Podcasts about luddites

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! Nordic Edge:@nordic_edge on IG Nordicedge.com.auNordic Edge is about the joy of making something with your own hands. our one stop shop for tools, supplies and help when it comes to knife making, blacksmithing, leatherworking, spoon carving and other crafts where you get to take some time out for yourself and turn an idea into something tangible. Nordic Edge also holds hands-on workshops in the “lost arts” of blacksmithing, knife making and spoon carving. Come spend a day with us and go home with new skills and something you made with your own hands. They have the  guidance to help accelerate your creativity and the  Tools, products, supplies to help you manifest your ideas. NordicEdge.com.auThank you Baker Forge & Tool for your beautiful Steel. Go to Bakerforge.com to see all the incredible steels they offer. ‘FullBlast' gets you 10% off your order. CHECK OUT THE NEW ADDITIONS TO THE GATOR PISS LINE - GATOR PISS MAX & GATOR PISS HEAVYWelcome to our new Sponsor- EVENHEAT- Manufacturers of the best heat treating ovens available.  To find your next oven go to Evenheat-kiln.comFollow them on Instagram: Welcome aboard Texas Farrier Supply! 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Hansen & Sons On Instagramhttps://instagram.com/g.l._hansenandsons?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== Gcarta.bigcartel.comG-Carta is unique composite of natural fibers and fabrics mixed with epoxy under pressure and heat Boofa, ripple cut, Tuxini, by Mikie, Mahi Mahi, Radio worm g-cartaPheasant by MikieColorama by MikieHoopla by MikeAmazing colors and razzle dazzle for your project. MARITIME KNIFE SUPPLIESMaritimeknifesupply.CAAll your knifemaking needs, belts abrasive, steals, kilns forges presses, heat treating ovens anvils and everything you need to get started or resupply. Including Dr. Thomas's book:“Knife Engineering”They're in Canada but ship to the US with ease and you can take advantage of the exchange rate The steel selection is always growing and Lawrence just got 3900 lbs. of steel in.10% off on abrasive belt packs of 10 get a hold of https://www.instagram.com/maritimeknifesupply/ and see what the fuss is about.Welcome Tormek as a sponsor to the show. Take your sharpening to a new level. I love these sharpening machines. Waterfed, easy to use. Jigs included. Definitely check out what they have to offer. If you need it sharpened, Tormek is definitely something for you:https://tormek.com/en/inspiration/woodworking--craftsVisit Tormek's website: https://tormek.com/enFollow Tormek on Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tormek_sharpening/?hl=enFollow Tormek on TikTokhttps://www.tiktok.com/@tormek_sharpening?lang=enGo look at the course curriculum at CMA:https://centerformetalarts.org/workshops/** Taking classes from some of the best in forging at one of the best facilities in the country is an excellent opportunity to propel yourself as a blacksmith. Not to be missed. And with housing on the campus it's a great way to get yourself to the next level. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Send us a textWelcome to IoT Coffee Talk #240 where we have a chat about all things #IoT over a cup of coffee or two with some of the industry's leading business minds, thought leaders and technologists in a totally unscripted, organic format. Thanks for joining us. Sit back with a cup of Joe and enjoy the morning banter.This week, Olivier, Debbie, Rob, Pete, Bill, Ryan, and Leonard jump on Web3 to talk about:BAD KARAOKE! "Jingle Bells", The IoT Coffee Talk OrchestraOlivier explaining how he doesn't know the lyrics to Jingle BellsTay is back with a vengeance!!What do we not get about garbage in, garbage out?What is determinism and why is it a new concept for a lot of folks?Are we Luddites or do we know something you don't?Human speed versus machine speedWas 2024 the year of GenAI revolution results, denial, or experimentation?How to get the Wizard of Oz out of the loopOlivier and Leonard have a Hololens and Vision Pro shoot out!!Metaverse is dead. It's all about memories.Samsung's Project Moohan - Metaverse not revisitedWe are way past 1984 and we let it happen and are disturbingly OK with itPleasure, Convenience, FOMO - the key drivers shaping our future?The dynamic of collective stupidityIt's a great episode. Grab an extraordinarily expensive latte at your local coffee shop and check out the whole thing. You will get all you need to survive another week in the world of IoT and greater tech!Thanks for listening to us! Watch episodes at http://iotcoffeetalk.com/. We support Elevate Our Kids to bridge the digital divide by bringing K-12 computing devices and connectivity to support kids' education in under-resourced communities. Please donate.

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

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: 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... Read More

