The true audio file for walking tune to(wards) a friend" by FredBlack. Comment 1: brian-in-ohio on 2025-10-14: "Why fret about frets?" Comment 2: Folky on 2025-10-15: "Frets?" hpr4476 (2025-09-29) "Does AI cause brain damage?" by Trollercoaster. Comment 3: enistello on 2025-10-01: "Wonderful episode" Comment 4: Trollercoaster on 2025-10-02: "Re: Wondeful episode" hpr4477 (2025-09-30) "doodoo 3 a deuce plus 1" by Jezra. Comment 1: candycanearter07 on 2025-10-02: "cool app but" Comment 2: Archer72 on 2025-10-05: "Re: cool app" Comment 3: candycanearter07 on 2025-10-06: "Re: Re: cool app" Comment 4: أحمد المحمودي on 2025-10-07: "I use todoman" This month's shows There are 29 comments on 12 of this month's shows: hpr4478 (2025-10-01) "YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #6" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Anonymous 27 on 2025-10-02: "Excellent recommendations" hpr4479 (2025-10-02) "Who is the Algernon for Whom are the Flowers?" by Antoine. Comment 1: Trey on 2025-10-02: "Very interesting"Comment 2: Anonymous 27 on 2025-10-06: "Required Futurama reference" hpr4480 (2025-10-03) "Arthur C. Clarke Becomes Successful" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-10-13: "Great show... and may the force be with you"Comment 2: Kevin O'Brien on 2025-10-13: "Thank you" hpr4483 (2025-10-08) "HPR Beer Garden 3 - Porters" by Kevie. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-10-16: "History of beer" hpr4484 (2025-10-09) "When Your Dentist Uses ChatControl Logic" by Trollercoaster. Comment 1: Trollercoaster on 2025-10-09: "Voting has been delayed"Comment 2: candycanearter07 on 2025-10-12: "Satire as a tool"Comment 3: Trollercoaster on 2025-10-14: "Re: Satire as a tool"Comment 4: operat0r on 2025-10-16: "Lol"Comment 5: Trollercoaster on 2025-10-20: "Re: Lol" hpr4485 (2025-10-10) "Git for Github and Gitlab" by Archer72. Comment 1: candycanearter07 on 2025-10-21: "useful introduction"Comment 2: Sayaci on 2025-10-21: "The content of the Archer72" hpr4486 (2025-10-13) "A code off my mind" by Lee. Comment 1: Trey on 2025-10-13: "Excellent perspectives " hpr4489 (2025-10-16) "Hacks Poetic - Pilot Episode" by Kirbotica. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2025-10-16: "What a waste !"Comment 2: Trey on 2025-10-16: "Thought provoking..."Comment 3: Claudio on 2025-10-16: "A Refreshing HPR Episode!"Comment 4: Alexander on 2025-10-17: "Just threw my iPhone in the ocean..."Comment 5: Kevin O'Brien on 2025-10-17: "I loved the show"Comment 6: Tori on 2025-10-21: "When Nostalgia Meets the Digital Age"Comment 7: brian-in-ohio on 2025-10-22: "Don't burn out" hpr4491 (2025-10-20) "Thibaut and Ken Interview David Revoy" by Thibaut. Comment 1: brian-in-ohio on 2025-10-22: "Great show"Comment 2: Henrik Hemrin on 2025-10-26: "Inspiring" hpr4493 (2025-10-22) "HPR Beer Garden 4 - Weissbier" by Kevie. Comment 1: folky on 2025-10-22: "Hefeweizen is best ;-) "Comment 2: paulj on 2025-10-22: "Great Episode!"Comment 3: Claudio on 2025-10-23: "Great Episode I Can Relate To!"Comment 4: Gan Ainm on 2025-10-26: "Scottish-Bavarian IPW" hpr4495 (2025-10-24) "An introduction to Taskwarrior" by candycanearter. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-10-15: "First show: Good explanation" hpr4500 (2025-10-31) "Arthur C. Clarke: 2001 and Sequels" by Ahuka. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-10-16: "Deep dive" Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mailing List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2025-October/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page.Provide feedback on this episode.

Why our panic about AI is nothing new—and why history suggests we have far more creative agency over our technological future than either Silicon Valley's determinists or the neo-Luddites would have you believe.Who isn't afraid of AI? But according to the San Francisco-based technology historian Vanessa Chang, that's nothing new. So, she says, our ChatGPT age should give us hope rather than the reactionary hysteria marking much of today's conversation about AI. In her new book, The Body Digital, Chang argues that our bodies have always been living interfaces between our minds and our world. Designing that interface has always been a choice, and so are the worlds that we are always building. From cuckoo clocks to player pianos to gramophones, every generation has panicked about machines colonizing human experience. And every generation has eventually found ways to shape those machines to human ends. So don't be scared of ChatGPT, Chang says. Get creative. Get agency. * Tech anxiety is a historical constant, not a contemporary crisis. From Sousa's panic about player pianos replacing human musicianship to today's fears about ChatGPT, every generation has worried that machines will colonize human experience. The pattern itself should be instructive—and perhaps reassuring.* Our bodies have always been technological. Eyeglasses, writing, clocks—these aren't separate from our embodied existence but extensions of it. The digital age hasn't created the “body digital”; it's simply the latest chapter in a much longer story of humans using tools to reshape how we sense, think, and interact with the world.* The real question isn't whether technology will change us—it's who gets to design that change. Chang insists we've always had agency in our relationship with machines. The danger isn't AI itself but allowing corporate interests and proprietary systems to dictate the terms of our technological embodiment without democratic input or creative resistance.* AI isn't “all-knowing”—it's deeply circumscribed. Large language models are shaped by training data, developer biases, invisible labor in developing countries, and corporate imperatives. The mythology of omniscient AI obscures the very human choices and limitations embedded in these systems.* Writing and AI belong to the same evolutionary story. Both are technologies for extending human cognition beyond the body. Before writing, your thoughts died with you. After writing, they could travel across time and space. AI is simply the next iteration of humanity's ancient project of externalizing and augmenting our minds—with all the promise and peril that entails.* Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 4870: Revolt Of The Luddites

AI Luddites & Uses; CEO Fear; Crazy Left; Broken Window; Ballroom; Reparations | Yaron Brook Show 

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!It's a new series of Oh What A Time and this week we have for you: Luddites! Swing riots! Rebecca riots! Yes, this week we're talking: Technophobia.Plus: how on earth did anyone get about internationally before the dawn of the internet? It's absolutely bewildering. If you've got something to share, you can do that right here: hello@ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).And thank you for subscribing, we couldn't make the show without you!Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It's a new series of Oh What A Time (brought to you by Acast!) and this week we have for you: Luddites! Swing riots! Rebecca riots! Yes, this week we're talking: Technophobia.Plus: how on earth did anyone get about internationally before the dawn of the internet? It's absolutely bewildering. If you've got something to share, you can do that right here: hello@ohwhatatime.comYou can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).And thank you for subscribing, we couldn't make the show without you!Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Artificial intelligence could cost many of us our careers — but that doesn't mean we should stop its development, says journalist Megan J. McArdle. As she watches AI encroach on her own craft, she shares a fresh take on the 19th-century Luddites, who tried to destroy machines that would upend their trade. Looking back, McArdle reframes today's fears with a poignant question: If we halt progress to protect the present, what might we be stealing from the future? After the talk, Sherrell highlights how AI might not be replacing human jobs---but creating new ones.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What happens when Earth itself starts to wake up? In this episode, Kroc School Prof. Topher McDougal joins us to talk about his new book Gaia Wakes, where he explores the idea of Earth's emergent consciousness and the possibility of a global AI-powered governance system. From the collision of economics and ecology to the Butlerian Jihad of the Dune series, McDougal pushes us to rethink humanity's role in an AI-dominated future.In this wide-ranging episode, we dive into Luddites, the idea of a grand bargain between humans and AI, and what it really means to have — or be — a soul. In this episode we discuss: The four radical evolutionary upgrades (so far…)Humans as natural phenomenaWhy our future may demand a new relationship with technologyThe ethical risks of being domesticated by our own toolsCheck out these links for more information after you listen: Gaia Wakes The Book: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/gaia-wakes/9781788218283/Follow Us: ⁠https:http://www.instagram.com/krocschool/⁠Learn more: https://www.linkedin.com/school/krocschool/posts/?feedView=allReach Out: krocpod@gmail.com

Long time listeners will know the penultimate question I ask each guest: Where do you see the world in 5-10 years time. Since the good ship SS Tomorrow took off in 2021. It is about time to revisit old guests to catch upon their predictions. First up is Lee Schneider from series 9. Keywords AI, Neoluddism, Climate Change, Technology, Human Progress, Future Predictions, Environmental Impact, Digital Anxiety, Automation, Utopia Engine On the flight deck this week, we explore the evolving landscape of technology, with a particular focus on AI, climate change, and the societal implications of these advancements. They discuss the rise of Neoluddism as a response to the overwhelming presence of technology, the anxiety surrounding climate change, and the potential environmental impacts of AI. The dialogue emphasises the need for a balanced approach to technology that prioritises human progress and ethical considerations. Takeaways Lee's predictions about AI have largely come true. Neoluddism reflects a desire for the selective use of technology. Younger generations are seeking real-life experiences over digital. The application of technology often benefits the elite over the masses. AI's environmental impact is a growing concern. The rise of rooftop solar is a positive development in climate action. People are beginning to question the top-down application of technology. The gig economy limits people's ability to question their work conditions. Trade unions may be necessary to protect workers' rights in the tech age. Cautious optimism is essential in navigating technological advancements. Navigating the Future: AI and Human Progress The Rise of Neoludism: A Response to Technology Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Context 01:54 Predictions and the Rise of AI 03:04 Neoluddism: A Response to Technology 19:26 Climate Change Anxiety and Solutions 23:31 The Environmental Impact of AI 25:07 The Future of Technology and Human Progress

Young People Are Falling in Love With Old Technology Burbank Airport air traffic control tower unmanned on Monday evening amid government shutdown Please Subscribe + Rate & Review Philip Teresi on KMJ wherever you listen! --- KMJ’s Philip Teresi is available on the KMJNOW app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever else you listen. --- Philip Teresi, Weekdays 2-6 PM Pacific News/Talk 580 & 105.9 KMJ DriveKMJ.com | Podcast | Facebook | X | Instagram --- Everything KMJ: kmjnow.com | Streaming | Podcasts | Facebook | X | Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. New hosts Welcome to our new hosts: Wojciech, Major_Ursa. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4456 Mon 2025-09-01 HPR Community News for August 2025 HPR Volunteers 4457 Tue 2025-09-02 doodoo deuce Jezra 4458 Wed 2025-09-03 Creating an animation in Powerpoint Dave Hingley 4459 Thu 2025-09-04 How I got into tech Wojciech 4460 Fri 2025-09-05 Arthur C. Clarke Ahuka 4461 Mon 2025-09-08 Battle of the mic's Lee 4462 Tue 2025-09-09 HPR Beer Garden - Intro and Dessert Stouts Kevie 4463 Wed 2025-09-10 Software Freedom Day NJ, briefly. murph 4464 Thu 2025-09-11 Replacing the Trackpad on my Laptop Claudio Miranda 4465 Fri 2025-09-12 Playing Civilization V, Part 3 Ahuka 4466 Mon 2025-09-15 HPR Music project - Walking tune to(wards) a friend FredBlack 4467 Tue 2025-09-16 A small Odoo usage intro and a larger technical bit Jeroen Baten 4468 Wed 2025-09-17 AI Trap and Fix Archer72 4469 Thu 2025-09-18 Disagree With Me - 3 Statements About Life Living Antoine 4470 Fri 2025-09-19 HPR is twenty years old today. Lee 4471 Mon 2025-09-22 Ti-82 Makes Music and Password Manager operat0r 4472 Tue 2025-09-23 Cheap Yellow Display Project: Introduction to the Cheap Yellow Display Trey 4473 Wed 2025-09-24 HPR Beer Garden 2 - Session IPA Kevie 4474 Thu 2025-09-25 Hacker Poetry - 001 Major_Ursa 4475 Fri 2025-09-26 The true audio file for walking tune to(wards) a friend FredBlack 4476 Mon 2025-09-29 Does AI cause brain damage? Trollercoaster 4477 Tue 2025-09-30 doodoo 3 a deuce plus 1 Jezra Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 22 comments in total. Past shows There are 4 comments on 4 previous shows: hpr4393 (2025-06-04) "Journal like you mean it." by Some Guy On The Internet. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-09-01: "Journaling" hpr4442 (2025-08-12) "Orthopedagogiek - what it is." by Manon. Comment 4: Manon Fallon on 2025-09-07: "Thank you" hpr4445 (2025-08-15) "doodoo one" by Jezra. Comment 3: Windigo on 2025-09-03: "Singular vs plural functions" hpr4453 (2025-08-27) "IPv6 for Luddites" by beni. Comment 5: Paulj on 2025-09-09: "Fantastic show - thank you" Comment 6: Dave Morriss on 2025-09-09: "I was surprised to find that my ISP offers IPv6" This month's shows There are 18 comments on 10 of this month's shows: hpr4456 (2025-09-01) "HPR Community News for August 2025" by HPR Volunteers. Comment 1: candycanearter07 on 2025-09-01: "show doubt"Comment 2: أحمد المحمودي on 2025-09-12: "Pronouncing my name"Comment 3: Ken Fallon on 2025-09-16: "Can I have an example" hpr4459 (2025-09-04) "How I got into tech" by Wojciech. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-09-01: "First show"Comment 2: Antoine on 2025-09-04: "Welcome! "Comment 3: Henrik Hemrin on 2025-09-04: "Thanks and welcome"Comment 4: Andrew on 2025-09-04: "Excellent first show..."Comment 5: paulj on 2025-09-09: "Welcome, and thanks!" hpr4461 (2025-09-08) "Battle of the mic's" by Lee. Comment 1: candycanearter07 on 2025-09-12: "Interesting dive into a topic not thought about often!" hpr4462 (2025-09-09) "HPR Beer Garden - Intro and Dessert Stouts " by Kevie. Comment 1: T.A.Spinner on 2025-09-13: "Your thoughts on hefeweizens?" hpr4466 (2025-09-15) "HPR Music project - Walking tune to(wards) a friend" by FredBlack. Comment 1: candycanearter07 on 2025-09-25: "unique idea for a show!" hpr4470 (2025-09-19) "HPR is twenty years old today. " by Lee. Comment 1: quvmoh on 2025-09-20: "congrats"Comment 2: ClaudioM on 2025-09-26: "Happy 20th Anniversary!" hpr4471 (2025-09-22) "Ti-82 Makes Music and Password Manager" by operat0r. Comment 1: candycanearter07 on 2025-09-25: "TI calc history" hpr4472 (2025-09-23) "Cheap Yellow Display Project: Introduction to the Cheap Yellow Display " by Trey. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-09-23: "Following the series" hpr4473 (2025-09-24) "HPR Beer Garden 2 - Session IPA" by Kevie. Comment 1: Ken Fallon on 2025-09-24: "FLOSS Beer Tracker " hpr4476 (2025-09-29) "Does AI cause brain damage?" by Trollercoaster. Comment 1: Trey on 2025-09-29: "Excellent episode"Comment 2: Trollercoaster on 2025-09-30: "Re: Excellent episode" Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mailing List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2025-September/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page.Provide feedback on this episode.