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

The amount of time children and adolescents spend with a screen is absolutely stunning. Lots of people, including parents, health leaders, educators, elected leaders from both parties I might mention, and even children themselves, are highly concerned and are discussing what might be done about all this. I'm delighted to begin this series of podcasts on children and screen time. Today we're welcoming two very special guests who can talk about this topic in general, and especially about what's being done to protect children and adolescents. Several podcasts will follow this one that deal with food and nutrition in particular. Our first guest, Kris Perry, is Executive Director of Children and Screens, an organization devoted to protecting children. In the digital world by addressing media's impact on child development, communicating state-of-the-art information, and working with policymakers. Prior to joining children in Screens, Kris was senior advisor of the Governor of California and Deputy Secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency. Our other guest, Dr. Dimitri Christakis is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and director of the Center for Child Health Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's. He's also editor-in-chief of JAMA Pediatrics and both Chief Scientific Officer and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of Children and Screens. He's also the co-editor of a new book that I'm very excited to discuss. Interview Summary Download The Handbook of Children and Screens: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-69362-5 Kris, let's start with you. Could you set the stage and give us some sense of how much time children spend in front of screens, children and adolescents, and what devices are being used and what kind of trends are you seeing? Yes, I'd be happy to. I had better news for your listeners, but as you might imagine, since the advent of the smartphone and social media, the youth digital media use has been increasing each year. Especially as children get older and have increasing demands on their time to use screens. But let's just start at the beginning of the lifespan and talk about kids under the age of two who shockingly are spending as much as two hours a day on screens. Most spend about 50 minutes, but there's a significant chunk spending up to two hours. And that rises to three or three to five hours in childhood. And eventually in adolescence, approximately eight and a half hours a day our adolescents are spending online. Also wanted to talk a little bit about middle childhood children, six to 12 years of age. 70% of them already have a social media account, and we all know social media wasn't designed for children. And there are restrictions on children under 13 using them, and yet children six to 12 most have an account already. Over half of four-year-olds have a tablet and two thirds of children have their own device by the age of eight; and 90% of teens. This probably won't be surprising, and yet we should really think about what this means; that 90% of teens are using YouTube, 60% are on TikTok and Instagram, and 55% use Snapchat. I'll stop by ending on a really alarming statistic. Oh my, there's more? There's more. I know it! I told you. I'll be the bearer of bad news so that we can talk about solutions later. But, children are checking their devices as often as 300 times per day. 300 times. 300 times per day, and we're talking about screen time right now. And we know that when you're using time to be on screens, you are not doing something else. And we know that childhood is full of challenges and skill building and mastery that requires repetition and tenacity and grit and effort. And the more children are on their screens, whether it's social media or other entertainment, they're not doing one of these other critical child development tasks. That's pretty amazing. And the fact that the older kids are spending more time on before a screen than they are in school is pretty alarming. And the younger, the really youngest kids, that's especially alarming. So, Dimitri, why should we fret about this? And I realize that fret is kind of a mild word here. Maybe all I'll panic would be better. But what are some of the major concerns? Well, I don't think panic is ever the right reaction, but the numbers Kris conveyed, you know, I think do paint a, let's say, concerning story. You know, the simple reality is that there's only so much time in a day. And if you think about it, teenagers in particular should sleep for eight to 10 hours a day at a minimum. They really should be in school six and a half, seven hours a day. And then when you add the numbers, Kris conveyed, you realize that something's giving because there isn't enough time left to spend eight and a half hours a day. The two things at a minimum that are giving are sleep. Kids are losing sleep to be on screens. And I'm sorry to say that they're losing school while they're on screens. We just published a paper that used passive sensing to see where and when children are on their screens. And found that the typical child in the United States spends an hour and a half during the school day on their device. And it's not, before any of your guests ask, on Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica. It's on the usual suspects of social media, TikTok, etc. So, you know, we talk about displacement, and I think it's pretty obvious what's being displaced during school hours. Its time focused on learning if it's in the classroom, and time focused on being authentically present in real time and space if it's during recess. School hours are precious in that way, and I think it is concerning that they're spending that much time in school. And I told you the median. Of course, some kids are above that, a significant half of them are above it. And at the high end, they're spending 30 to 40% of school time on screens. Now, some schools have enacted policies. They don't typically enforce them very well. One of the things that drives me nuts, Kelly, is that as an academic, you know we love to argue amongst ourselves and hem and haw. And this issue about whether or not there's such a phenomenon as digital addiction is still being hotly debated. Honestly, the only behavioral addiction that's being seriously considered at this point is gaming disorder. The DSM-5 didn't consider gaming, considered it, but didn't include, it said it needed further study in 2013. In 2022, the WHO did include gaming disorder as an ICD-11 diagnosis. But just as further evidence how slow science is compared to technology., I mean gaming, while it's still an entity, represents a small fraction of most people's screen time. And the numbers that Kris conveyed, a small fraction of that for some on average was gaming. For some people, it's their screen use of choice, but for many, it's social media. YouTube, although I consider YouTube to be a social media, etc. And at the high end when you hear the numbers Kris conveyed in my mind that's a behavioral addiction any way you define it. Well, and if you think about things that we all agree are addictive, like nicotine and alcohol and heroin, people aren't doing it 300 times a day. So it's really pretty remarkable. And that's exactly right. One of the salient criteria for those addictions is that it's interfering with activities of daily living. Well, you can't be on a screen for nine hours a day when you're supposed to be asleep for 10 and at school for six without interfering with activities of day. The math isn't there. And things like being physically active and going out and playing. That's right. It doesn't add up. So, you don't need the DSM-5. You don't need a psychiatrist. You need a mathematician to tell you that there's too much time on this thing. Alright, so Kris, talk to us if you will, about the Children and Screens organization. I have a lot of respect for the organization and its work. Tell us how it got started and what its objectives are. Well, it's so great to be on this show with you and get to see you in your day job, Kelly. Because you've been an advisor, like Dimitri, to the institute almost since its inception, which is in 2013. As you know, our founder, Dr. Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra, really became concerned as a parent about the way digital media was impacting her children and sought out some answers. Well, what does this mean? Why is this happening? What should I do? And found out that this, of course, is 2013, this is a long time ago. There wasn't that much research yet. And it was multidisciplinary. In other words, there might be a study among neuroscientists or developmental psychologists, even ophthalmologists. But there really hadn't been, yet, a concerted effort to bring these different disciplines and the research together to try to answer some of these hard questions about the impact on kids. And lo and behold, here we are, almost 13 years since the advent of the smartphone and social media. And there is an astounding amount of research across disciplines. So, what we do at the institute is we try to translate it as fast as we can and make it actionable for parents, providers, and policy makers. And we do that through our Ask the Experts webinar series where we bring the experts themselves directly to our audience to talk about these impacts and answer questions. We also create printables, you might say, like tip sheets and Research at a Glance Digest, and newsletters and FAQs and we've upgraded our website to make it very navigable for parents of kids of all ages. I even started my own podcast this year, which has been really fun. Dimitri was my first guest, so it's great to see him here. And we have convenings. We're having our third Digital Media Developing Mind Scientific Congress this summer where the experts come together in person to discuss issues. And we really try to focus them on advancing research and supporting it, translating it, and positioning the issue as a policy priority. We'll be in Washington, DC where we know lawmakers are grappling with the impact of digital media on child development, how to make online, products safer for kids and protect their data. The Institute is in the middle of all of this, trying to facilitate more discussion, more results and more support for parents primarily. Kris, a couple of things occur to me. One is that the breadth of work you do is really very impressive because you're not only having very hands-on kind of in the real world ex advice for parents on how to navigate this world, but you have advice for and helpful resources for policy makers and for researchers and people. It's really quite an impressive breadth of work. The other thing that occurred to me is that I don't think you and I would have any podcast career at all if it hadn't been for Dimitri helping us out. So thanks Dimitri. Yeah. So, let me ask you, Dimitri, so I know that both you and Kris are committed to an evidence-based approach to making policy. Yeah. But technology advances way more quickly than scientists can evaluate it. Much less come up with policies to deal with it. And by the time research gets funded, completed, published, you're on to eight new levels of technology. So how does one handle this fundamental problem of pace? It's a really good question. I mean, I can tell you that we should at a minimum learn from the mistakes we've made in the past. And, you know, one of the most critical, frankly, that most people don't really understand is that we talk about the age at which children get social media accounts in this country. Kris pointed out that actually pre-teens routinely have social media accounts. Social media companies do very little to age gate. They're trying to do more now, but even the age at which we've accepted it is being normative is 13. Few people know where that comes from. That doesn't come from talking to pediatricians, psychologists, parents about what age is the appropriate age. It comes entirely from COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act), which basically was the original privacy act that said that before the age of 13, companies could not collect data from children. So, because these companies were interested in collecting data, they set the age at 13 so as to not have any constraints on the data they collected. Well, that's not even common sense-based policy, let alone evidence-based policy. And it's never been revisited since. It's very troubling to me. And as things move forward, I think we have to learn from those mistakes. Medicine has a maxim which is do no harm. We use that phrase a lot and I think it's a good one in this case. I think it's a particularly good one as we see the new technologies emerging around artificial intelligence. And you know, again, like any new technology, it has incredible upside. We made the mistake and we're still paying for it, about not appreciating the downsides of social network sites, and frankly, the internet in general. And I would hope we put guardrails in place now. And if you will apply the same standard we apply to other non-technology based products. You can't introduce a new pharmaceutical to anybody, let alone to children, until you show it's safe and effective. You can't bring toys to the world that are dangerous. Why do we have more safety precautions around toys than we do around websites for children? You know, a lot of it involves changing defaults, doesn't it? Because if the default is that government or somebody out there has to prove that something is harmful before it gets taken away. That changes everything then if you began at a different point where these companies have to prove that these things are safe. Correct. Or they're permitted. Then the companies would find workarounds and they would play games with that too, but at least that would help some. Well, it would help some. And at least we'd be philosophically in the right place. By the way, Kris didn't say it, so I'll say it. You know, the mission of Children and Screens, lest we sound like Luddites here, is not get kids away from technology. Take away their smartphones. We all recognize that technology is here to stay. I think all of us appreciate the incredible upside that it brings to children's lives. The mission of Children and Screens is to help children lead healthy lives in a digital world. And part of the reason she and I often talk about the concerns we have is because the pros make the case for themselves. I mean, you know, no one needs to come here and tell you how amazing it is that you could Google something or that you could get somewhere with GPS. I mean, we know it's amazing and we all rely on it. And none of us are ever talking about getting rid of that stuff. That makes good sense. It's like, you know, children benefit from the fact that they can get around with their parents in the automobile. But you want to have car seats in there to protect them. Exactly. And that's exactly right. There needs to be assurances of safety and they're none. I mean, they're really virtually none. The age getting is a joke. And even if we accept it as effective, the age set of 13 is too young, in my opinion. We started this conversation talking about these medias being addictive, I believe they're addictive. There are legitimate academics that will debate me on that, and I'm happy to join that debate. But as I said before, it's a tough argument to win when people spending upwards of 10 to 16 hours a day doing it. I don't know what you call that besides addictive. We can argue about what percentage are doing that, but nevertheless, once you accept something as addictive, for other addictive things we immediately age gate it above 18 or 21, right? Mm-hmm. We don't believe that the teenagers have the ability to regulate their alcohol or tobacco or gambling, all of which we accept are addictive. In fact, in the case of alcohol, we raised the age from 18 to 21 because we thought even 18-year-olds weren't able to do it. And yet somehow for this behavior, we think of it as just so different that it doesn't require greater cognitive capacity. And I don't believe that. Yeah, very good point. Kris, let me ask you a question about how you and your colleagues at Children and Screens set priorities because there are a lot of things that one could potentially worry about as outcomes. There's violence that kids see on social media. There's cognitive and brain development, social developments, social interactions, and bullying. Mental health, body image, diet, all these things are out there. How do you decide what to work on? Well, we try to work on all of it. And in fact, we've built up a fair amount of expertise and resources around almost 25 different topics. And we also understand that, you know, childhood is a long period of time. Birth to 18, birth to 21, birth to 25, depending on who you talk to. So, we're able to take those 25 topics and also provide deeper, you might say, resources that address the different stages of development. We're really trying to do as much as we can. What's been interesting over these last few years is trying to figure out when to be reactive, when to be proactive. And by being proactive, we go out looking for the research, translating it, digesting it, and creating materials with it that we think are really accessible and actionable. At the same time, as Dimitri points out, there are policy windows and there are opportunities that present themselves that you have to react to. If you just only talk about what you want to talk about to each other you're missing some of these external opportunities to inform policy and policy makers. Help influence the way that parents and providers are talking about the issue. Framing it in such a way that engages youth and makes them want what we want for them. We're really excited by increasing opportunities to partner in coalitions with others that care about kids and teachers and nurses and doctors. But we also are speaking directly to leaders in states and school districts at the federal level, at the local level. You would be, I'm sure, not surprised to hear that we are contacted every day by groups that support parents and families. Asking for resources, asking for support, because they're seeing the impact now over many years on their children, their development. Their academic ability. Their cognitive and analytical ability. Their social emotional ability. Their ability to pay attention to tasks that we all know are critical in building that foundation for essentially, you know, future success. The Institute is being pulled in many directions. Ee try really hard to be strategic about what are people asking us for? What does the research say and how can we get that to them as quickly as possible? Dimitri - Can I add to that? You know, I want to emphasize that the concern around the effects of screen use on children's lives is shared by parents on both sides of the aisle. 