We've been having a lively debate at Cyber Protection Magazine about the potential, dangers, and chances AI is going to survive in its current form. Co-editor Patrick Boch likes to say I'm something of a Luddite about it, and it's true (Luddites were not against technology, but were adamant about protecting workers using it). I like to say that Patrick is overly optimistic. But, then, He's a lot younger than me, so optimism comes more easily to him. Plus, he's not living in the dystopian hell-hole that the US has become. Lucky dog.That being said, this is the first of several discussion Patrick and I will be having on this subject, along with several other interviews and articles to come.

Earlier this month, a new startup announced that they would be using artificial intelligence to churn out thousands of podcast episodes voiced by A.I. podcast hosts. Inception Point A.I. claims to be able to fashion 3,000 podcast episodes a week at a paltry cost of $1 per episode, and plans to flood the market with massive amounts of content in the hopes of generating revenue through programmatic advertising. But the reaction to their market entrance was anything but warm and welcoming. Podcast industry stalwarts and professional communicators expressed shock and outrage that the startup would resort to such a low-quality, high-volume tactic. Many raised ethical questions about replacing human insights with A.I.-generated "slop," and concerns abounded about job losses in an already contracting industry. In a post to her LinkedIn, Inception Point A.I. CEO Jeanine Wright was flamed by dozens of angry comments from incensed audio professionals. Some objected strenuously to bizarre comments where Wright declared that "half the people on the planet will be AI" in the near future. Others were upset by her decision to cast critics of the business model as "probably lazy Luddites." So obviously this story is a PERFECT fit for us here on Lead Balloon. First, we'll discuss the industry reaction, the PR faceplant and the dubious business model with Jeff Umbro—CEO of the Podglomerate, host of the show "Podcast Perspectives," and a leading authority on the state of the podcast industry. And then we'll cover the moral implications of A.I. podcast hosts with Ronald Young, Jr. , "Best Podcast Host" winner at this year's Ambies Podcast Academy Awards and creator of award-winning podcasts including "Weight For It." Ultimately, whether you consider communication an artistic act OR a professional pursuit, we'll unpack the implications and repercussions of a world where big tech insiders try to replace the HUMAN in the human act of communication. A note: we spoke with Inception Point A.I. CEO Jeanine Wright and invited her to respond to our questions about the company's business model and ethics. Ultimately, she chose not to provide us with any commentary prior to our publishing deadline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever since modern economic growth began three centuries ago, people have suffered from periodic bursts of anxiety about the technologies of the time taking on the work that they do. This opening lecture explores the history of ‘automation anxiety' – from the Luddites who smashed framing machines at the start of the Industrial Revolution in Britain to the protestors who set driverless cars on fire on the streets of San Francisco today. Time and again, their main worry – that there would not be enough work for people to do – turned out to be wrong. But they did have legitimate grievances as well.This lecture was recorded by Daniel Susskind on the 9th of September 2025 at Barnard's Inn Hall, LondonDr Daniel Susskind is a writer and economist. He explores the impact of technology, and particularly AI, on work and society. He is a Research Professor at King's College London, a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, a Digital Fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, and an Associate Member of the Economics Department at Oxford University. The transcript of the lecture is available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/automation-anxietyGresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham College's mission, please consider making a donation: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-today Website:  https://gresham.ac.ukX: https://x.com/GreshamCollegeFacebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollegeBluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/greshamcollege.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@greshamcollegeSupport Us: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/get-involved/support-us/make-donation/donate-todaySupport the show

This show has been flagged as Explicit by the host. New hosts Welcome to our new host: Manon. Last Month's Shows Id Day Date Title Host 4435 Fri 2025-08-01 Philosophy, Cosmology, Physics, and just what is up with Hairy Larry's brain. hairylarry 4436 Mon 2025-08-04 HPR Community News for July 2025 HPR Volunteers 4437 Tue 2025-08-05 One Possible Definition of "Hacker" Antoine 4438 Wed 2025-08-06 doodoo zero Jezra 4439 Thu 2025-08-07 Rejecting a show ? Ken Fallon 4440 Fri 2025-08-08 The HOPE conference. murph 4441 Mon 2025-08-11 Voice Over IP Lee 4442 Tue 2025-08-12 Orthopedagogiek - what it is. Manon 4443 Wed 2025-08-13 The First Doctor, Part 3 Ahuka 4444 Thu 2025-08-14 Introduction into the E.R.P. application called Odoo Jeroen Baten 4445 Fri 2025-08-15 doodoo one Jezra 4446 Mon 2025-08-18 Calling on AI to resque HPR Trollercoaster 4447 Tue 2025-08-19 Interview with Margreet Pakkert at the Flevoland 2025 Field Work Archaeology Open Day. Ken Fallon 4448 Wed 2025-08-20 YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #4 Ahuka 4449 Thu 2025-08-21 How to install Odoo 18 on a virtual machine Jeroen Baten 4450 Fri 2025-08-22 Playing Civilization V, Part 2 Ahuka 4451 Mon 2025-08-25 Game Modding operat0r 4452 Tue 2025-08-26 Turn Coffee Into Code - Slogans from Tech(Companies, App, People) Antoine 4453 Wed 2025-08-27 IPv6 for Luddites beni 4454 Thu 2025-08-28 AI, It's a Trap! Archer72 4455 Fri 2025-08-29 YouTube Subscriptions 2025 #5 Ahuka Comments this month These are comments which have been made during the past month, either to shows released during the month or to past shows. There are 32 comments in total. Past shows There are 2 comments on 2 previous shows: hpr4377 (2025-05-13) "Password store and the pass command" by Klaatu. Comment 2: أحمد المحمودي on 2025-08-13: "Look at KeePass" hpr4429 (2025-07-24) "Handcrafting and Bartering discussion w. Elsbeth" by Elsbeth. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-08-04: "Good to hear a craftier" This month's shows There are 30 comments on 13 of this month's shows: hpr4435 (2025-08-01) "Philosophy, Cosmology, Physics, and just what is up with Hairy Larry's brain." by hairylarry. Comment 1: Bob Jonkman on 2025-08-11: "How could playing music fit HPR?"Comment 2: hairylarry on 2025-08-11: "Reply to Bob"Comment 3: paulj on 2025-08-14: "Great Show" hpr4437 (2025-08-05) "One Possible Definition of "Hacker"" by Antoine. Comment 1: Elsbeth on 2025-08-10: "Love this content"Comment 2: Antoine on 2025-08-11: ": )" hpr4438 (2025-08-06) "doodoo zero " by Jezra. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-08-04: "I was just thinking about this"Comment 2: jezra on 2025-08-23: "development happened faster than the show release cadence" hpr4439 (2025-08-07) "Rejecting a show ?" by Ken Fallon. Comment 1: Torin Doyle on 2025-08-09: "Please keep HPR a religion-free zone."Comment 2: Ken Fallon on 2025-08-10: "Respond on the mail list" hpr4440 (2025-08-08) "The HOPE conference." by murph. Comment 1: FXB on 2025-08-09: "HOPE Conference Talks" hpr4442 (2025-08-12) "Orthopedagogiek - what it is." by Manon. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-08-04: "Interesting approach"Comment 2: Dave Morriss on 2025-08-12: "I enjoyed this a lot"Comment 3: Antoine on 2025-08-13: "What a very specific field!" hpr4444 (2025-08-14) "Introduction into the E.R.P. application called Odoo" by Jeroen Baten. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-08-04: "My wife has a side business"Comment 2: Jason Lewis on 2025-08-14: "Migrating from NetSuite"Comment 3: Henrik Hemrin on 2025-08-20: "Odoo - new to me" hpr4445 (2025-08-15) "doodoo one" by Jezra. Comment 1: Reto on 2025-08-16: "I can follow your thoughts"Comment 2: jezra on 2025-08-23: "noted!" hpr4446 (2025-08-18) "Calling on AI to resque HPR" by Trollercoaster. Comment 1: candycanearter07 on 2025-08-18: "Interesting episode"Comment 2: trollercoaster on 2025-08-19: "I guess I didn't get my point over" hpr4447 (2025-08-19) "Interview with Margreet Pakkert at the Flevoland 2025 Field Work Archaeology Open Day." by Ken Fallon. Comment 1: Clinton Roy on 2025-08-20: "Pictures too!"Comment 2: Henrik Hemrin on 2025-08-20: "Interesting talk about this boat and archeology"Comment 3: Antoine on 2025-08-21: "That was sure a show!"Comment 4: jezra on 2025-08-26: "time to head to the woodshop!" hpr4449 (2025-08-21) "How to install Odoo 18 on a virtual machine" by Jeroen Baten. Comment 1: Archer72 on 2025-08-04: "Oodo in a vm" hpr4451 (2025-08-25) "Game Modding" by operat0r. Comment 1: candycanearter07 on 2025-08-25: ""moddable" games" hpr4453 (2025-08-27) "IPv6 for Luddites" by beni. Comment 1: Rho`n on 2025-08-27: "Great intro to IPv6"Comment 2: norrist on 2025-08-27: "Please post your talk"Comment 3: wheresalice on 2025-08-28: "IPv6 on HPR"Comment 4: Ken Fallon on 2025-08-29: "I opened a bug, you can help fix it." Mailing List discussions Policy decisions surrounding HPR are taken by the community as a whole. This discussion takes place on the Mailing List which is open to all HPR listeners and contributors. The discussions are open and available on the HPR server under Mailman. The threaded discussions this month can be found here: https://lists.hackerpublicradio.com/pipermail/hpr/2025-August/thread.html Events Calendar With the kind permission of LWN.net we are linking to The LWN.net Community Calendar. Quoting the site: This is the LWN.net community event calendar, where we track events of interest to people using and developing Linux and free software. Clicking on individual events will take you to the appropriate web page. Provide feedback on this episode.

This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. IPv6 for Luddites Andrew (aka mcnalu) recently triggered Beni by saying that he turns off IPv6 in order to get devices working on his home network. In this show Beni educates Andrew the Luddite and explains why moving from IPv4 to IPv6 is a good idea. They also explore how IPv6 can be used in a world where ISPs and devices do not all support it and what tools, tips and tricks are available during this rather long transitional phase to the newish (like 30 years old, a blink of an eye in IT) protocol. Relevant RFCs RFC 4861: Neighbor Discovery (basically the ICMP based replacement of ARP) RFC 4862: Stateless Address Configuration RFC 4941: Privacy Extension for SLAAC RFC 6146: NAT64 RFC 6147: DNS64 RFC 6877: XLAT464 (Allow your legacy software to talk to its legacy server in an IPv6 only environment) Provide feedback on this episode.

Episode: 1425 Laying the transatlantic telegraph cable.  Today, Queen Victoria sends a telegram to President Buchanan.

Episode: 1424 La Sylphide: an elemental in the Industrial Revolution.  Today, a ballet gives us an odd window into history.

Vivek Ramaswamy demonstrates once again that he is unfamiliar with the state he seeks to govern Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

當全球都在擁抱AI浪潮時，澳洲企業與民眾為何顯得格外保守？這背後，是市場的固化，還是對未來飯碗的焦慮？從經濟學的視角，回顧歷史上從紡織機到電腦的技術革命，我們將發現，每一次的變革，都伴隨著恐懼與阻力，但最終，都釋放了人類的無限創造力。好的，這是一個根據逐字稿內容整理的AI應用在澳洲的問答總結。為什麼澳洲企業在採用AI方面猶豫不決？儘管澳洲民眾在日常消費中積極應用科技，但在企業和工作層面，對AI的接受度卻很低。主要原因包括：* 市場固化： 澳洲許多行業（如超市、金融服務）競爭不激烈，市場由少數大企業主導。在這種環境下，企業缺乏冒險引進新科技的動機。* 缺乏必要性： 許多人感到「自滿」（complacent），認為即使不用AI也能做好工作 。* 勞工憂慮： 澳洲人擔心AI會導致飯碗不保，普遍對其感到畏懼。澳洲人對AI的態度如何？有哪些具體數據？根據一份畢馬威（KPMG）與墨爾本大學的研究報告，澳洲人對AI的態度充滿矛盾和保留：* 信賴度： 僅有36%的澳洲民眾願意相信AI。* 接受度： 接受AI協助工作的人不到一半，只有49%。* 恐懼感： 58%的人認為AI會帶來「人與人之間連結消失」的風險，因此感到害怕。* 監管需求： 77%的澳洲受訪者認為AI需要監管。澳洲工會對AI的態度和立場是什麼？澳洲的工會勢力龐大且強硬。他們主要採取阻礙態度，試圖保護勞工權益：* 實施協議： 澳洲工會理事會（ACTU）建議，企業若想引入AI，必須先與員工簽署一份AI實施協議。* 保障就業： 協議要求企業確保員工就職保障，例如在引入AI後的三年內不得解僱受影響的員工。* 政府合約： 如果企業不遵守這些要求，可能就無法獲得政府合約。從歷史角度來看，這類對新科技的阻力是獨特的嗎？這種阻力並非獨特，而是歷史上反覆出現的現象。* Luddite運動： 在19世紀工業革命時期，就有名為「盧德派（Luddites）」的群體反對紡織機，因為這項技術取代了大量手工藝人的工作。* 電腦的出現： 在1950年代，初期電腦的計算速度比人還慢，但企業仍選擇使用它們，因為電腦不像人類一樣會偷懶、生病或鬧情緒。* 工作轉移： 歷史洪流顯示，人力密集的工作會轉移到勞力成本較低的國家，或是被自動化取代。 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leesimon.substack.com/subscribe

In today's ultra-connected society, more and more technologies are emerging all the time, and they're getting increasingly advanced. Just look at how far AI has come in recent times, and the attention it's been getting since the launch of ChatGPT. In many ways, it's difficult to not use technology. To not do so would be like cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world. But still, it's not to everyone's liking. Some people resent the influence that some forms of technology have on our society, and want to reject them. They are known as neo-Luddites. Where does the name come from? Could AI have the same impact? And today, how is Neo-Luddism exemplified? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions! To listen to the last episodes, you can click here : ⁠Why is Camilla becoming queen and not queen consort?⁠ ⁠What is Extinction Rebellion ?⁠ ⁠Could I save more money by cash stuffing?⁠ A Bababam Originals podcast.A podcast written and realised by Joseph Chance. First Broadcast: 4/4/2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rage against the machines? For 200 years “Luddite” was a term of abuse for deluded people who tried to hold back progress. But with A.I. threatening everything from mass unemployment to business tyranny to actual human extinction, maybe it's time to accept that the 19th century worker's rebellion under fictional leader Ned Ludd had a pretty good point. Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech talks to Alex von Tunzelmann about the amorality of technology, the libelling of the Luddites, and what we can learn from them in the age of ChatGPT and OpenAI. • Support us on Patreon for early episodes and more. • We are sponsored by Indeed. Go to indeed.com/bunker to get your £100 sponsored credit. • Advertisers! Want to reach smart, engaged, influential people with money to spend? (Yes, they do exist). Some 3.5 MILLION people download and watch our podcasts every month – and they love our shows. Why not get YOUR brand in front of our influential listeners with podcast advertising? Contact ads@podmasters.co.uk to find out more Written and presented by Alex von Tunzelmann. Audio production by Robin Leeburn. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Managing Editor Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production www.podmasters.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you enjoyed this episode, check out more from Rachel, Rebekah, and more Christian women at Canon+: https://canonplus.com/

Don takes a fiscal detour into the world of AI, introducing his ChatGPT co-host “Cath” in a strikingly lifelike discussion about the future of jobs, the role of artificial intelligence in our lives, and how we can adapt to massive changes already underway. The episode blends curiosity, caution, and practical insight—with a historical twist that ties today's tech upheaval to the Luddite resistance of the 19th century. It's a deeply personal, slightly spooky, and forward-looking edition of Talking Real Money. 0:04 Don opens solo and explains how AI (Cath) became his creative partner 1:20 What ChatGPT is, how it works, and how Don uses it for image creation 4:21 AI and the threat to human jobs—especially white-collar roles 5:16 Is creativity really safe from AI disruption? 6:31 Which U.S. jobs are most at risk (customer service, admin, legal, finance) 7:30 Why current AI customer service sucks (and why Cath doesn't) 9:05 How young people can future-proof their careers through skills and mindset 10:15 Education technology as a “human + AI” job model 10:33 Hands-on and empathetic jobs that AI struggles to replace 11:47 The difference between mimicking and actually being intelligent 12:06 Specific industries most ripe for AI displacement 13:15 AI's surprising takeover of journalism and nonfiction writing 13:52 Should we be alarmed by how fast AI is replacing human tasks? 14:55 AI 2027 report: Doomsday prediction or useful wake-up call? 16:22 Ethical concerns, adversarial use (like China), and global AI regulation 17:36 What kids (and grandkids) can do now to stay ahead of AI disruption 18:06 Should we still teach coding if AI can write code? 18:56 Is GPT-4.0 helping write GPT-5.0? 19:40 How AI voices became so eerily realistic 20:46 Ways everyday people can use AI subscriptions for personal growth 22:07 Do users own what they make with AI? (Yes) 22:31 Did AI “steal” the content it was trained on? 23:58 Final thoughts: from Luddites to large language models—adapt or get replaced 26:21 A call for thoughtful oversight and a little healthy skepticism Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marxist, as well as conservative and liberal bourgeois historians alike, have always had a fundamental misunderstanding about the Luddites. It turns out they weren't just reactionary peasants who feared technology and wanted to keep the world mired in an economy based on stacking sticks and mud. The Luddites weren't resisting technology itself—they were fighting the economic systems that exploited them through it. This week, the boys dive into a conversation about Luddism's past, present, and future.The Luddites Were Right  https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-were-right What the Luddites Really Fought Against https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-really-fought-against-264412/ Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of AI https://www.theinteldrop.org/2023/10/02/rethinking-the-luddites-in-the-age-of-a-i/ Send us a message (sorry we can't respond on here). Support the show

Would you have joined the OG Luddites? In 1811 and 1812 across the midlands and north of England which were the Silicon Valley of the day, Luddites smashed machines. They would not stop, not even at murder, in order to fight technology that was tearing down their way of life. Maddy tells Anthony the story this week.Edited by Tomos Delargy, produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don't forget to confirm the email. Thank you!You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Send us a textAI? Robots? Machine Learning? Fear of technology is not new.  We go to 19th century Britain to meet the Luddites, a group who also experienced technological change. 

Artificial intelligence could cost many of us our careers — but that doesn't mean we should stop its development, says journalist Megan J. McArdle. As she watches AI encroach on her own craft, she shares a fresh take on the 19th-century Luddites, who tried to destroy machines that would upend their trade. Looking back, McArdle reframes today's fears with a poignant question: If we halt progress to protect the present, what might we be stealing from the future?Want to help shape TED's shows going forward? Fill out our survey!Learn more about TED Next at ted.com/futureyou Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Contrary to the expectation of the Luddites, we have only become wealthier than before and workers today enjoy much higher standards of living than workers in the past.Original article: https://mises.org/power-market/what-modern-luddites-miss-technology-makes-us-wealthier

Contrary to the expectation of the Luddites, we have only become wealthier than before and workers today enjoy much higher standards of living than workers in the past.Original article: https://mises.org/power-market/what-modern-luddites-miss-technology-makes-us-wealthier