75% of parents are concerned about the impact of screens on their children's lives. 35% of teenagers are concerned about their dependents on screens and that it has a negative effect on their lives. Actually by some studies, some surveys, even more than 35 to 50% of teenagers are concerned. And both sides of the political aisle agree in large part of this. And Kris and Kelly, you guys are the policy wonks, you can speak more to that. So it's a serious indictment on us as grownups and as a society that we have not done more to deliver on this issue. Why? When there's bipartisan agreement amongst many policymakers. This is not a political [00:22:00] issue to speak of and there is widespread concern on the part of parents and even teenagers. Why is nothing happening? Well, one has to look no further than where the money is. And that's a problem. I mean, that's a serious indictment on our political system when we can't deliver something that is needed and basically wanted by everybody but the industry itself. We'll come back and talk in a few moments about the policy issues and where industry gets involved here. But let me take just a bit of a detour from that and talk about the book that I mentioned earlier, because I think it's such a valuable resource. Now, when I mention the name of this book I'm urging our listeners to write this down or to remember it because you can get the book at no cost. And I'll come back, Kris, and explain what made that possible and why the decision was to make this an open access book. But Dimitri, let's begin with you. So you, along with Lauren Hale, edited this book that's entitled, The Handbook of Children and Screens: Digital Media Development and Wellbeing From Birth Through Adolescence. I think it's an extraordinary piece of work, but tell, tell us about the book.  It was an extraordinary undertaking. There's I think 178 or 180 authors. Literally, it's a who's who of experts in children and media research in all disciplines. It represents pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, communications experts, demography, lawyers, neuroscientists. I don't know who I'm forgetting. Every single discipline is represented. Leading scientists in all of those areas. Virtually every topic that someone might be of interest to people. And we deliberately made the chapters short and easily accessible. So, it is, I think, a great resource for the constituents we serve. For teachers, for parents, for researchers, for policymakers. And it is free. The hardest part of it, to be honest, as an editor, was getting peer reviewers because unfortunately, every expert was conflicted since they all had an article in it. But it was a long time coming. And again, this was really the brainchild of Pam (Pamela Hurst-Della Pietra) and we're grateful to have brought it along. So, you go all the way from the neuroscience, how children's brains are reacting to this, all the way out there into the public policy and legal arena about what can be done about it. And then kind of everything in between. It's remarkable how much the book covers. It's almost a thousand pages. I mean, it is a tome to be sure. And don't forget to mention, Dimitri, we aren't even two months post publication, and we have 1.6 million views of the document, despite its gargantuan size. I think that is really a tribute to experts like you and others that have really studied this issue and can speak directly to its impacts. It's been great to see the success so far. You know, not a small number of those views is from me logging on. And then a million from me and then we got there. So, it is free because it's online and you can download it. You can also order a hard copy for I think, $60, but I'm not sure why you would do that if you can download it for free. But it's up to you. So, Kris, it's unusual for a book like this to be made open access and free to the general public. What made that possible and why was that so important? We want the maximum number of people to use it and treat it like the premier resource that it is. And the only way you can really do that is to fund it to be open access and find a publisher that does open access publishing, which we did with Springer. I mean, most journal articles are behind a paywall and publishers do require you to purchase either a subscription or the document itself to download it or order it. And we just really wanted maximum access. So, we funded it to be published in that way. And I think honestly, it helped us even sort of create it in the first place. People want to be a part of something that has that level of access and is available so widely. So, I think it was a kind of mutually beneficial. It gets more people to read it, but it got more people to write for it too, I think. Right, Dimitri? Dimitri - I agree. I mean, you know, the numbers 1.6 million are extraordinary. I mean, Kelly, you've been internal editor. I mean, as a editor of JAMA Pediatrics, if an article gets 70,000 views, it's in our top 1%, you know, 200,000 views is 0.01%. 1.6 million in growing is really extraordinary. And that's about the number of people that read my articles. 1.6. And of course, they're not all scientists. I mean, many of them are parents and maybe are policy makers, but that's Kris's point, you know. The moment anyone hits a paywall, even if it's a dollar or two, they're going to walk away. It's great to see it get so much traction. Alright, so again, for our listeners, the title of the book is The Handbook of Children and Screens. And it's really a terrific resource. Alright, so let's turn our attention to a really important matter. And we've sort of touched on this, but who's in charge of protecting our children? You know, Dimitri at the end of the day help survey this landscape for us. I mean, is it congress, is it the administrative branch of government? What role do the courts play? Are there legal actors taking meaningful action? What's being done does it come anywhere near, meeting the need. Tell us about what that landscape is like? Well, there isn't adequate protections for children. And we talked a little bit about that earlier. There's been an enormous loophole, unfortunately, created by Congress when they added the Section 230 to the Communications Decency Act in 1996. And that was put in place essentially to provide protections for internet companies. And it basically said that they should be treated like bookstores and not publishers. That they weren't responsible for content they were just conveying it. And what that means, in effect, was that the companies had sort of carte blanche to do whatever they want. And they've used that very effectively, legally, to argue that any restriction, any culpability on their part, is protected by that Act. That they're exonified for any ill that occurs as a result of their product. The only exception that's been made of it, to date, was around sex trafficking on back page, if anyone remembers that. But other than that, social media sites and internet sites in general have been able to say that they're not liable for anything that's done. And I think that was a huge mistake that was made. It needs to be rectified. It's being challenged in the courts presently. My own belief is that, and I'm not speaking as a lawyer, is that when that law was passed, it was under the assumption as I said, that they were just conveying information. No one at the time foresaw the development of algorithms that would feed the information. It's really not a bookstore when you are making recommendations. Once you start recommending things, I think you're no longer merely a purveyor of product. You're actually pushing it. So, Kris, tell us about the Children and Screens and the role the organization plays in this space. And how do you deal with policy and is it possible to be bipartisan? Yeah, I mean, it's essential. There's no way to get anything done, anywhere on these policy matters at a population level without working in a bipartisan or non-partisan manner, which is what we've always done. And it's easy to do that when you're following the science, not ideology. And you're putting the science first and you're creating resources and tools and support for those mostly staffers, honestly, that are trying to help their bosses get smarter and better at talking about these issues as they evolve and become more complicated over time. It takes more effort to staff a lawmaker on this front. And they're very anxious to learn and understand because they're meeting with parents of children who have been harmed. Or frankly didn't even survive their childhood because of the social media platform. There's great urgency on the part of policymakers. We've heard everything from school phone bans to outright social media bans proposed as policies. And one thing I like to come back to is it's one thing to want to take action and make your best guess at what would have the best impact. But it's another thing to study whether or not that policy actually achieved its result. And it's a part of this that by staying bipartisan, nonpartisan allows us to say, 'Hey lawmaker, if you're able to get that to happen, we'd really like to come in and help study whether or not your idea actually achieves the results that you wanted, or if it needs to be adjusted or amended over time.' Fantastic. That's so important to be doing that work, and I'm delighted the organization is doing it. Let me ask a question here. If you think about some of the areas of public health that I've been following, like tobacco, for example. Opioids more recently. Vaping products. And in the case of my own particular work food policy. The administrative legislative branches of government have been almost completely ineffective. If I think about food policy over the years, relatively little has been accomplished. Even though lots of people have worked really hard on it. Same thing happened with tobacco for many years. Opioids, same thing.  And it's until you get the third branch of government involved, the judiciary, and you start suing the actors who were causing the harm do you get much action. Not only do the lawsuits seem to have an effect, but they soften the ground for legislative things that then can occur because public opinion has changed. And then those things help make a difference as well. What do you think about that kind of issue in this space?  I think you're exactly right. I mean, I think the failure of our legislative branch to enact policy leaves us with very few options at this point anyway, except to try to pursue it through the judiciary. There are challenges there. First and foremost, it's a big and well-funded industry, not unlike tobacco or big food, as you mentioned and there's this Section 230 that's given them kind of blanket immunity to date. But there are many, many very large pending cases in several jurisdictions brought by individuals, brought by school districts, brought by states. And those, at least provisionally have gotten further than prior cases have with which have been thrown out based on Section 230. So, we'll see what happens with that litigation. But right now, my guess is it's the best chance we have to set some guardrails. And I think there are plenty of guardrails that could be set. Everything that these companies have done to make their products addictive can be undone. Can be made protective. The tobacco company deliberately designed their products to be addictive. While they tried to make the claims that they were less addictive, you know. They made light cigarettes that had holes in the filter so that it would diffuse the carbon and nicotine, but people quickly learned they could cover those up with their fingers and think they were smoking light cigarettes, and smoke more of them. There's a lot of things that can be done in this space to undesign the problematic nature of the products. And quite apart from the financial settlements, which will get companies attention, I hope that that's part of any settlement if it gets that far. It'll be interesting to see where those go. And, also historically, one important part of these lawsuits is what gets turned up in discovery. And what sort of intent the companies have and how much do they know about harms. And how much do they know about addiction and things like that. And how they might have proceeded in the face of that information that then doesn't get disclosed to the public. In any event, we'll see where that goes. Dimitri, what about the argument that responsibility resides with parents. It's up to parents to protect their kids from this, and government doesn't need to be involved. I've never understood that argument. I mean parents obviously are children's most important safeguard, but as a society, we enact policies and laws to assist parents in that. I mean to me, if I made the argument, well, why, why do we have minimum ages of drinking. It's parents' job to make sure their kids don't drink. How would that possibly play out? Look, it's hard enough as a parent anyway, because kids do get around these laws. But we still have them and it's a lot easier as a parent. I think most parents would agree their life's made easier by minimum age restrictions on certain things. We have seatbelt laws. I mean, why do we have seatbelt laws? Why don't we just tell its parents' job to make sure their kids buckle up? The truth is its society and parents working hand in hand to try and keep children safe. And I think it also helps parents to be able to say that there are laws around this, and I expect you to follow the laws. So, I don't think it's an either or. Okay, well, I think that's a very good way to frame it. There are many, many precedents where we protect children. And why not do it here too? So let me end with a question I'd like to ask both of you. So, in this sea of concerns that we've discussed, is there a reason for optimism? And Kris, let me start, start with you. What do you think? Absolutely. I think the young people I've met that are leading among their peers are incredibly impressive and are armed with the research and their energy and their own lived experience in ways that are very compelling. At the same time, I think the vast amount of research that has now been compiled and translated and acted upon, whether in courtrooms or in state houses, it's becoming more, and we're all getting more steeped and aware of more nuanced information. And finally, I would just say, there is a tipping point. We are reaching as a society, adults and kids alike, we are reaching a tipping point where we can't withstand the pressure of technology in every aspect, every corner of our day, our life. And we want relief. We deserve relief. And I think that's what's going to take us over the finish line. Good. Well, I'm glad to hear those optimistic notes. Dimitri, what about you? I can find reasons to be optimistic. I mean, look, the reality is that technologies have enriched our lives in many ways. And I think if we put guardrails in place, we can make sure that future ones do even better. I have a piece coming out in JAMA Pediatrics around the use of AI, which people are very concerned about, I think rightly. But specifically, about the use of AI and people with intellectual developmental disabilities, making the use case, that there are ways in which it could be extremely beneficial to that population. A population I care deeply about in my role as the Chief Health Officer at Special Olympics International. And in particular, let's say in terms of the doctor patient interaction where it could facilitate their communication with their provider, and it could also help the provider better communicate with them. Look, that use case isn't going to be a priority for the purveyors of artificial intelligence. It's a small, non-lucrative use of a technology. But it's a good one. And if we created the right incentives and put in the right guardrails, we could find many other ways that technology can serve the needs of all of us going forward. I think the problem is that we've tended to be reactive rather than proactive. And to not start with the do no harm first premise, particularly when it comes to children. AI is another example of that where I hope we don't make the same mistake we made with social media. Bios Kris Perry is the executive director of the Children and Screens Institute. Kris most recently served as Senior Advisor to Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Deputy Secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency where she led the development of the California Master Plan for Early Learning and Care and the expansion of access to high-quality early childhood programs. She led systems change efforts at the local, state and national levels in her roles as executive director of First 5 San Mateo, First 5 California and of the First Five Years Fund. Through it all, Perry has fought to protect children, improve and expand early learning programs, and increase investments in low-income children. Perry was instrumental in returning marriage equality to California after the landmark 2013 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Hollingsworth v. Perry, which she wrote about in her book Love on Trial (Roaring Forties Press, 2017). Dimitri Christakis, MD, MPH is the Children and Screens Institute's inaugural Chief Science Officer. He is also the George Adkins Professor at the University of Washington, Editor in Chief of JAMA Pediatrics, and the Chief Health Officer at Special Olympics International. Christakis is a leading expert on how media affects child health and development. He has published over 270 peer reviewed articles (h-index 101) including dozens of media-related studies and co-authored a groundbreaking book, The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television Work for Your Kids. His work has been featured on Anderson Cooper 360, the Today Show, ABC, NBC, and CBS news as well as all major national newspapers. Christakis received his undergraduate degree at Yale University and his medical training at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and completed his residency and Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar Fellowship at the University of Washington School of Medicine. 