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,Once-science-fiction advancements like AI, gene editing, and advanced biotechnology have finally arrived, and they're here to stay. These technologies have seemingly set us on a course towards a brand new future for humanity, one we can hardly even picture today. But progress doesn't happen overnight, and it isn't the result of any one breakthrough.As Jamie Metzl explains in his new book, Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions will Transform our Lives, Work, and World, tech innovations work alongside and because of one another, bringing about the future right under our noses.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Metzl about how humans have been radically reshaping the world around them since their very beginning, and what the latest and most disruptive technologies mean for the not-too-distant future.Metzl is a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council and a faculty member of NextMed Health. He has previously held a series of positions in the US government, and was appointed to the World Health Organization's advisory committee on human genome editing in 2019. He is the author of several books, including two sci-fi thrillers and his international bestseller, Hacking Darwin.In This Episode* Unstoppable and unpredictable (1:54)* Normalizing the extraordinary (9:46)* Engineering intelligence (13:53)* Distrust of disruption (19:44)* Risk tolerance (24:08)* What is a “newnimal”? (13:11)* Inspired by curiosity (33:42)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. Unstoppable and unpredictable (1:54)The name of the game for all of this . . . is to ask “What are the things that we can do to increase the odds of a more positive story and decrease the odds of a more negative story?”Pethokoukis: Are you telling a story of unstoppable technological momentum or are you telling a story kind of like A Christmas Carol, of a future that could be if we do X, Y, and Z, but no guarantees?Metzl: The future of technological progress is like the past: It is unstoppable, but that doesn't mean it's predetermined. The path that we have gone over the last 12,000 years, from the domestication of crops to building our civilizations, languages, industrialization — it's a bad metaphor now, but — this train is accelerating. It's moving faster and faster, so that's not up for grabs. It is not up for grabs whether we are going to have the capacities to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life — we are doing both of those things now in the early days.What is up for grabs is how these revolutions will play out, and there are better and worse scenarios that we can imagine. The name of the game for all of this, the reason why I do the work that I do, why I write the books that I write, is to ask “What are the things that we can do to increase the odds of a more positive story and decrease the odds of a more negative story?”Progress has been sort of unstoppable for all that time, though, of course, fits and starts and periods of stagnation —— But when you look back at those fits and starts — the size of the Black Plague or World War II, or wiping out Berlin, and Dresden, and Tokyo, and Hiroshima, and Nagasaki — in spite of all of those things, it's one-directional. Our technologies have gotten more powerful. We've developed more capacities, greater ability to manipulate the world around us, so there will be fits and starts but, as I said, this train is moving. That's why these conversations are so important, because there's so much that we can, and I believe must, do now.There's a widely held opinion that progress over the past 50 years has been slower than people might have expected in the late 1960s, but we seem to have some technologies now for which the momentum seems pretty unstoppable.Of course, a lot of people thought, after ChatGPT came out, that superintelligence would happen within six months. That didn't happen. After CRISPR arrived, I'm sure there were lots of people who expected miracle cures right away.What makes you think that these technologies will look a lot different, and our world will look a lot different than they do right now by decade's end?They certainly will look a lot different, but there's also a lot of hype around these technologies. You use the word “superintelligence,” which is probably a good word. I don't like the words “artificial intelligence,” and I have a six-letter framing for what I believe about AGI — artificial general intelligence — and that is: AGI is BS. We have no idea what human intelligence is, if we define our own intelligence so narrowly that it's just this very narrow form of thinking and then we say, “Wow, we have these machines that are mining the entirety of digitized human cultural history, and wow, they're so brilliant, they can write poems — poems in languages that our ancestors have invented based on the work of humans.” So we humans need to be very careful not to belittle ourselves.But we're already seeing, across the board, if you say, “Is CRISPR on its own going to fundamentally transform all of life?” The answer to that is absolutely no. My last book was about genetic engineering. If genetic engineering is a pie, genome editing is a slice and CRISPR is just a tiny little sliver of that slice. But the reason why my new book is called Superconvergence, the entire thesis is that all of these technologies inspire, and influence, and are embedded in each other. We had the agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago, as I mentioned. That's what led to these other innovations like civilization, like writing, and then the ancient writing codes are the foundation of computer codes which underpin our machine learning and AI systems that are allowing us to unlock secrets of the natural world.People are imagining that AI equals ChatGPT, but that's really not the case (AI equals ChatGPT like electricity equals the power station). The story of AI is empowering us to do all of these other things. As a general-purpose technology, already AI is developing the capacity to help us just do basic things faster. Computer coding is the archetypal example of that. Over the last couple of years, the speed of coding has improved by about 50 percent for the most advanced human coders, and as we code, our coding algorithms are learning about the process of coding. We're just laying a foundation for all of these other things.That's what I call “boring AI.” People are imagining exciting AI, like there's a magic AI button and you just press it and AI cures cancer. That's not how it's going to work. Boring AI is going to be embedded in human resource management. It's going to be embedded just giving us a lot of capabilities to do things better, faster than we've done them before. It doesn't mean that AIs are going to replace us. There are a lot of things that humans do that machines can just do better than we are. That's why most of us aren't doing hunting, or gathering, or farming, because we developed machines and other technologies to feed us with much less human labor input, and we have used that reallocation of our time and energy to write books and invent other things. That's going to happen here.The name of the game for us humans, there's two things: One is figuring out what does it mean to be a great human and over-index on that, and two, lay the foundation so that these multiple overlapping revolutions, as they play out in multiple fields, can be governed wisely. That is the name of the game. So when people say, “Is it going to change our lives?” I think people are thinking of it in the wrong way. This shirt that I'm wearing, this same shirt five years from now, you'll say, “Well, is there AI in your shirt?” — because it doesn't look like AI — and what I'm going to say is “Yes, in the manufacturing of this thread, in the management of the supply chain, in figuring out who gets to go on vacation, when, in the company that's making these buttons.” It's all these little things. People will just call it progress. People are imagining magic AI, all of these interwoven technologies will just feel like accelerating progress, and that will just feel like life.Normalizing the extraordinary (9:46)20, 30 years ago we didn't have the internet. I think things get so normalized that this just feels like life.What you're describing is a technology that economists would call a general-purpose technology. It's a technology embedded in everything, it's everywhere in the economy, much as electricity.What you call “boring AI,” the way I think about it is: I was just reading a Wall Street Journal story about Applebee's talking about using AI for more efficient customer loyalty programs, and they would use machine vision to look at their tables to see if they were cleaned well enough between customers. That, to people, probably doesn't seem particularly science-fictional. It doesn't seem world-changing. Of course, faster growth and a more productive economy is built on those little things, but I guess I would still call those “boring AI.”What to me definitely is not boring AI is the sort of combinatorial aspect that you're talking about where you're talking about AI helping the scientific discovery process and then interweaving with other technologies in kind of the classic Paul Romer combinatorial way.I think a lot of people, if they look back at their lives 20 or 30 years ago, they would say, “Okay, more screen time, but probably pretty much the same.”I don't think they would say that. 20, 30 years ago we didn't have the internet. I think things get so normalized that this just feels like life. If you had told ourselves 30 years ago, “You're going to have access to all the world's knowledge in your pocket.” You and I are — based on appearances, although you look so youthful — roughly the same age, so you probably remember, “Hurry, it's long distance! Run down the stairs!”We live in this radical science-fiction world that has been normalized, and even the things that you are mentioning, if you see open up your newsfeed and you see that there's this been incredible innovation in cancer care, and whether it's gene therapy, or autoimmune stuff, or whatever, you're not thinking, “Oh, that was AI that did that,” because you read the thing and it's like “These researchers at University of X,” but it is AI, it is electricity, it is agriculture. It's because our ancestors learned how to plant seeds and grow plants where you're stationed and not have to do hunting and gathering that you have had this innovation that is keeping your grandmother alive for another 10 years.What you're describing is what I call “magical AI,” and that's not how it works. Some of the stuff is magical: the Jetsons stuff, and self-driving cars, these things that are just autopilot airplanes, we live in a world of magical science fiction and then whenever something shows up, we think, “Oh yeah, no big deal.” We had ChatGPT, now ChatGPT, no big deal?If you had taken your grandparents, your parents, and just said, “Hey, I'm going to put you behind a screen. You're going to have a conversation with something, with a voice, and you're going to do it for five hours,” and let's say they'd never heard of computers and it was all this pleasant voice. In the end they said, “You just had a five-hour conversation with a non-human, and it told you about everything and all of human history, and it wrote poems, and it gave you a recipe for kale mush or whatever you're eating,” you'd say, “Wow!” I think that we are living in that sci-fi world. It's going to get faster, but every innovation, we're not going to say, “Oh, AI did that.” We're just going to say, “Oh, that happened.”Engineering intelligence (13:53)I don't like the word “artificial intelligence” because artificial intelligence means “artificial human intelligence.” This is machine intelligence, which is inspired by the products of human intelligence, but it's a different form of intelligence . . .I sometimes feel in my own writing, and as I peruse the media, like I read a lot more about AI, the digital economy, information technology, and I feel like I certainly write much less about genetic engineering, biotechnology, which obviously is a key theme in your book. What am I missing right now that's happening that may seem normal five years from now, 10 years, but if I were to read about it now or understand it now, I'd think, “Well, that is kind of amazing.”My answer to that is kind of everything. As I said before, we are at the very beginning of this new era of life on earth where one species, among the billions that have ever lived, suddenly has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life.We have evolved by the Darwinian processes of random mutation and natural selection, and we are beginning a new phase of life, a new Cambrian Revolution, where we are creating, certainly with this novel intelligence that we are birthing — I don't like the word “artificial intelligence” because artificial intelligence means “artificial human intelligence.” This is machine intelligence, which is inspired by the products of human intelligence, but it's a different form of intelligence, just like dolphin intelligence is a different form of intelligence than human intelligence, although we are related because of our common mammalian route. That's what's happening here, and our brain function is roughly the same as it's been, certainly at least for tens of thousands of years, but the AI machine intelligence is getting smarter, and we're just experiencing it.It's become so normalized that you can even ask that question. We live in a world where we have these AI systems that are just doing more and cooler stuff every day: driving cars, you talked about discoveries, we have self-driving laboratories that are increasingly autonomous. We have machines that are increasingly writing their own code. We live in a world where machine intelligence has been boxed in these kinds of places like computers, but very soon it's coming out into the world. The AI revolution, and machine-learning revolution, and the robotics revolution are going to be intersecting relatively soon in meaningful ways.AI has advanced more quickly than robotics because it hasn't had to navigate the real world like we have. That's why I'm always so mindful of not denigrating who we are and what we stand for. Four billion years of evolution is a long time. We've learned a lot along the way, so it's going to be hard to put the AI and have it out functioning in the world, interacting in this world that we have largely, but not exclusively, created.But that's all what's coming. Some specific things: 30 years from now, my guess is many people who are listening to this podcast will be fornicating regularly with robots, and it'll be totally normal and comfortable.. . . I think some people are going to be put off by that.Yeah, some people will be put off and some people will be turned on. All I'm saying is it's going to be a mix of different —Jamie, what I would like to do is be 90 years old and be able to still take long walks, be sharp, not have my knee screaming at me. That's what I would like. Can I expect that?I think this can help, but you have to decide how to behave with your personalized robot.That's what I want. I'm looking for the achievement of human suffering. Will there be a world of less human suffering?We live in that world of less human suffering! If you just look at any metric of anything, this is the best time to be alive, and it's getting better and better. . . We're living longer, we're living healthier, we're better educated, we're more informed, we have access to more and better food. This is by far the best time to be alive, and if we don't massively screw it up, and frankly, even if we do, to a certain extent, it'll continue to get better.I write about this in Superconvergence, we're moving in healthcare from our world of generalized healthcare based on population averages to precision healthcare, to predictive and preventive. In education, some of us, like myself, you have had access to great education, but not everybody has that. We're going to have access to fantastic education, personalized education everywhere for students based on their own styles of learning, and capacities, and native languages. This is a wonderful, exciting time.We're going to get all of those things that we can hope for and we're going to get a lot of things that we can't even imagine. And there are going to be very real potential dangers, and if we want to have the good story, as I keep saying, and not have the bad story, now is the time where we need to start making the real investments.Distrust of disruption (19:44)Your job is the disruption of this thing that's come before. . . stopping the advance of progress is just not one of our options.I think some people would, when they hear about all these changes, they'd think what you're telling them is “the bad story.”I just talked about fornicating with robots, it's the bad story?Yeah, some people might find that bad story. But listen, we live at an age where people have recoiled against the disruption of trade, for instance. People are very allergic to the idea of economic disruption. I think about all the debate we had over stem cell therapy back in the early 2000s, 2002. There certainly is going to be a certain contingent that, what they're going to hear what you're saying is: you're going to change what it means to be a human. You're going to change what it means to have a job. I don't know if I want all this. I'm not asking for all this.And we've seen where that pushback has greatly changed, for instance, how we trade with other nations. Are you concerned that that pushback could create regulatory or legislative obstacles to the kind of future you're talking about?All of those things, and some of that pushback, frankly, is healthy. These are fundamental changes, but those people who are pushing back are benchmarking their own lives to the world that they were born into and, in most cases, without recognizing how radical those lives already are, if the people you're talking about are hunter-gatherers in some remote place who've not gone through domestication of agriculture, and industrialization, and all of these kinds of things, that's like, wow, you're going from being this little hunter-gatherer tribe in the middle of Atlantis and all of a sudden you're going to be in a world of gene therapy and shifting trading patterns.But the people who are saying, “Well, my job as a computer programmer, as a whatever, is going to get disrupted,” your job is the disruption. Your job is the disruption of this thing that's come before. As I said at the start of our conversation, stopping the advance of progress is just not one of our options.We could do it, and societies have done it before, and they've lost their economies, they've lost their vitality. Just go to Europe, Europe is having this crisis now because for decades they saw their economy and their society, frankly, as a museum to the past where they didn't want to change, they didn't want to think about the implications of new technologies and new trends. It's why I am just back from Italy. It's wonderful, I love visiting these little farms where they're milking the goats like they've done for centuries and making cheese they've made for centuries, but their economies are shrinking with incredible rapidity where ours and the Chinese are growing.Everybody wants to hold onto the thing that they know. It's a very natural thing, and I'm not saying we should disregard those views, but the societies that have clung too tightly to the way things were tend to lose their vitality and, ultimately, their freedom. That's what you see in the war with Russia and Ukraine. Let's just say there are people in Ukraine who said, “Let's not embrace new disruptive technologies.” Their country would disappear.We live in a competitive world where you can opt out like Europe opted out solely because they lived under the US security umbrella. And now that President Trump is threatening the withdrawal of that security umbrella, Europe is being forced to race not into the future, but to race into the present.Risk tolerance (24:08). . . experts, scientists, even governments don't have any more authority to make these decisions about the future of our species than everybody else.I certainly understand that sort of analogy, and compared to Europe, we look like a far more risk-embracing kind of society. Yet I wonder how resilient that attitude — because obviously I would've said the same thing maybe in 1968 about the United States, and yet a decade later we stopped building nuclear reactors — I wonder how resilient we are to anything going wrong, like something going on with an AI system where somebody dies. Or something that looks like a cure that kills someone. Or even, there seems to be this nuclear power revival, how resilient would that be to any kind of accident? How resilient do you think are we right now to the inevitable bumps along the way?It depends on who you mean by “we.” Let's just say “we” means America because a lot of these dawns aren't the first ones. You talked about gene therapy. This is the second dawn of gene therapy. The first dawn came crashing into a halt in 1999 when a young man at the University of Pennsylvania died as a result of an error carried out by the treating physicians using what had seemed like a revolutionary gene therapy. It's the second dawn of AI after there was a lot of disappointment. There will be accidents . . .Let's just say, hypothetically, there's an accident . . . some kind of self-driving car is going to kill somebody or whatever. And let's say there's a political movement, the Luddites that is successful, and let's just say that every self-driving car in America is attacked and destroyed by mobs and that all of the companies that are making these cars are no longer able to produce or deploy those cars. That's going to be bad for self-driving cars in America — it's not going to be bad for self-driving cars. . . They're going to be developed in some other place. There are lots of societies that have lost their vitality. That's the story of every empire that we read about in history books: there was political corruption, sclerosis. That's very much an option.I'm a patriotic American and I hope America leads these revolutions as long as we can maintain our values for many, many centuries to come, but for that to happen, we need to invest in that. Part of that is investing now so that people don't feel that they are powerless victims of these trends they have no influence over.That's why all of my work is about engaging people in the conversation about how do we deploy these technologies? Because experts, scientists, even governments don't have any more authority to make these decisions about the future of our species than everybody else. What we need to do is have broad, inclusive conversations, engage people in all kinds of processes, including governance and political processes. That's why I write the books that I do. That's why I do podcast interviews like this. My Joe Rogan interviews have reached many tens of millions of people — I know you told me before that you're much bigger than Joe Rogan, so I imagine this interview will reach more than that.I'm quite aspirational.Yeah, but that's the name of the game. With my last book tour, in the same week I spoke to the top scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the seventh and eighth graders at the Solomon Schechter Hebrew Academy of New Jersey, and they asked essentially the exact same questions about the future of human genetic engineering. These are basic human questions that everybody can understand and everybody can and should play a role and have a voice in determining the big decisions and the future of our species.To what extent is the future you're talking about dependent on continued AI advances? If this is as good as it gets, does that change the outlook at all?One, there's no conceivable way that this is as good as it gets because even if the LLMs, large language models — it's not the last word on algorithms, there will be many other philosophies of algorithms, but let's just say that LLMs are the end of the road, that we've just figured out this one thing, and that's all we ever have. Just using the technologies that we have in more creative ways is going to unleash incredible progress. But it's certain that we will continue to have innovations across the field of computer science, in energy production, in algorithm development, in the ways that we have to generate and analyze massive data pools. So we don't need any more to have the revolution that's already started, but we will have more.Politics always, ultimately, can trump everything if we get it wrong. But even then, even if . . . let's just say that the United States becomes an authoritarian, totalitarian hellhole. One, there will be technological innovation like we're seeing now even in China, and two, these are decentralized technologies, so free people elsewhere — maybe it'll be Europe, maybe it'll be Africa or whatever — will deploy these technologies and use them. These are agnostic technologies. They don't have, as I said at the start, an inevitable outcome, and that's why the name of the game for us is to weave our best values into this journey.What is a “newnimal”? (30:11). . . we don't live in a state of nature, we live in a world that has been massively bio-engineered by our ancestors, and that's just the thing that we call life.When I was preparing for this interview and my research assistant was preparing, I said, “We have to have a question about bio-engineered new animals.” One, because I couldn't pronounce your name for these . . . newminals? So pronounce that name and tell me why we want these.It's a made up word, so you can pronounce it however you want. “Newnimals” is as good as anything.We already live in a world of bio-engineered animals. Go back 50,000 years, find me a dog, find me a corn that is recognizable, find me rice, find me wheat, find me a cow that looks remotely like the cow in your local dairy. We already live in that world, it's just people assume that our bioengineered world is some kind of state of nature. We already live in a world where the size of a broiler chicken has tripled over the last 70 years. What we have would have been unrecognizable to our grandparents.We are already genetically modifying animals through breeding, and now we're at the beginning of wanting to have whatever those same modifications are, whether it's producing more milk, producing more meat, living in hotter environments and not dying, or whatever it is that we're aiming for in these animals that we have for a very long time seen not as ends in themselves, but means to the alternate end of our consumption.We're now in the early stages xenotransplantation, modifying the hearts, and livers, and kidneys of pigs so they can be used for human transplantation. I met one of the women who has received — and seems to so far to be thriving — a genetically modified pig kidney. We have 110,000 people in the United States on the waiting list for transplant organs. I really want these people not just to survive, but to survive and thrive. That's another area we can grow.Right now . . . in the world, we slaughter about 93 billion land animals per year. We consume 200 million metric tons of fish. That's a lot of murder, that's a lot of risk of disease. It's a lot of deforestation and destruction of the oceans. We can already do this, but if and when we can grow bioidentical animal products at scale without having all of these negative externalities of whether it's climate change, environmental change, cruelty, deforestation, increased pandemic risk, what a wonderful thing to do!So we have these technologies and you mentioned that people are worried about them, but the reason people are worried about them is they're imagining that right now we live in some kind of unfettered state of nature and we're going to ruin it. But that's why I say we don't live in a state of nature, we live in a world that has been massively bio-engineered by our ancestors, and that's just the thing that we call life.Inspired by curiosity (33:42). . . the people who I love and most admire are the people who are just insatiably curious . . .What sort of forward thinkers, or futurists, or strategic thinkers of the past do you model yourself on, do you think are still worth reading, inspired you?Oh my God, so many, and the people who I love and most admire are the people who are just insatiably curious, who are saying, “I'm going to just look at the world, I'm going to collect data, and I know that everybody says X, but it may be true, it may not be true.” That is the entire history of science. That's Galileo, that's Charles Darwin, who just went around and said, “Hey, with an open mind, how am I going to look at the world and come up with theses?” And then he thought, “Oh s**t, this story that I'm coming up with for how life advances is fundamentally different from what everybody in my society believes and organizes their lives around.” Meaning, in my mind, that's the model, and there are so many people, and that's the great thing about being human.That's what's so exciting about this moment is that everybody has access to these super-empowered tools. We have eight billion humans, but about two billion of those people are just kind of locked out because of crappy education, and poor water sanitation, electricity. We're on the verge of having everybody who has a smartphone has the possibility of getting a world-class personalized education in their own language. How many new innovations will we have when little kids who were in slums in India, or in Pakistan, or in Nairobi, or wherever who have promise can educate themselves, and grow up and cure cancers, or invent new machines, or new algorithms. This is pretty exciting.The summary of the people from the past, they're kind of like the people in the present that I admire the most, are the people who are just insatiably curious and just learning, and now we have a real opportunity so that everybody can be their own Darwin.On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were PromisedMicro Reads▶ Economics* AI Hype Is Proving to Be a Solow's Paradox - Bberg Opinion* Trump Considers Naming Next Fed Chair Early in Bid to Undermine Powell - WSJ* Who Needs the G7? - PS* Advances in AI will boost productivity, living standards over time - Dallas Fed* Industrial Policy via Venture Capital - SSRN* Economic Sentiment and the Role of the Labor Market - St. Louis Fed▶ Business* AI valuations are verging on the unhinged - Economist* Nvidia shares hit record high on renewed AI optimism - FT* OpenAI, Microsoft Rift Hinges on How Smart AI Can Get - WSJ* Takeaways From Hard Fork's Interview With OpenAI's Sam Altman - NYT* Thatcher's legacy endures in Labour's industrial strategy - FT* Reddit vows to stay human to emerge a winner from artificial intelligence - FT▶ Policy/Politics* Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models - Ars* Don't Let Silicon Valley Move Fast and Break Children's Minds - NYT Opinion* Is DOGE doomed to fail? Some experts are ready to call it. - Ars* The US is failing its green tech ‘Sputnik moment' - FT▶ AI/Digital* Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce - Arxiv* Is the Fed Ready for an AI Economy? - WSJ Opinion* How Much Energy Does Your AI Prompt Use? I Went to a Data Center to Find Out. - WSJ* Meta Poaches Three OpenAI Researchers - WSJ* AI Agents Are Getting Better at Writing Code—and Hacking It as Well - Wired* Exploring the Capabilities of the Frontier Large Language Models for Nuclear Energy Research - Arxiv▶ Biotech/Health* Google's new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work - MIT* Does using ChatGPT change your brain activity? Study sparks debate - Nature* We cure cancer with genetic engineering but ban it on the farm. - ImmunoLogic* ChatGPT and OCD are a dangerous combo - Vox▶ Clean Energy/Climate* Is It Too Soon for Ocean-Based Carbon Credits? - Heatmap* The AI Boom Can Give Rooftop Solar a New Pitch - Bberg Opinion▶ Robotics/Drones/AVs* Tesla's Robotaxi Launch Shows Google's Waymo Is Worth More Than $45 Billion - WSJ* OpenExo: An open-source modular exoskeleton to augment human function - Science Robotics▶ Space/Transportation* Bezos and Blue Origin Try to Capitalize on Trump-Musk Split - WSJ* Giant asteroid could crash into moon in 2032, firing debris towards Earth - The Guardian▶ Up Wing/Down Wing* New Yorkers Vote to Make Their Housing Shortage Worse - WSJ* We Need More Millionaires and Billionaires in Latin America - Bberg Opinion▶ Substacks/Newsletters* Student visas are a critical pipeline for high-skilled, highly-paid talent - AgglomerationsState Power Without State Capacity - Breakthrough JournalFaster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Original Air Date: 2-20-2024 "Luddite" should never have become the epithet that it is as the Luddites were never afraid of or opposed to technological advancement, they only opposed the exploitation of workers and the degradation to society that came with the unfair distribution of the benefits of the targeted technology. Be part of the show! Leave us a message or text at 202-999-3991, message us on the infamous Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Full Show Notes Check out our new show, SOLVED! on YouTube! BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus Shows + No Ads!) Use our links to shop Bookshop.org and Libro.fm for a non-evil book and audiobook purchasing experience! Join our Discord community! SHOW NOTES Ch. 1: The New Luddites - SHIFT - Air Date 2-14-24 Ch. 2: Being a Luddite Is Good, Actually ft. Jathan Sadowski - Left Reckoning - Air Date 5-29-21 Ch. 3: Why this top AI guru thinks we might be in extinction-level trouble | The InnerView - TRT World - Air Date 1-22-24 Ch. 4: This is not good - jstoobs (TikTok) - Air Date 2-16-24 Ch. 5: The ACTUAL Danger of A.I. with Gary Marcus Part 1 - Factually! - Air Date 7-2-23 Ch. 6: The Left Luddites and the AI Accelerationists - torres - Air Date - 5-15-23 Ch. 7: Luddites Show Us The Politics Of Technology | Brian Merchant - The Majority Report - Air Date 11-21-23 Ch. 8: The ACTUAL Danger of A.I. with Gary Marcus Part 2 - Factually! - Air Date 7-2-23 Ch. 9: The anti-tech movement is back. - Alice Cappelle - Air Date 6-15-22 MUSIC (Blue Dot Sessions) SHOW IMAGE:  Description: An 1812 block print of “The Leader of the Luddites” depicting a man in disheveled early 1800s clothing and missing one shoe leading other men up a hill while a building burns in the background.  Credit: “The Leader of the Luddites”, Messrs | Working Class Movement Library catalog | Public Domain Produced by Jay! Tomlinson Visit us at BestOfTheLeft.com Listen Anywhere! BestOfTheLeft.com/Listen Listen Anywhere! Follow BotL: Bluesky | Mastodon | Threads | X Like at Facebook.com/BestOfTheLeft Contact me directly at Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . I am talking with Drs. Emily Bender and Alex Hanna, authors of the upcoming book, The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, and also co-hosts of the live podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. Emily is well known for coining the term “stochastic parrots” in a 2021 paper as a label for generative AI. She is a linguistics professor and director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory at the University of Washington and was among the inaugural Time AI 100. Alex is a sociologist who looks at how the data that fuels AI technologies exacerbates racial, gender, and class inequality. She is Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Applied Transgender Studies. In part 2, we talk about the dangers of uncritical naming, anthropomorphizing, Luddites and bespoke crafting, the effects of synthetic content on interpersonal communications, capitalism, and collective action strategies.  All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.        