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

“The future is coming, and you're not in it.” That's what Rear Admiral Chester Cain (played by Ed Harris) says to Captain Pete Mitchell (played by Tom Cruise) in Top Gun: Maverick. Cain's reasoning? Mitchell will be replaced by AI. “These planes you've been testing, Captain, one day, sooner or later, they won't need pilots at all.” Technological advances initiate a process of creative destruction, in which old ways of doing things give way to new ways, in the process displacing people who do things the old way. The Luddites, for example, were weavers whose livelihoods were threatened by the adoption of automated weaving machines. The concern with AI is not merely that it will replace people's jobs, but that it will fundamentally redefine what it means to be human. How should pastors respond to this concern? That's the question I ask Paul A. Hoffman in this episode of the Influence Podcast. I'm George P. Wood, executive editor of Influence magazine and your host. Paul A. Hoffman is  senior pastor of Evangelical Friends Church of Newport, Rhode Island, and coauthor with Sean O'Callaghan of AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep, published by Baker Academic. ————— This episode of the Influence podcast is brought to you by My Healthy Church, distributors of Open When . . . Parenting through Foster and Adoption. Christian professionals delve into the unique challenges and struggles encountered by foster parents, adoptive parents, or kinship caregivers. Readers will be equipped with practical tools and strategies to navigate the complexities of guiding and nurturing children in nontraditional family structures. For more information about Open When . . . Parenting through Foster and Adoption visit MyHealthyChurch.com.

Un salarié remercié, un code secret, et une entreprise paralysée en un instant. Ce scénario digne d'un thriller informatique est pourtant bien réel. Il s'est déroulé chez Eaton Corp, géant américain de la gestion d'énergie, où Davis Lu, développeur chevronné, a orchestré une vengeance numérique aussi méticuleuse qu'implacable.Tout commence en 2018, quand l'entreprise annonce une réorganisation stratégique, comprenez des licenciements en cascade. Lu, fidèle employé depuis plus de dix ans, voit venir le couperet. Plutôt que de protester, il code en silence. Pendant plusieurs semaines, il développe un kill switch : un programme capable de bloquer les serveurs de l'entreprise en cas de départ forcé. Son script ultime, nommé IsDLEnabledinAD, agit comme une bombe à retardement : tant que son compte est actif, rien ne se passe. Mais dès qu'il disparaît du système, tout bascule.Le 9 septembre 2019, le couperet tombe : Davis Lu est licencié. Quelques instants plus tard, les collaborateurs sont bloqués, les serveurs deviennent inaccessibles, les opérations sont paralysées. Un chaos total, orchestré par un simple bout de code. Eaton tente de réagir, mais le mal est fait. Très vite, le FBI entre en jeu et remonte jusqu'au responsable. Ses identifiants sont liés au serveur de lancement, son historique de navigation montre des recherches sur l'escalade de privilèges et la suppression massive de fichiers. Tout prouve une attaque préméditée. Début mars 2025, le verdict tombe : Davis Lu est inculpé pour sabotage informatique et risque jusqu'à dix ans de prison. L'entreprise parle de pertes s'élevant à plusieurs centaines de milliers de dollars, mais la défense conteste, évoquant un préjudice limité à 5 000 dollars.Alors, simple acte criminel ou révolte technologique ? Car au-delà du procès, l'affaire Davis Lu rappelle d'autres formes de résistance face au progrès perçu comme une menace. Du mouvement ouvrier des Luddites au XIXe siècle, qui s'attaquait aux métiers à tisser mécaniques, au groupe CLODO dans les années 80, qui voyait l'informatisation comme un outil de répression, ce type de sabotage soulève une question fondamentale : quand la technologie décide du sort des salariés, ceux-ci peuvent-ils un jour décider légitimement de la retourner contre leurs employeurs ? Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Worries about AI are deeply rooted in history. Plus, the local news for March 11, 2025 and an illuminating conversation with a 14-year-old Nashvillian. Credits: This is a production of Nashville Public RadioHost/producer: Nina CardonaEditor: Miriam KramerAdditional support: Mack Linebaugh, Tony Gonzalez, Rachel Iacovone, LaTonya Turner and the staff of WPLN and WNXP

On today's Labor Radio Podcast Daily: Wisconsin teachers & allies rally, reports Madison Labor Radio; Luddites smash “labor saving” machines; Evan Esar quote @wpfwdc @AFLCIO #1u #UnionStrong #LaborRadioPod Proud founding member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network

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.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Panel - 361Firm's NY Tech Summit Feb. 25, 2025SUMMARY KEYWORDSArtificial Intelligence, generative AI, venture capital, seed funding, Hippocratic, LLM, job displacement, AI revolution, energy solutions, food security, humanoid robots, quantum computing, stakeholder model, economic impact, technological advancement.SPEAKERSSpeaker 1, Alex Zhuk, Rashmi Joshi, Ben Narasin, Speaker 2, Maisy Ng, Mark Sanor, Zoe Cruz Mark Sanor  00:00Um, introduce yourself again, share an insight and what scares and excites you about AI, there you Ben Narasin  00:06go. What is this the one? All right, Hi, I'm Ben Naris, and I run tenacity venture capital. I spent of any a large venture firm about three years ago. I focus on seed. I've been doing that for about 18 years. Last year, I saw 2000 companies. I funded three. They were all generative. Ai related. It it is not because I have an explicit focus on AI. By the way, focused funds of under perform generalist funds for 40 years, find that data out there and think about how you invest. It's that the best and brightest always go to the shiniest, most exciting thing, and that is certainly generative AI right now, I even have I paid them personally, the most I've ever paid for company, $500 million for a company called Hippocratic, which is creating LLM based nurses. And what's fascinating about AI, I guess there's so many things, but one, we don't know how it works and how it thinks. These machines are thinking. And people that are in the business will acknowledge they don't actually understand how, two, it totally changes the value and reality of time. So let's use the example of Hippocratic they have an LLM that is trained on the nursing notes from major medical facilities. It calls in audio every person that leaves a hospital or doctor's office and checks in on them to make sure they are staying in tune with the things they need to do to get better. When in the past, would that ever have been possible? You know, 1000 people leaves a hospital in a day, there is zero chance you can afford to get the people to do it. But AI can spend infinite amounts of time and spin up infinite instances, and it will totally change things that we are able to do. I make one more example of that. I was listening on calls that the AI made to different patients. And it called a woman that had diabetes, and it, you know, did its check in. And then she said, Hey, can I eat, you know, beans? Yeah, beans are fine. Can I eat bread? Well, bread is bad at spikes. And then she listed off one by 156, foods to see if they were okay to eat. And the AI, very patiently, said, yes, no, yes, no, that would never happen. But not only can the AI allow infinite time to be utilized to do things in parallel, but the people on the other side can take advantage of it in ways they never would have with a traditional nurse in this instance. So I think there are going to be so many things that happen that we are not expecting. I am not worried about I am a little worried about the single purpose tool labor, the person that is not able to be retrained well, because that's not the culture they grew up in. They didn't value education there, you know? But hey, I walk down New York City streets today, a lot of people swing and sledge hammers and dig in dirt. There'll be plenty of things to be done. It's just if you have a single if you're that high or gal in the call center in Bangladesh. Woo. I hope you can find someone else. Mark Sanor  02:45Okay, so Maisie, also introduce yourself. And again, what scares, excites, insights. Maisy Ng  02:53Hi. My name is May Z. I'm founder, managing partner of the light capital. We're VC head quarter in Singapore. We're now doing our second fund, the first invest in Southeast Asia tech companies that celebrate the UN SDGs. The second fund will invest in AI companies across the AI tech stack. We're really excited about this opportunity because, I mean, AI is like a tech East dream, right? So, because it's so revolutionary, the same O, same o doesn't work anymore. We need a whole new class of semi conductors, data center technologies, new software that will empower new applications. So this is, we think it's like, I think the aircraft guy, this is once in 100 years as well. So, and what excites me, I think, well, the sort of paradigm shift that AI brings, it enables us humans to do things we never thought was possible. And initially, for example, when deep mine was started, it started by trying to play chess. And initially it basically took all the grand master strategies and train the software to play like a grand master. And so it played against grand masters, and they win some and they lose some, and then they decide, okay, fine, we just tell the computer, these are the rules, and you just go play. And because computers can basically, you know, like, work really fast, they could play, like, a million games overnight, and very soon they learn how to play. And then they did this go, which is a far more complex game than chess, and just by playing against itself, they found new strategies that Grand Masters would not think of like in the chess game. They be sacrificing pieces, left, right and Sanor, and then they win. And people just can't understand how they did that. And a couple of days ago, I read this article about scientists using AI to design basically micro wave circuits, and they said that the design that comes out looks really weird. It's not something that an engineer would design, because it's not something you've been taught in school. But so it looks really weird. Doesn't look like a circuit board, but apparently it worked better than any other circuit. So I think that is opportunity that we can have with AI. What? What scares me a bit to what Zoe said. I mean, someone once said that basically, software would eat the world. So guess what? Ai. Eat the software. And to Ben's point, people will lose jobs, and this is a major program shift. Some of the jobs aren't ever coming back, and so you gonna have, like, massive layoffs, and what people are gonna do so the consumption will drop, because people just don't have jobs they can spend. So I think the governments and the companies need to know and try to plan ahead, because the core, I guess, social compound we have capitalism is that if you make money as a capitalist, you are supposed to invest the money to create more jobs, build factories. But what we saw in the past decades is that people who made money from outsourcing globalization, they didn't build more factories. They did hire more workers. What did they do? They bought Yach, they bought art. And so all this rent seeking behavior didn't help the economy, and that is a problem. So if you take AI, that's going to be like compounded a train in times exponentially. So I think companies need to be aware of that. Governments need to be aware of that. It may be that we have to do either tax on robots or UBI just to what people picking up. Pitch Fox, Mark Sanor  06:00okay, let Alex go next. Alex Zhuk  06:05Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me. Great to see all of you. I'm going to give you a very short introduction by myself, because I haven't met many of you. I'm a founder of an AI company that uses satellites to map the environmental footprint of every farm on the planet to help ensure food security through resilience, but also decarbonize agriculture, which is the second largest emitting sector in the world. I'm also on the side involved in critical mission asset development, primarily energy solutions and data centers, starting with building a digital twin of the electrical grid, because it's becoming very hard to connect to it, as many of now, in terms of an insight that I think hasn't been shared by these experts near me, I think we are under appreciating, or at least I did for a very long time, the way in which industries that have been established as part of humanity's operation for 1000s of years will be disrupted. So I work in agriculture. We've been farming in a mechanized, or at least structured manner for centuries, but you could argue 1000s of years we are actually for writing of climate reasons, but also just the way we've been farming since the 19th century, are on track to erode the size of arable land. It's about the size of Latin America, which puts in tricky position, especially with a growing global population, right? What do you mean by a road? So the way we farm, we've been farming for past 100 years is we've been blank to chemicals non stop on the soil, mechanically turning it over same crops. And what we found recently is that process over time kills us well. Now the question is, how do you deal with that? One way is to improve how we've been farming before. So precision agriculture, but you know, there's a completely different paradigm on hand, right? So, much like a century ago, in order to get a diamond, you would go down a mine shaft, you would dig it up, you would clean it, you process it, you ship it over. Now you can start with a kernel of carbon and grow it, right? Similarly, for example, with meat, we're getting to a point where we can grow real patties that are juicy, feel more or less the same taste and a real meat in a lab, what the consumption and the water and the energy needed to raise through animals at scale. So I think it's an opportunity in that AI can provide real resource abundance and a quality of life for each and one of us in terms of volume, that is fundamentally different from how we've been approaching it as humanity for hundreds of years. The question comes back to actually something you mentioned and several other panelists, which is, how do we tackle the social question, and how do we deal with the tension if the haves, if the gap between the haves and the have nots increases far greater than we've seen before. Mark Sanor  09:17So thank you, Alex, somewhat hopeful, maybe, maybe. Zoe, you're now on an AI panel. If you stick around, you could be on a health tech panel. What are your thoughts on on AI specifically scary and exciting. I Zoe Cruz  09:35mean, to me, this young man is Exhibit A why it all is going to be very good again. My concern is the transition. And right now, the way we allocate capital to wonderful things like AI is in at the traditional paradigm, which is, you know, stocks and bonds go up if x. Why, you see, there's a paradigm. I went and re read actually, and that's where AI is helpful. There is a book that was written in 1955 and it's basically the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And it was the first time they talked about paradigm shifts. And in that they said scientists do a lot of work in a particular paradigm, and then Copernicus says, no, no, no, the sun doesn't go around the Earth. It's the other way around. That's a paradigm shift. So you do something different. So for me right now, as my 29 year old son says, technology exists to take the carbon out of the air to even get these meteorites to go off. The technology exists. How do you deal with the existing capitalist model, where you have existing capital allocated to things that will go to zero? So I do believe this is something spectacular and exciting, but I can't put the two and two together. That comes up with four in terms of regular transition. And you know, one of the things I said to my son, because the world is now run by HEPA gene octogenarians, never mind heptogenarians, why don't you guys get more involved? I mean, he's a brilliant young man. He started evolutionary biology. He plays the classical piano. He should get involved. And you know what he said? Talk about socio economic issues. What's the point? We have to wait until you guys die off. Now he didn't mean me, but hopefully, but Mark Sanor  11:42so we were in Germany at a round table, and apparently there's, there's legislation afoot to reduce or incentivize you to reduce voting at later ages. So you've sort of heard the panel, if you guys want to make some comments. But otherwise, I started opening Ben Narasin  12:04it up to comment on something I very much disagree with. Maisie. I don't think the evidence is that people are greedy, venal yacht buyers. I think it's quite the opposite look at so I look spend a lot of time in trucking space. Trucking is the number one job in the world by head count, although nobody wants to do it anymore, and there's an issue with aging out, etc, etc. But I was very concerned for a long time, because I was also looking at autonomous trucks and the massive displacement number one job in the world by head count, it should be done by machines. Okay, these people are out of work over time. So I started looking backwards. And one of the great example. See what the very one of the very first commercialized robots was the card scanner at the gas station. Now, if you're unfortunate enough to live in New Jersey and drive a car, you are in one of two states that unions which, by the way, I could not despise an entity more than I despise union. So please, no union leaders here have insisted that a human being pump your gas, an incredibly inefficient experience that drives me insane whenever I'm forced to deal with it. By the way, yesterday I was in a apartment. We were looking at buying an apartment here, and they have a man who pushes the button in the elevator like talk about it doesn't matter how much we do, the unions will make sure people have ridiculously stupid jobs and get paid. So anyway, what happened with all that great wealth that was created because now they didn't have to employ people to pump the gas in 48 states the United States, did people just stick with what they were doing? Absolutely not. They created what is now known as the convenience store when you go to a gas station, instead of just having gas pumps, which back then was all there was, maybe a counter with gum and candy, full fledged stores with all kinds of food and drinks and slushies, those stores ended up employing more people than the gas station attendant jobs represented same thing with the ATM everybody said, Oh my God, all these banks, the tellers ought to work more banks today than there Were with ATMs. I Mark Sanor  13:59think maisie's Point was different, because and Esther again, Esther Dyson asked, What billionaires, you know, have become better people in the last 1020, years, some have, but we, of Ben Narasin  14:13course, remind me, exaggerates you. It doesn't change you. Rashmi Joshi  14:18Hi. Thanks for that. I have actually three questions, so you might have to come back to me in a bit, but I'm curious, as an AI founder myself, what industries or new verticals Do you feel like are going to be established as a by factor or a consequence of us getting rid of all of these mundane tasks and grunt work type of jobs? Alex Zhuk  14:42Sure, happy to so the near term industry that has gone from, I would