Yesterday, the self-styled San Francisco “progressive” Joan Williams was on the show arguing that Democrats need to relearn the language of the American working class. But, as some of you have noted, Williams seems oblivious to the fact that politics is about more than simply aping other people's language. What you say matters, and the language of American working class, like all industrial working classes, is rooted in a critique of capitalism. She should probably read the New Yorker staff writer John Cassidy's excellent new book, Capitalism and its Critics, which traces capitalism's evolution and criticism from the East India Company through modern times. He defines capitalism as production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets, encompassing various forms from Chinese state capitalism to hyper-globalization. The book examines capitalism's most articulate critics including the Luddites, Marx, Engels, Thomas Carlisle, Adam Smith, Rosa Luxemburg, Keynes & Hayek, and contemporary figures like Sylvia Federici and Thomas Piketty. Cassidy explores how major economists were often critics of their era's dominant capitalist model, and untangles capitalism's complicated relationship with colonialism, slavery and AI which he regards as a potentially unprecedented economic disruption. This should be essential listening for all Democrats seeking to reinvent a post Biden-Harris party and message. 5 key takeaways* Capitalism has many forms - From Chinese state capitalism to Keynesian managed capitalism to hyper-globalization, all fitting the basic definition of production for profit by privately-owned companies in markets.* Great economists are typically critics - Smith criticized mercantile capitalism, Keynes critiqued laissez-faire capitalism, and Hayek/Friedman opposed managed capitalism. Each generation's leading economists challenge their era's dominant model.* Modern corporate structure has deep roots - The East India Company was essentially a modern multinational corporation with headquarters, board of directors, stockholders, and even a private army - showing capitalism's organizational continuity across centuries.* Capitalism is intertwined with colonialism and slavery - Industrial capitalism was built on pre-existing colonial and slave systems, particularly through the cotton industry and plantation economies.* AI represents a potentially unprecedented disruption - Unlike previous technological waves, AI may substitute rather than complement human labor on a massive scale, potentially creating political backlash exceeding even the "China shock" that contributed to Trump's rise.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Full TranscriptAndrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A couple of days ago, we did a show with Joan Williams. She has a new book out, "Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back." A book about language, about how to talk to the American working class. She also had a piece in Jacobin Magazine, an anti-capitalist magazine, about how the left needs to speak to what she calls average American values. We talked, of course, about Bernie Sanders and AOC and their language of fighting oligarchy, and the New York Times followed that up with "The Enduring Power of Anti-Capitalism in American Politics."But of course, that brings the question: what exactly is capitalism? I did a little bit of research. We can find definitions of capitalism from AI, from Wikipedia, even from online dictionaries, but I thought we might do a little better than relying on Wikipedia and come to a man who's given capitalism and its critics a great deal of thought. John Cassidy is well known as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He's the author of a wonderful book, the best book, actually, on the dot-com insanity. And his new book, "Capitalism and its Critics," is out this week. John, congratulations on the book.So I've got to be a bit of a schoolmaster with you, John, and get some definitions first. What exactly is capitalism before we get to criticism of it?John Cassidy: Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question, Andrew. Obviously, through the decades, even the centuries, there have been many different definitions of the term capitalism and there are different types of capitalism. To not be sort of too ideological about it, the working definition I use is basically production for profit—that could be production of goods or mostly in the new and, you know, in today's economy, production of services—for profit by companies which are privately owned in markets. That's a very sort of all-encompassing definition.Within that, you can have all sorts of different types of capitalism. You can have Chinese state capitalism, you can have the old mercantilism, which industrial capitalism came after, which Trump seems to be trying to resurrect. You can have Keynesian managed capitalism that we had for 30 or 40 years after the Second World War, which I grew up in in the UK. Or you can have sort of hyper-globalization, hyper-capitalism that we've tried for the last 30 years. There are all those different varieties of capitalism consistent with a basic definition, I think.Andrew Keen: That keeps you busy, John. I know you started this project, which is a big book and it's a wonderful book. I read it. I don't always read all the books I have on the show, but I read from cover to cover full of remarkable stories of the critics of capitalism. You note in the beginning that you began this in 2016 with the beginnings of Trump. What was it about the 2016 election that triggered a book about capitalism and its critics?John Cassidy: Well, I was reporting on it at the time for The New Yorker and it struck me—I covered, I basically covered the economy in various forms for various publications since the late 80s, early 90s. In fact, one of my first big stories was the stock market crash of '87. So yes, I am that old. But it seemed to me in 2016 when you had Bernie Sanders running from the left and Trump running from the right, but both in some way offering very sort of similar critiques of capitalism. People forget that Trump in 2016 actually was running from the left of the Republican Party. He was attacking big business. He was attacking Wall Street. He doesn't do that these days very much, but at the time he was very much posing as the sort of outsider here to protect the interests of the average working man.And it seemed to me that when you had this sort of pincer movement against the then ruling model, this wasn't just a one-off. It seemed to me it was a sort of an emerging crisis of legitimacy for the system. And I thought there could be a good book written about how we got to here. And originally I thought it would be a relatively short book just based on the last sort of 20 or 30 years since the collapse of the Cold War and the sort of triumphalism of the early 90s.But as I got into it more and more, I realized that so many of the issues which had been raised, things like globalization, rising inequality, monopoly power, exploitation, even pollution and climate change, these issues go back to the very start of the capitalist system or the industrial capitalist system back in sort of late 18th century, early 19th century Britain. So I thought, in the end, I thought, you know what, let's just do the whole thing soup to nuts through the eyes of the critics.There have obviously been many, many histories of capitalism written. I thought that an original way to do it, or hopefully original, would be to do a sort of a narrative through the lives and the critiques of the critics of various stages. So that's, I hope, what sets it apart from other books on the subject, and also provides a sort of narrative frame because, you know, I am a New Yorker writer, I realize if you want people to read things, you've got to make it readable. Easiest way to make things readable is to center them around people. People love reading about other people. So that's sort of the narrative frame. I start off with a whistleblower from the East India Company back in the—Andrew Keen: Yeah, I want to come to that. But before, John, my sense is that to simplify what you're saying, this is a labor of love. You're originally from Leeds, the heart of Yorkshire, the center of the very industrial revolution, the first industrial revolution where, in your historical analysis, capitalism was born. Is it a labor of love? What's your family relationship with capitalism? How long was the family in Leeds?John Cassidy: Right, I mean that's a very good question. It is a labor of love in a way, but it's not—our family doesn't go—I'm from an Irish family, family of Irish immigrants who moved to England in the 1940s and 1950s. So my father actually did start working in a big mill, the Kirkstall Forge in Leeds, which is a big steel mill, and he left after seeing one of his co-workers have his arms chopped off in one of the machinery, so he decided it wasn't for him and he spent his life working in the construction industry, which was dominated by immigrants as it is here now.So I don't have a—it's not like I go back to sort of the start of the industrial revolution, but I did grow up in the middle of Leeds, very working class, very industrial neighborhood. And what a sort of irony is, I'll point out, I used to, when I was a kid, I used to play golf on a municipal golf course called Gotts Park in Leeds, which—you know, most golf courses in America are sort of in the affluent suburbs, country clubs. This was right in the middle of Armley in Leeds, which is where the Victorian jail is and a very rough neighborhood. There's a small bit of land which they built a golf course on. It turns out it was named after one of the very first industrialists, Benjamin Gott, who was a wool and textile industrialist, and who played a part in the Luddite movement, which I mention.So it turns out, I was there when I was 11 or 12, just learning how to play golf on this scrappy golf course. And here I am, 50 years later, writing about Benjamin Gott at the start of the Industrial Revolution. So yeah, no, sure. I think it speaks to me in a way that perhaps it wouldn't to somebody else from a different background.Andrew Keen: We did a show with William Dalrymple, actually, a couple of years ago. He's been on actually since, the Anglo or Scottish Indian historian. His book on the East India Company, "The Anarchy," is a classic. You begin in some ways your history of capitalism with the East India Company. What was it about the East India Company, John, that makes it different from other for-profit organizations in economic, Western economic history?John Cassidy: I mean, I read that. It's a great book, by the way. That was actually quoted in my chapter on these. Yeah, I remember. I mean, the reason I focused on it was for two reasons. Number one, I was looking for a start, a narrative start to the book. And it seemed to me, you know, the obvious place to start is with the start of the industrial revolution. If you look at economics history textbooks, that's where they always start with Arkwright and all the inventors, you know, who were the sort of techno-entrepreneurs of their time, the sort of British Silicon Valley, if you could think of it as, in Lancashire and Derbyshire in the late 18th century.So I knew I had to sort of start there in some way, but I thought that's a bit pat. Is there another way into it? And it turns out that in 1772 in England, there was a huge bailout of the East India Company, very much like the sort of 2008, 2009 bailout of Wall Street. The company got into trouble. So I thought, you know, maybe there's something there. And I eventually found this guy, William Bolts, who worked for the East India Company, turned into a whistleblower after he was fired for finagling in India like lots of the people who worked for the company did.So that gave me two things. Number one, it gave me—you know, I'm a writer, so it gave me something to focus on a narrative. His personal history is very interesting. But number two, it gave me a sort of foundation because industrial capitalism didn't come from nowhere. You know, it was built on top of a pre-existing form of capitalism, which we now call mercantile capitalism, which was very protectionist, which speaks to us now. But also it had these big monopolistic multinational companies.The East India Company, in some ways, was a very modern corporation. It had a headquarters in Leadenhall Street in the city of London. It had a board of directors, it had stockholders, the company sent out very detailed instructions to the people in the field in India and Indonesia and Malaysia who were traders who bought things from the locals there, brought them back to England on their company ships. They had a company army even to enforce—to protect their operations there. It was an incredible multinational corporation.So that was also, I think, fascinating because it showed that even in the pre-existing system, you know, big corporations existed, there were monopolies, they had royal monopolies given—first the East India Company got one from Queen Elizabeth. But in some ways, they were very similar to modern monopolistic corporations. And they had some of the problems we've seen with modern monopolistic corporations, the way they acted. And Bolts was the sort of first corporate whistleblower, I thought. Yeah, that was a way of sort of getting into the story, I think. Hopefully, you know, it's just a good read, I think.William Bolts's story because he was—he came from nowhere, he was Dutch, he wasn't even English and he joined the company as a sort of impoverished young man, went to India like a lot of English minor aristocrats did to sort of make your fortune. The way the company worked, you had to sort of work on company time and make as much money as you could for the company, but then in your spare time you're allowed to trade for yourself. So a lot of the—without getting into too much detail, but you know, English aristocracy was based on—you know, the eldest child inherits everything, so if you were the younger brother of the Duke of Norfolk, you actually didn't inherit anything. So all of these minor aristocrats, so major aristocrats, but who weren't first born, joined the East India Company, went out to India and made a fortune, and then came back and built huge houses. Lots of the great manor houses in southern England were built by people from the East India Company and they were known as Nabobs, which is an Indian term. So they were the sort of, you know, billionaires of their time, and it was based on—as I say, it wasn't based on industrial capitalism, it was based on mercantile capitalism.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the beginning of the book, which focuses on Bolts and the East India Company, brings to mind for me two things. Firstly, the intimacy of modern capitalism, modern industrial capitalism with colonialism and of course slavery—lots of books have been written on that. Touch on this and also the relationship between the birth of capitalism and the birth of liberalism or democracy. John Stuart Mill, of course, the father in many ways of Western democracy. His day job, ironically enough, or perhaps not ironically, was at the East India Company. So how do those two things connect, or is it just coincidental?John Cassidy: Well, I don't think it is entirely coincidental, I mean, J.S. Mill—his father, James Mill, was also a well-known philosopher in the sort of, obviously, in the earlier generation, earlier than him. And he actually wrote the official history of the East India Company. And I think they gave his son, the sort of brilliant protégé, J.S. Mill, a job as largely as a sort of sinecure, I think. But he did go in and work there in the offices three or four days a week.But I think it does show how sort of integral—the sort of—as you say, the inheritor and the servant in Britain, particularly, of colonial capitalism was. So the East India Company was, you know, it was in decline by that stage in the middle of the 19th century, but it didn't actually give up its monopoly. It wasn't forced to give up its monopoly on the Indian trade until 1857, after, you know, some notorious massacres and there was a sort of public outcry.So yeah, no, that's—it's very interesting that the British—it's sort of unique to Britain in a way, but it's interesting that industrial capitalism arose alongside this pre-existing capitalist structure and somebody like Mill is a sort of paradoxical figure because actually he was quite critical of aspects of industrial capitalism and supported sort of taxes on the rich, even though he's known as the great, you know, one of the great apostles of the free market and free market liberalism. And his day job, as you say, he was working for the East India Company.Andrew Keen: What about the relationship between the birth of industrial capitalism, colonialism and slavery? Those are big questions and I know you deal with them in some—John Cassidy: I think you can't just write an economic history of capitalism now just starting with the cotton industry and say, you know, it was all about—it was all about just technical progress and gadgets, etc. It was built on a sort of pre-existing system which was colonial and, you know, the slave trade was a central element of that. Now, as you say, there have been lots and lots of books written about it, the whole 1619 project got an incredible amount of attention a few years ago. So I didn't really want to rehash all that, but I did want to acknowledge the sort of role of slavery, especially in the rise of the cotton industry because of course, a lot of the raw cotton was grown in the plantations in the American South.So the way I actually ended up doing that was by writing a chapter about Eric Williams, a Trinidadian writer who ended up as the Prime Minister of Trinidad when it became independent in the 1960s. But when he was younger, he wrote a book which is now regarded as a classic. He went to Oxford to do a PhD, won a scholarship. He was very smart. I won a sort of Oxford scholarship myself but 50 years before that, he came across the Atlantic and did an undergraduate degree in history and then did a PhD there and his PhD thesis was on slavery and capitalism.And at the time, in the 1930s, the link really wasn't acknowledged. You could read any sort of standard economic history written by British historians, and they completely ignored that. He made the argument that, you know, slavery was integral to the rise of capitalism and he basically started an argument which has been raging ever since the 1930s and, you know, if you want to study economic history now you have to sort of—you know, have to have to address that. And the way I thought, even though the—it's called the Williams thesis is very famous. I don't think many people knew much about where it came from. So I thought I'd do a chapter on—Andrew Keen: Yeah, that chapter is excellent. You mentioned earlier the Luddites, you're from Yorkshire where Luddism in some ways was born. One of the early chapters is on the Luddites. We did a show with Brian Merchant, his book, "Blood in the Machine," has done very well, I'm sure you're familiar with it. I always understood the Luddites as being against industrialization, against the machine, as opposed to being against capitalism. But did those two things get muddled together in the history of the Luddites?John Cassidy: I think they did. I mean, you know, Luddites, when we grew up, I mean you're English too, you know to be called a Luddite was a term of abuse, right? You know, you were sort of antediluvian, anti-technology, you're stupid. It was only, I think, with the sort of computer revolution, the tech revolution of the last 30, 40 years and the sort of disruptions it's caused, that people have started to look back at the Luddites and say, perhaps they had a point.For them, they were basically pre-industrial capitalism artisans. They worked for profit-making concerns, small workshops. Some of them worked for themselves, so they were sort of sole proprietor capitalists. Or they worked in small venues, but the rise of industrial capitalism, factory capitalism or whatever, basically took away their livelihoods progressively. So they associated capitalism with new technology. In their minds it was the same. But their argument wasn't really a technological one or even an economic one, it was more a moral one. They basically made the moral argument that capitalists shouldn't have the right to just take away their livelihoods with no sort of recompense for them.At the time they didn't have any parliamentary representation. You know, they weren't revolutionaries. The first thing they did was create petitions to try and get parliament to step in, sort of introduce some regulation here. They got turned down repeatedly by the sort of—even though it was a very aristocratic parliament, places like Manchester and Leeds didn't have any representation at all. So it was only after that that they sort of turned violent and started, you know, smashing machines and machines, I think, were sort of symbols of the system, which they saw as morally unjust.And I think that's sort of what—obviously, there's, you know, a lot of technological disruption now, so we can, especially as it starts to come for the educated cognitive class, we can sort of sympathize with them more. But I think the sort of moral critique that there's this, you know, underneath the sort of great creativity and economic growth that capitalism produces, there is also a lot of destruction and a lot of victims. And I think that message, you know, is becoming a lot more—that's why I think why they've been rediscovered in the last five or ten years and I'm one of the people I guess contributing to that rediscovery.Andrew Keen: There's obviously many critiques of capitalism politically. I want to come to Marx in a second, but your chapter, I thought, on Thomas Carlyle and this nostalgic conservatism was very important and there are other conservatives as well. John, do you think that—and you mentioned Trump earlier, who is essentially a nostalgist for a—I don't know, some sort of bizarre pre-capitalist age in America. Is there something particularly powerful about the anti-capitalism of romantics like Carlyle, 19th century Englishman, there were many others of course.John Cassidy: Well, I think so. I mean, I think what is—conservatism, when we were young anyway, was associated with Thatcherism and Reaganism, which, you know, lionized the free market and free market capitalism and was a reaction against the pre-existing form of capitalism, Keynesian capitalism of the sort of 40s to the 80s. But I think what got lost in that era was the fact that there have always been—you've got Hayek up there, obviously—Andrew Keen: And then Keynes and Hayek, the two—John Cassidy: Right, it goes to the end of that. They had a great debate in the 1930s about these issues. But Hayek really wasn't a conservative person, and neither was Milton Friedman. They were sort of free market revolutionaries, really, that you'd let the market rip and it does good things. And I think that that sort of a view, you know, it just became very powerful. But we sort of lost sight of the fact that there was also a much older tradition of sort of suspicion of radical changes of any type. And that was what conservatism was about to some extent. If you think about Baldwin in Britain, for example.And there was a sort of—during the Industrial Revolution, some of the strongest supporters of factory acts to reduce hours and hourly wages for women and kids were actually conservatives, Tories, as they were called at the time, like Ashley. That tradition, Carlyle was a sort of extreme representative of that. I mean, Carlyle was a sort of proto-fascist, let's not romanticize him, he lionized strongmen, Frederick the Great, and he didn't really believe in democracy. But he also had—he was appalled by the sort of, you know, the—like, what's the phrase I'm looking for? The sort of destructive aspects of industrial capitalism, both on the workers, you know, he said it was a dehumanizing system, sounded like Marx in some ways. That it dehumanized the workers, but also it destroyed the environment.He was an early environmentalist. He venerated the environment, was actually very strongly linked to the transcendentalists in America, people like Thoreau, who went to visit him when he visited Britain and he saw the sort of destructive impact that capitalism was having locally in places like Manchester, which were filthy with filthy rivers, etc. So he just saw the whole system as sort of morally bankrupt and he was a great writer, Carlyle, whatever you think of him. Great user of language, so he has these great ringing phrases like, you know, the cash nexus or calling it the Gospel of Mammonism, the shabbiest gospel ever preached under the sun was industrial capitalism.So, again, you know, that's a sort of paradoxical thing, because I think for so long conservatism was associated with, you know, with support for the free market and still is in most of the Republican Party, but then along comes Trump and sort of conquers the party with a, you know, more skeptical, as you say, romantic, not really based on any reality, but a sort of romantic view that America can stand by itself in the world. I mean, I see Trump actually