say, sort of in the shadows, a little bit boring, to very exciting. That was obviously energy. So we're realizing that if we're in a race at international level, we. Can't afford to lose, to concentrate now, as to how do we power these machines, both to train the models, but also humanoids, once automation is commercialized, which we're seeing happening very rapidly, that's exciting. How that will be solved, whether it's nuclear, whether it's other source of energy, is a guessing game, but that's a very exciting space. We haven't seen this growth infrastructure in decades. Personally. You know, I mentioned example of how we can similar to how we can synthesize proteins for medicine, create new foods, right? So, there is a company that was able to create cow free milk, and they tasked an AI to come up with ingredients that would when combined, taste, smell and feel like milk. And when you know, you might wonder what those ingredients were. Those were pineapple and strawberries, right? So ingredients are completely unintuitive to the human mind, that when combined, we're able to synthesize something that we want to consume. And I think we'll see that across food, I think we'll see that across health care. Mark Sanor  16:03But those are interesting vectors. But I think your question was the people, sort of your earlier point about job, you know, people who are going to be out of out of jobs, was your question like, Where will they be going? Where should they be where's the puck going for people? Is that it Alex Zhuk  16:20very difficult question for me to ask Mark, I would say the best bet would be for the verticals that are growing the fastest, Mark Sanor  16:29or maybe this goes back to Steven SPI about education. Anyone else want to answer that skill set Speaker 1  16:38would be, oh, I will cycle into something different, maybe more productive, just like, Well, Ben Narasin  16:41that was a great example. One of my one of my founders, made the point we brought a YPO group in, and he said, you know, you were talking about farming before the Civil War, 90% of the US population farmed. So we have seen a massive wipe out of an entire population of workers before it was all of America, but then they moved to cities. And guess what? When you're on a farm, you don't cut you cut your own hair. So all kinds of jobs were created that didn't exist when we had a mono culture of farming as the primary job, hair cutter, barber being one, and there were infinitely more. I think, by the way, if we could answer your question, we wouldn't tell you, because we'd be investing in at least two of us would be investing in it right now to get ahead of it. Yeah, well, yeah, I'm you must not have met many VCs, because we're very greedy in the first round to get all the ownership we can. That's the only chance we get. But it's, I think it's unpredictable, but I'm not worried that it won't happen. I think that, look, we have been through this before. The difference is that this is the first time software ever attacked the labor force instead of just process. But the labor force has been attacked many, many times. I mean, the Luddites are obviously the most commonly quoted example. But you know, it's like labor is lake water. It flows to the place it's needed. I do have material concern about, I'll just say, because I'm not gonna go too deep and dark here certain populations that might not have the historic advantage of or desire to reinvest in their own education. And I think that sometimes it's unrealistic for highly educated people to believe that everybody can be re educated, and that they'll even want to be and so where does that end up going? But here you want hope there's 100,000 unfilled jobs the United States right now in construction that are paying over $100,000 it's a good place to start. There's many places where jobs are unfilled. And lastly, a lot of the AI will augment people's ability and take over jobs that aren't filled, that are wanted and needed. As someone once said, You're not at threat of a of being your job being taken by AI. You're at threat of somebody that's better of using AI, taking your job. Maisy Ng  19:01I think I might have mis understood your question. So if you allow me, I'll give you a misunderstood answer. So I think there's, I mean, AI could be used also for, like robotics. So for example, I think, you know, we have really seen from Boston Dynamics that like dancing robots, but that isn't too useful for most of us. You don't buy a dancing robot. But a couple days ago, I saw this really interesting video. I think it's a US company that has basically built robots that can be used for domestic work. So can you imagine a robot that cleans your house? And this one was cool. So there's like two humanoid robots and standing side by side, and basically the owner comes in and gives them a bag of groceries, and the robot just look at them, and they sort it out. And if they took up a ketchup and they know its ketchup, they put at the top shelf of the fridge, they open it and they see there's eggs. And one robot picks up the eggs very gently, hands it to the other robot, who then puts it in the fridge. I mean, that's pretty cool, because you need computer vision. You also need an LL. Am, and you know, you can train a domestic robot for all scenarios, right? So the robot has to know that if it's an egg, you handle carefully, and this may be a quills egg, so he would know to the LLM that is a quills egg, it's an egg, so I handle it gently as well, so that, I think would bring tremendous, I mean, advantage for us, because nobody wants, you know, to do housework these days. Can I Rashmi Joshi  20:20just piggyback off that for a Mark Sanor  20:24second? One second, piggyback on the mic. Rashmi Joshi  20:27So as humanoid robots become more and more similar to us, let's say I can build you a robot that would be your perfect husband or partner, right? And it's indistinguishable from the real thing. Maisy Ng  20:44I think I can distinguish that Rashmi Joshi  20:47today, sure, but maybe five years from now, maybe not, right? So my question is, then, what is the value in being human? Maisy Ng  20:57I think we still have a soul, which I don't think that. I mean, we could probably train the robots at some point, but I don't know, it's a tough question to answer. So I think, I mean, that's something that we had discussed internally as well. I mean, so do we teach robots about, you know, like life after life and so forth? I mean, do do when you Mark Sanor  21:17say So internally? I mean, your fund internally discuss this friends Maisy Ng  21:20and within the partners and so what it means to be human, and basically, what do we need to teach, you know, the robots and so forth. So I don't know. I mean, it's an honest answer. I really don't know good to see how it goes, Zoe Cruz  21:33because I'm gonna leave after this. Are you gonna drop the mic and just go? What an amazing question, in the sense that, first of all, the idea that I'm going to have this made in my home, this robot that I can't control, that somebody else actually can control, I don't know that I'm going to get to that dysfunction. To me, we're not again, we don't need we can take off the table. How amazing AI is going to be. Let's take it. It's not. You don't need to argue it. It's going to be amazing. Okay, the land of plenty. This thing about human beings, my experience at Morgan Stanley was, if you in the ability of human beings to do amazing things if you inspired them, is mind boggling. If you inspired them, that's what humanity is. And so this idea that we're going to replace human beings, you're going to build me the perfect partner. No, thank you. What I want to ask again, of all of us, why is it that we talk in terms of the stakeholder? We're talking about is the shareholder of a company that's going to make a lot of money because they're going to fire employees, and therefore productivity is going to go up, and therefore you're going to be rich. That's basically the discussion. Yes. Now the old capitalist system that I started growing up in as a young, you know, graduate of a business school was you had three stakeholders as a company, shareholders at the head of the que, clearly, your employees and your community, those were the stakeholders. And I think how we got to the only stakeholder in any kind of for profit organization is your equity holders. Is what stops us from doing inspiring things. I'm not inspired to be rich or they say the shroud has no pockets, so when you're six feet under, it doesn't matter whether you are multi billionaire or sent a millionaire. Did your life make a difference? So with that, sorry. 23:53Thank you. Ben Narasin  23:54Just one comment on humanoid robots. I mean, Japan has been trying to do humanoid robots for decades. It is not clear that human beings want them, and I'm looking think about your eggs, example. So what's better a humanoid with two hands and two feet, or an octopod, pod like creature that has eight you know, building for functionality will ultimately so you'll go back to one thing. You wanna know, it really scares me. So I was a writer for 10 years. I got a lot of freelance of freelance writing. I want to write a science fiction book on the following. Jump forward 10 years. Quantum works. Okay? I don't know how many of you spent time looking at Quantum. We have no flipping clue what it can do, right? It changes everything. And the only thing we worry about is end point, security. Well, how about literally everything else? It's things differently than human beings find ways to do things that we would never consider okay. So now we're 10 years forward. We're at chat GPT 10. Now someone express some optimism that China and the United States would get together for some positive Oh, hallelujah moment, which, yeah, good luck with. That I'll take 10 to one odds against it happening. China wants to replace us, not to be our buddy. So now you take chi and you take Putin. They, you know, probably two of the richest people on the planet, considering certainly how Putin has raped this country of its capital. And they each put a half a trillion dollars in a bucket, and they build out the largest data farm in the world that runs entirely quantum computing. And they bring in all the best people who, by the way, if they don't perform, get a bullet in their head and get buried in the back yard. And they get them to run the newest issues of chat, GPT, and they ask that system, that trillion dollar system, do just one thing, figure out how to destroy the United States. That's what I worry about. I hope we can stay strong enough that we have a really good chance. And while I'm not a political person and we, you know, the pendulum is a nightmare, we will spend well on defense. We will allow AI to flourish. And if we're not a leader, we have a very good chance of being a distant 12th 10 years from Mark Sanor  25:57now. And what's your last thought, Alex, actually, you're going to stick around because you do AG, so the panel you originally on, you'll stay, you'll stay for and rash me is going to come up along with Chris, and we're at two. This is why there's an AI for that. There's not an AI for my glasses. 229, so last, any last questions or thoughts for AI? Yes, sorry, David, Speaker 2  26:27so Alex, love what you doing. The thought is, you know, 50 years ago, there's probably people in a room, and they were talking about how spectacular we'd gotten at crop farming and the use of these fertilizers and this mechanization, all the stuff that's now proven problematic at that point seen ground breaking. What are your views on how we've grown in terms of thinking about the how of technology and being able to mitigate for all of because everything has trade off, so everything has unforeseen circumstances. Are we just plowing ahead, same as we did 6070, years ago, expecting perfect results, when actually we've seen that. That doesn't often happen. That's Alex Zhuk  27:06a fantastic point. And to give context to that comment, you know that process, which is the HP process, which allowed us to manufacture these chemicals for farm and very cheap and scalable, did prevent famines, and, you know, solved a lot of issues at the time were post World War Two, especially, really pressing. I think today, there's a component of that, which is, there are problems we can see in the near term, and it's extremely appealing to solve those at the expense of, you know, something we will have to figure out later down the line. And I will also compound on the comment I've heard earlier I can remember who mentioned it, which is that both great powers Today, China and America, realize that in particular, the AI race is the new nuclear race, and it's a race neither one of them can totally afford to lose, and the importance of which supersedes profits. So you combine that dynamic with where we today, and I don't see not only any one of us stopping, but how we could, even in the in national interest, slow down our progress given the dynamic internationally. Hope that answers your question, do you Mark Sanor  28:22want to hit that or you good. There's one other thing that I think you all should know. You all know open ai, llms, just give, give 3060, seconds on, on pricing model, Maisy Ng  28:34right? Yeah, we are investing in a new company that does the world's first large pricing model. So basically, there's lot of content in the world, but there's no price on it. So this company has figured out a way how to price different content. So just like you train an LLM with text input, I mean, with lots of text, so that you can figure out, using transformer model, what's the probability of the next word, and therefore, in doing so, be a performance sentence and reply to a query. So basically, LM has been trained on copious amounts of text to give you an answer when you input a tax query. So what these guys have done is, again, they've trained the large pricing model on a huge amount of content. And instead of figuring out a tax output, what it does is, when then confronted with a content input, it can then spit out the monetary value of that content. And so the use is immense. Because right now, if imagine, if I go to farmers market that was sharing this angle, we don't have time for the farmers market, but they can price any content. Mark Sanor  29:31But the point is this, this is, yeah, this is another new frontier that I think, is talk to talk. We'll be having round tables very soon. So thank you to this panel. We appreciate it. Alex, stay I'm joined our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. You. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. For reference: Web: www.361firm.com/homeOnboard as Investor: https://361.pub/shortdiagOnboard Deals 361: www.361firm.com/onbOnboard as Banker: www.361firm.com/bankersEvents: www.361firm.com/eventsContent: www.youtube.com/361firmWeekly Digests: www.361firm.com/digest

An overdue check-in conversation with Dan Barber,  chef, co-owner of Blue Hill restaurants and co-founder of Row 7 Seeds, where we dive into the fascinating world of seeds and how breeding is evolving with the explosion of AI and other technologies. No, we don't need GMOs, CRISPR, or other risky blunt instruments. We discuss the implosion of the fake meat hype, which was at its peak when we last spoke four years ago, why insane umami flavor and potentially self-nitrogen-fixing tomatoes are revolutionary. This is a deep conversation about bread and wheat—and why breeding wheat specifically for whole meal flour is so important, where Row 7 Seeds, his seed company, is headed and why they're launching a CPG brand using pressure-cooked vegetables (because processing isn't a dirty word). When your vegetables come from incredible seeds and are grown in healthy soils, you don't need unhealthy additives. We kick things off with mouthwatering winter spinach and dive into a long conversation about the role of technology in food and agriculture. No, we shouldn't go back to the past. No, we're not Luddites. In fact, Dan is incredibly bullish on the role of AI in natural breeding—perhaps the best of both worlds, enabling faster breeding for local conditions rather than global crops that lack flavor, nutrients, and rely on excessive chemicals.Get ready for a firehose of stories on food, seeds, soil, and culture!More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/dan-barber-2.==========================In Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast show we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Hosted by Koen van Seijen.==========================