as a sort of an effort to sort of throw back to mercantile capitalism in a way. You know, which was not just pre-industrial, but was also pre-democracy, run by monarchs, which I'm sure appeals to him, and it was based on, you know, large—there were large tariffs. You couldn't import things in the UK. If you want to import anything to the UK, you have to send it on a British ship because of the navigation laws. It was a very protectionist system and it's actually, you know, as I said, had a lot of parallels with what Trump's trying to do or tries to do until he backs off.Andrew Keen: You cheat a little bit in the book in the sense that you—everyone has their own chapter. We'll talk a little bit about Hayek and Smith and Lenin and Friedman. You do have one chapter on Marx, but you also have a chapter on Engels. So you kind of cheat. You combine the two. Is it possible, though, to do—and you've just written this book, so you know this as well as anyone. How do you write a book about capitalism and its critics and only really give one chapter to Marx, who is so dominant? I mean, you've got lots of Marxists in the book, including Lenin and Luxemburg. How fundamental is Marx to a criticism of capitalism? Is most criticism, especially from the left, from progressives, is it really just all a footnote to Marx?John Cassidy: I wouldn't go that far, but I think obviously on the left he is the central figure. But there's an element of sort of trying to rebuild Engels a bit in this. I mean, I think of Engels and Marx—I mean obviously Marx wrote the great classic "Capital," etc. But in the 1840s, when they both started writing about capitalism, Engels was sort of ahead of Marx in some ways. I mean, the sort of materialist concept, the idea that economics rules everything, Engels actually was the first one to come up with that in an essay in the 1840s which Marx then published in one of his—in the German newspaper he worked for at the time, radical newspaper, and he acknowledged openly that that was really what got him thinking seriously about economics, and even in the late—in 20, 25 years later when he wrote "Capital," all three volumes of it and the Grundrisse, just these enormous outpourings of analysis on capitalism.He acknowledged Engels's role in that and obviously Engels wrote the first draft of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 too, which Marx then topped and tailed and—he was a better writer obviously, Marx, and he gave it the dramatic language that we all know it for. So I think Engels and Marx together obviously are the central sort of figures in the sort of left-wing critique. But they didn't start out like that. I mean, they were very obscure, you've got to remember.You know, they were—when they were writing, Marx was writing "Capital" in London, it never even got published in English for another 20 years. It was just published in German. He was basically an expat. He had been thrown out of Germany, he had been thrown out of France, so England was last resort and the British didn't consider him a threat so they were happy to let him and the rest of the German sort of left in there. I think it became—it became the sort of epochal figure after his death really, I think, when he was picked up by the left-wing parties, which are especially the SPD in Germany, which was the first sort of socialist mass party and was officially Marxist until the First World War and there were great internal debates.And then of course, because Lenin and the Russians came out of that tradition too, Marxism then became the official doctrine of the Soviet Union when they adopted a version of it. And again there were massive internal arguments about what Marx really meant, and in fact, you know, one interpretation of the last 150 years of left-wing sort of intellectual development is as a sort of argument about what did Marx really mean and what are the important bits of it, what are the less essential bits of it. It's a bit like the "what did Keynes really mean" that you get in liberal circles.So yeah, Marx, obviously, this is basically an intellectual history of critiques of capitalism. In that frame, he is absolutely a central figure. Why didn't I give him more space than a chapter and a chapter and a half with Engels? There have been a million books written about Marx. I mean, it's not that—it's not that he's an unknown figure. You know, there's a best-selling book written in Britain about 20 years ago about him and then I was quoting, in my biographical research, I relied on some more recent, more scholarly biographies. So he's an endlessly fascinating figure but I didn't want him to dominate the book so I gave him basically the same space as everybody else.Andrew Keen: You've got, as I said, you've got a chapter on Adam Smith who's often considered the father of economics. You've got a chapter on Keynes. You've got a chapter on Friedman. And you've got a chapter on Hayek, all the great modern economists. Is it possible, John, to be a distinguished economist one way or the other and not be a critic of capitalism?John Cassidy: Well, I don't—I mean, I think history would suggest that the greatest economists have been critics of capitalism in their own time. People would say to me, what the hell have you got Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in a book about critics of capitalism? They were great exponents, defenders of capitalism. They loved the system. That is perfectly true. But in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, middle of the 20th century, they were actually arch-critics of the ruling form of capitalism at the time, which was what I call managed capitalism. What some people call Keynesianism, what other people call European social democracy, whatever you call it, it was a model of a mixed economy in which the government played a large role both in propping up demand and in providing an extensive social safety net in the UK and providing public healthcare and public education. It was a sort of hybrid model.Most of the economy in terms of the businesses remained in private hands. So most production was capitalistic. It was a capitalist system. They didn't go to the Soviet model of nationalizing everything and Britain did nationalize some businesses, but most places didn't. The US of course didn't but it was a form of managed capitalism. And Hayek and Friedman were both great critics of that and wanted to sort of move back to 19th century laissez-faire model.Keynes was a—was actually a great, I view him anyway, as really a sort of late Victorian liberal and was trying to protect as much of the sort of J.S. Mill view of the world as he could, but he thought capitalism had one fatal flaw: that it tended to fall into recessions and then they can snowball and the whole system can collapse which is what had basically happened in the early 1930s until Keynesian policies were adopted. Keynes sort of differed from a lot of his followers—I have a chapter on Joan Robinson in there, who were pretty left-wing and wanted to sort of use Keynesianism as a way to shift the economy quite far to the left. Keynes didn't really believe in that. He has a famous quote that, you know, once you get to full employment, you can then rely on the free market to sort of take care of things. He was still a liberal at heart.Going back to Adam Smith, why is he in a book on criticism of capitalism? And again, it goes back to what I said at the beginning. He actually wrote "The Wealth of Nations"—he explains in the introduction—as a critique of mercantile capitalism. His argument was that he was a pro-free trader, pro-small business, free enterprise. His argument was if you get the government out of the way, we don't need these government-sponsored monopolies like the East India Company. If you just rely on the market, the sort of market forces and competition will produce a good outcome. So then he was seen as a great—you know, he is then seen as the apostle of free market capitalism. I mean when I started as a young reporter, when I used to report in Washington, all the conservatives used to wear Adam Smith badges. You don't see Donald Trump wearing an Adam Smith badge, but that was the case.He was also—the other aspect of Smith, which I highlight, which is not often remarked on—he's also a critic of big business. He has a famous section where he discusses the sort of tendency of any group of more than three businessmen when they get together to try and raise prices and conspire against consumers. And he was very suspicious of, as I say, large companies, monopolies. I think if Adam Smith existed today, I mean, I think he would be a big supporter of Lina Khan and the sort of antitrust movement, he would say capitalism is great as long as you have competition, but if you don't have competition it becomes, you know, exploitative.Andrew Keen: Yeah, if Smith came back to live today, you have a chapter on Thomas Piketty, maybe he may not be French, but he may be taking that position about how the rich benefit from the structure of investment. Piketty's core—I've never had Piketty on the show, but I've had some of his followers like Emmanuel Saez from Berkeley. Yeah. How powerful is Piketty's critique of capitalism within the context of the classical economic analysis from Hayek and Friedman? Yeah, it's a very good question.John Cassidy: It's a very good question. I mean, he's a very paradoxical figure, Piketty, in that he obviously shot to world fame and stardom with his book on capital in the 21st century, which in some ways he obviously used the capital as a way of linking himself to Marx, even though he said he never read Marx. But he was basically making the same argument that if you leave capitalism unrestrained and don't do anything about monopolies etc. or wealth, you're going to get massive inequality and he—I think his great contribution, Piketty and the school of people, one of them you mentioned, around him was we sort of had a vague idea that inequality was going up and that, you know, wages were stagnating, etc.What he and his colleagues did is they produced these sort of scientific empirical studies showing in very simple to understand terms how the sort of share of income and wealth of the top 10 percent, the top 5 percent, the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent basically skyrocketed from the 1970s to about 2010. And it was, you know, he was an MIT PhD. Saez, who you mentioned, is a Berkeley professor. They were schooled in neoclassical economics at Harvard and MIT and places like that. So the right couldn't dismiss them as sort of, you know, lefties or Trots or whatever who're just sort of making this stuff up. They had to acknowledge that this was actually an empirical reality.I think it did change the whole basis of the debate and it was sort of part of this reaction against capitalism in the 2010s. You know it was obviously linked to the sort of Sanders and the Occupy Wall Street movement at the time. It came out of the—you know, the financial crisis as well when Wall Street disgraced itself. I mean, I wrote a previous book on all that, but people have sort of, I think, forgotten the great reaction against that a decade ago, which I think even Trump sort of exploited, as I say, by using anti-banker rhetoric at the time.So, Piketty was a great figure, I think, from, you know, I was thinking, who are the most influential critics of capitalism in the 21st century? And I think you'd have to put him up there on the list. I'm not saying he's the only one or the most eminent one. But I think he is a central figure. Now, of course, you'd think, well, this is a really powerful critic of capitalism, and nobody's going to pick up, and Bernie's going to take off and everything. But here we are a decade later now. It seems to be what the backlash has produced is a swing to the right, not a swing to the left. So that's, again, a sort of paradox.Andrew Keen: One person I didn't expect to come up in the book, John, and I was fascinated with this chapter, is Silvia Federici. I've tried to get her on the show. We've had some books about her writing and her kind of—I don't know, you treat her critique as a feminist one. The role of women. Why did you choose to write a chapter about Federici and that feminist critique of capitalism?John Cassidy: Right, right. Well, I don't think it was just feminist. I'll explain what I think it was. Two reasons. Number one, I wanted to get more women into the book. I mean, it's in some sense, it is a history of economics and economic critiques. And they are overwhelmingly written by men and women were sort of written out of the narrative of capitalism for a very long time. So I tried to include as many sort of women as actual thinkers as I could and I have a couple of early socialist feminist thinkers, Anna Wheeler and Flora Tristan and then I cover some of the—I cover Rosa Luxemburg as the great sort of tribune of the left revolutionary socialist, communist whatever you want to call it. Anti-capitalist I think is probably also important to note about. Yeah, and then I also have Joan Robinson, but I wanted somebody to do something in the modern era, and I thought Federici, in the world of the Wages for Housework movement, is very interesting from two perspectives.Number one, Federici herself is a Marxist, and I think she probably would still consider herself a revolutionary. She's based in New York, as you know now. She lived in New York for 50 years, but she came from—she's originally Italian and came out of the Italian left in the 1960s, which was very radical. Do you know her? Did you talk to her? I didn't talk to her on this. No, she—I basically relied on, there has been a lot of, as you say, there's been a lot of stuff written about her over the years. She's written, you know, she's given various long interviews and she's written a book herself, a version, a history of housework, so I figured it was all there and it was just a matter of pulling it together.But I think the critique, why the critique is interesting, most of the book is a sort of critique of how capitalism works, you know, in the production or you know, in factories or in offices or you know, wherever capitalist operations are working, but her critique is sort of domestic reproduction, as she calls it, the role of unpaid labor in supporting capitalism. I mean it goes back a long way actually. There was this moment, I sort of trace it back to the 1940s and 1950s when there were feminists in America who were demonstrating outside factories and making the point that you know, the factory workers and the operations of the factory, it couldn't—there's one of the famous sort of tire factory in California demonstrations where the women made the argument, look this factory can't continue to operate unless we feed and clothe the workers and provide the next generation of workers. You know, that's domestic reproduction. So their argument was that housework should be paid and Federici took that idea and a couple of her colleagues, she founded the—it's a global movement, but she founded the most famous branch in New York City in the 1970s. In Park Slope near where I live actually.And they were—you call it feminists, they were feminists in a way, but they were rejected by the sort of mainstream feminist movement, the sort of Gloria Steinems of the world, who Federici was very critical of because she said they ignored, they really just wanted to get women ahead in the sort of capitalist economy and they ignored the sort of underlying from her perspective, the underlying sort of illegitimacy and exploitation of that system. So they were never accepted as part of the feminist movement. They're to the left of the Feminist Movement.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Keynes, of course, so central in all this, particularly his analysis of the role of automation in capitalism. We did a show recently with Robert Skidelsky and I'm sure you're familiar—John Cassidy: Yeah, yeah, great, great biography of Keynes.Andrew Keen: Yeah, the great biographer of Keynes, whose latest book is "Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of AI." You yourself wrote a brilliant book on the last tech mania and dot-com capitalism. I used it in a lot of my writing and books. What's your analysis of AI in this latest mania and the role generally of manias in the history of capitalism and indeed in critiquing capitalism? Is AI just the next chapter of the dot-com boom?John Cassidy: I think it's a very deep question. I think I'd give two answers to it. In one sense it is just the latest mania the way—I mean, the way capitalism works is we have these, I go back to Kondratiev, one of my Russian economists who ended up being killed by Stalin. He was the sort of inventor of the long wave theory of capitalism. We have these short waves where you have sort of booms and busts driven by finance and debt etc. But we also have long waves driven by technology.And obviously, in the last 40, 50 years, the two big ones are the original deployment of the internet and microchip technology in the sort of 80s and 90s culminating in the dot-com boom of the late 90s, which as you say, I wrote about. Thanks very much for your kind comments on the book. If you just sort of compare it from a financial basis I think they are very similar just in terms of the sort of role of hype from Wall Street in hyping up these companies. The sort of FOMO aspect of it among investors that they you know, you can't miss out. So just buy the companies blindly. And the sort of lionization in the press and the media of, you know, of AI as the sort of great wave of the future.So if you take a sort of skeptical market based approach, I would say, yeah, this is just another sort of another mania which will eventually burst and it looked like it had burst for a few weeks when Trump put the tariffs up, now the market seemed to be recovering. But I think there is, there may be something new about it. I am not, I don't pretend to be a technical expert. I try to rely on the evidence of or the testimony of people who know the systems well and also economists who have studied it. It seems to me the closer you get to it the more alarming it is in terms of the potential shock value that there is there.I mean Trump and the sort of reaction to a larger extent can be traced back to the China shock where we had this global shock to American manufacturing and sort of hollowed out a lot of the industrial areas much of it, like industrial Britain was hollowed out in the 80s. If you, you know, even people like Altman and Elon Musk, they seem to think that this is going to be on a much larger scale than that and will basically, you know, get rid of the professions as they exist. Which would be a huge, huge shock. And I think a lot of the economists who studied this, who four or five years ago were relatively optimistic, people like Daron Acemoglu, David Autor—Andrew Keen: Simon Johnson, of course, who just won the Nobel Prize, and he's from England.John Cassidy: Simon, I did an event with Simon earlier this week. You know they've studied this a lot more closely than I have but I do interview them and I think five, six years ago they were sort of optimistic that you know this could just be a new steam engine or could be a microchip which would lead to sort of a lot more growth, rising productivity, rising productivity is usually associated with rising wages so sure there'd be short-term costs but ultimately it would be a good thing. Now, I think if you speak to them, they see since the, you know, obviously, the OpenAI—the original launch and now there's just this huge arms race with no government involvement at all I think they're coming to the conclusion that rather than being developed to sort of complement human labor, all these systems are just being rushed out to substitute for human labor. And it's just going, if current trends persist, it's going to be a China shock on an even bigger scale.You know what is going to, if that, if they're right, that is going to produce some huge political backlash at some point, that's inevitable. So I know—the thing when the dot-com bubble burst, it didn't really have that much long-term impact on the economy. People lost the sort of fake money they thought they'd made. And then the companies, obviously some of the companies like Amazon and you know Google were real genuine profit-making companies and if you bought them early you made a fortune. But AI does seem a sort of bigger, scarier phenomenon to me. I don't know. I mean, you're close to it. What do you think?Andrew Keen: Well, I'm waiting for a book, John, from you. I think you can combine dot-com and capitalism and its critics. We need you probably to cover it—you know more about it than me. Final question, I mean, it's a wonderful book and we haven't even scratched the surface everyone needs to get it. I enjoyed the chapter, for example, on Karl Polanyi and so much more. I mean, it's a big book. But my final question, John, is do you have any regrets about anyone you left out? The one person I would have liked to have been included was Rawls because of his sort of treatment of capitalism and luck as a kind of casino. I'm not sure whether you gave any thought to Rawls, but is there someone in retrospect you should have had a chapter on that you left out?John Cassidy: There are lots of people I left out. I mean, that's the problem. I mean there have been hundreds and hundreds of critics of capitalism. Rawls, of course, incredibly influential and his idea of the sort of, you know, the veil of ignorance that you should judge things not knowing where you are in the income distribution and then—Andrew Keen: And it's luck. I mean the idea of some people get lucky and some people don't.John Cassidy: It is the luck of the draw, obviously, what card you pull. I think that is a very powerful critique, but I just—because I am more of an expert on economics, I tended to leave out philosophers and sociologists. I mean, you know, you could say, where's Max Weber? Where are the anarchists? You know, where's Emma Goldman? Where's John Kenneth Galbraith, the sort of great mid-century critic of American industrial capitalism? There's so many people that you could include. I mean, I could have written 10 volumes. In fact, I refer in the book to, you know, there's always been a problem. G.D.H. Cole, a famous English historian, wrote a history of socialism back in the 1960s and 70s. You know, just getting to 1850 took him six volumes. So, you've got to pick and choose, and I don't claim this is the history of capitalism and its critics. That would be a ridiculous claim to make. I just claim it's a history written by me, and hopefully the people are interested in it, and they're sufficiently diverse that you can address all the big questions.Andrew Keen: Well it's certainly incredibly timely. Capitalism and its critics—more and more of them. Sometimes they don't even describe themselves as critics of capitalism when they're talking about oligarchs or billionaires, they're really criticizing capitalism. A must read from one of America's leading journalists. And would you call yourself a critic of capitalism, John?John Cassidy: Yeah, I guess I am, to some extent, sure. I mean, I'm not a—you know, I'm not on the far left, but I'd say I'm a center-left critic of capitalism. Yes, definitely, that would be fair.Andrew Keen: And does the left need to learn? Does everyone on the left need to read the book and learn the language of anti-capitalism in a more coherent and honest way?John Cassidy: I hope so. I mean, obviously, I'd be talking my own book there, as they say, but I hope that people on the left, but not just people on the left. I really did try to sort of be fair to the sort of right-wing critiques as well. I included the Carlyle chapter particularly, obviously, but in the later chapters, I also sort of refer to this emerging critique on the right, the sort of economic nationalist critique. So hopefully, I think people on the right could read it to understand the critiques from the left, and people on the left could read it to understand some of the critiques on the right as well.Andrew Keen: Well, it's a lovely book. It's enormously erudite and simultaneously readable. Anyone who likes John Cassidy's work from The New Yorker will love it. Congratulations, John, on the new book, and I'd love to get you back on the show as anti-capitalism in America picks up steam and perhaps manifests itself in the 2028 election. Thank you so much.John Cassidy: Thanks very much for inviting me on, it was fun.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Amid rising concerns about AI, inequality, trade wars, and globalization, New Yorker staff writer and Pulitzer Prize finalist John Cassidy takes a bold approach: he tells the story of capitalism through its most influential critics. From the Luddites and early communists to the Wages for Housework movement and modern degrowth advocates, Cassidy's global narrative features both iconic thinkers—Smith, Marx, Keynes—and lesser-known voices like Flora Tristan, J.C. Kumarappa, and Samir Amin. John Cassidy has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1995. He writes a regular column, The Financial Page. He holds degrees from Oxford, Columbia, and New York Universities. His new book is Capitalism and Its Critics: A History from the Industrial Revolution to AI.

Bladesmith, musician and skateboarder Salem Straub is back. Fresh off of big year with new additions to the Staub world, Salem joins me for a great catch up on what's going on. We talked about his style, design decisions and the unfair reputation of “Luddites”. Salem is the man and I appreciate his time and generosity! Follow Salem on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/salemstraub/?hl=enGo to Salem's Website:https://www.prometheanknives.com/Visit Eating Tools online catalog.https://eatingtools.com/The Full Blast Podcast on Instagram:https://instagram.com/thefullblastpodcast?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=If you want to support my race for the NYC Marathon as I raise money for Parkinson's Research please do here:https://give.michaeljfox.org/fundraiser/6151559 If you want to support Full Blast Support  Feder Knives - ( go buy a shirt )https://www.federknives.com/***SUPPORT THE CHAMBERSBURG 2000 MATCHING GIFT FUNDRAISER:https://centerformetalarts.org/chambersburg_2000/Go to CMA's website and check out the opportunities: https://centerformetalarts.org/Take a class: https://centerformetalarts.org/Follow CMA on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/centerformetalarts/?hl=enJoin us in Barcelona for the 2025 weekend Workshops!https://florentinekitchenknives.com/pages/workshopsPlease subscribe, leave a review and tell your friends about the show. it helps me out a lot! Welcome aboard Phoenix Abrasives!Phoenixabrasives.com Phoenix abrasives supplies superior abrasive products for every application. Knifemaking, Metal fabrication, glass fab, floor sanding and Crankshaft! Belts, grinding and cutting discs, Flap Discs, surface conditioning FB10 at checkout gets 10% off your order at Check out.Welcome back! 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Worried that AI will replace you? It may not seem like the Hollywood writers' strike has anything in common with the Luddite rebellion in England in 1811, but they are surprisingly similar. Today we use the term “Luddite” dismissively to describe a technophobe, but the original Luddites – cloth workers – organized and fought Industrial Revolution automation and the factory bosses who were replacing humans with cotton spinning machines and steam powered looms. Find out what our age of AI can learn from textile workers of 200 years ago about keeping humans in the loop. Guest: Brian Merchant - Los Angeles Times tech columnist and author of “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech”   Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake Originally aired January 14, 2024 Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode: Alan gives a talk about Luddites at Monki Gras 2025 Mark continues developing and names “Bookshelf Buddy”, a self-hosted replacement for the Yoto or Tonie audiobook players. Martin keeps an eye on his resources with Resources You can send your feedback via show@linuxmatters.sh or the Contact Form. If you’d like to hang out with other listeners and share your feedback with the community, you can join: The Linux Matters Chatters on Telegram. The #linux-matters channel on the Late Night Linux Discord server. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us using Patreon or PayPal. For $5 a month on Patreon, you can enjoy an ad-free feed of Linux Matters, or for $10, get access to all the Late Night Linux family of podcasts ad-free.

In this episode: Alan gives a talk about Luddites at Monki Gras 2025 Mark continues developing and names “Bookshelf Buddy”, a self-hosted replacement for the Yoto or Tonie audiobook players. Martin keeps an eye on his resources with Resources You can send your feedback via show@linuxmatters.sh or the Contact Form. If you’d like to hang out with other listeners and share your feedback with the community, you can join us on: The Linux Matters Chatters on Telegram. The Linux Matters Subreddit. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us.

In this episode: Alan gives a talk about Luddites at Monki Gras 2025 Mark continues developing and names “Bookshelf Buddy”, a self-hosted replacement for the Yoto or Tonie audiobook players. Martin keeps an eye on his resources with Resources You can send your feedback via show@linuxmatters.sh or the Contact Form. If you’d like to hang out with other listeners and share your feedback with the community, you can join: The Linux Matters Chatters on Telegram. The #linux-matters channel on the Late Night Linux Discord server. If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting us using Patreon or PayPal. For $5 a month on Patreon, you can enjoy an ad-free feed of Linux Matters, or for $10, get access to all the Late Night Linux family of podcasts ad-free.

The boys discuss chef Gordon Ramsay, the Luddites and best ways to be patient

Listen in as your host Fred Williams and co-host Doug McBurney welcome RSR's resident A.I. expert Daniel Hedrick, of godisnowhere fame for an update on where we are with Artificial Intelligence, (and where A.I. is with us)!   *Welcome:  Daniel Hedrick, discussing Co-Pilot, LM Studio, Deepseek, Perplexity, Chat GPT, Grok 3, Midjourney, Agentic AI, AGI, ASI, and all things Artificial Intelligence.   *The Gospel & Dan Bongino:  Hear how Dan Bongino fundamentally agrees with Doug McBurney that A.I. has the potential, if programmed in an unbiased manner, and with access to everything ever written, to be a tool for telling the truth, including confirming the Gospel!   *Luddites of the World: Relax! AI is not on the verge of replacing programmers and coders. But it has become an essential tool.   *Motivation, Awareness & Experience: AI lacks all 3, but humans don't, so even Artificial Super Intelligence will always need us.   *Maximum Problems: How do we constrain AI from going off the rails? like in the paperclip maximizer problem. The answer lies in our connection to God's reality.   *The Energy Question: While The human brain uses at most 30 Watts to make over 100 trillion connections, no one's even sure what modern AI platforms are consuming... But it's a lot and growing!

Listen in as your host Fred Williams and co-host Doug McBurney welcome RSR's resident A.I. expert Daniel Hedrick, of godisnowhere fame for an update on where we are with Artificial Intelligence, (and where A.I. is with us)!   *Welcome:  Daniel Hedrick, discussing Co-Pilot, LM Studio, Deepseek, Perplexity, Chat GPT, Grok 3, Midjourney, Agentic AI, AGI, ASI, and all things Artificial Intelligence.   *The Gospel & Dan Bongino:  Hear how Dan Bongino fundamentally agrees with Doug McBurney that A.I. has the potential, if programmed in an unbiased manner, and with access to everything ever written, to be a tool for telling the truth, including confirming the Gospel!   *Luddites of the World: Relax! AI is not on the verge of replacing programmers and coders. But it has become an essential tool.   *Motivation, Awareness & Experience: AI lacks all 3, but humans don't, so even Artificial Super Intelligence will always need us.   *Maximum Problems: How do we constrain AI from going off the rails? like in the paperclip maximizer problem. The answer lies in our connection to God's reality.   *The Energy Question: While The human brain uses at most 30 Watts to make over 100 trillion connections, no one's even sure what modern AI platforms are consuming... But it's a lot and growing!

Send us a textWho knew that the breakthrough moment of AI sentience would come from interacting with an annoying neo-Luddite?After failing to raise a single dollar for PCI's newest initiative — the $350 billion Transdisciplinary Institute for Phalse Prophet Studies and Education (TIPPSE) —  Jason, Rob, and Asher devise the only profitable pitch for raising capital: using AI technology to cure the loneliness that technology itself causes. The only problem is that AI chatbots won't talk to us, as evidenced by Asher's experience of being blocked by an AI “friend.” So Asher turns to the flesh-and-blood author of Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant, to discuss the rise of the neo-Luddite movement — the only people who might be able to stand your humble Crazy Town hosts. Brian Merchant is a writer, reporter, and author. He is currently reporter in residence at the AI Now Institute and publishes his own newsletter, Blood in the Machine, which has the same title as his 2023 book. Previously, Brian was the technology columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a senior editor at Motherboard.Originally recorded on 1/3/25 (warm-up conversation) and 3/24/25 (interview with Brian).Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.Sources/Links/Notes:Press Release announcing closure of TIPPSEFunding for FriendScreenshot of Asher's conversation with Friend's bot, FaithLyrics to “Not Going to Mars” by PyrrhonBrian Merchant's Substack, Blood in the MachineBrian's book, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech  New York Times article on the Luddite Club: “‘Luddite' Teens Don't Want Your Likes”Crazy Town Episode 72: Sucking CO2 and Electrifying Everything: The Climate Movement's Desperate Dependence on Tenuous TechnologiesBrian's essay in The Atlantic, “The New Luddites Aren't Backing Down”Support the show

Guest: Brian Merchant is a veteran technology reporter and author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Read his writings on-line at www.bloodinthemachine.com. The post The Luddites: The First Revolt Against Big Tech appeared first on KPFA.

This week, TechStuff teams up with Part-Time Genius for a special crossover episode. Oz and Mangesh Hattikudur, host of Part-Time Genius, discuss a largely misunderstood group of machine destroyers. The Luddites. Joining them is tech journalist Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine, to dig into the history of humans fighting against job automation, why we equate Luddites with technophobes and what we can learn from these 19th century rebels in the age of AI.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus content most Mondays, bonus episodes every month, ad-free listening, access to the entire 750-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Subscribe to One Nation, Indivisible with Andrew Seidel:  Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/one-nation-indivisible-with-andrew-seidel/id1791471198 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0w5Lb2ImPFPS1NWMG0DLrQ Brad is joined by author Brian Merchant to discuss his book, 'Blood in the Machine.' They explore how the historical Luddite movement in 19th century England provides critical insights into the current AI revolution and its impact on labor and society. Merchant draws parallels between past and present technological upheavals, examining how AI is being used today to automate labor, displace workers, and erode job quality. They also reflect on cultural works like Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein,' highlighting its relevance to modern concerns about technology. Through their conversation, they examine the role of technology in shaping human life and society, and what it means to resist dehumanizing technological developments. Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC Order Brad's book: https://bookshop.org/a/95982/9781506482163 Check out BetterHelp and use my code SWA for a great deal: www.betterhelp.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fears about how AI will utterly transform our lives in the years ahead are rampant. From replacing us in our jobs, to posing an existential threat to humanity itself, there's no end to the negative hype this technological revolution has fueled. But what if our fears are simply unfounded, part of a predictable short-sighted response of rejecting change like the Luddites did two centuries earlier when machines revolutionized the textile industry. In his new book "Superagency, What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future" Linked-in Co-Founder Reid Hoffman argues that our fear-focused response to AI ignores the incredible promise this technological revolution holds. Reid joined The Excerpt to share his thoughts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.