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.

Shawna Boren and Dan Kent break down this week's message by Greg Boyd titled: "Who or What Do You Worship?" Come join these two future Luddites as they embark on a journey of simplicity—with maybe a little silliness for good measure.

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

Connected vs. Unconnected: The Future of the Home The debate rages on… The fully connected home where all can be automated vs. the unconnected environment and the return to the beauty of form, function and simplicity. We're not Luddites, but if we look at the experiential nature and convenience of a connected space, we must also consider what it means to have a space that is intentionally unconnected. The removal of screens, tech, automation, phones, and tablets can create calm and allow opportunities for true reconnection with self and others. Offline. Join this compelling conversation about AI, automation and the pros and cons of a fully connected home in a complicated world. All of these programs took place in the WestEdge Theater presented by Pacific Sales Kitchen & Home. The stage was designed by Julie Beuerlein of JKB Home Design. As a busy professional designer, you know how important it is to find the right partnerships. Partnerships that allow you to specify the right products for every project. Professionals like you just don't have time to waste. Let me tell you about one of my partnerships. Pacific Sales is here to serve you with expert, knowledgeable and non-commissioned professionals to help you specify the right product for all your projects. Non-commissioned. That means their only incentive is your satisfaction. Pacific Sales Kitchen & Home, a Best Buy Company has just that with over 60 years of service in Southern California. Pacific Sales is your destination for exploration, advice and inspiration. And here's the cherry on top, access to exclusive Builder Trade Incentives from top brands like Monogram. Visit a Pacific Sales Showroom today to learn how you can unlock additional savings and benefits. Don't miss out on the opportunity to work with the best of the best. Visit Pacific Sales Kitchen & Home today and elevate your projects to new heights! Moderated by: Erika Heet - Interiors Magazine Featuring: Kristi Nelson | KM Nelson Design, Adam Hunter | Adam Hunter, Inc., Ginger Curtis | Urbanology Designs, Jaqui Seerman | Jaqui Seerman Designs

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.

Paris Marx is joined by Jathan Sadowski to discuss the relationship between technology and capitalism, and what lessons can be taken from the Luddites to properly assess and understand these systems.Jathan Sadowski is is the author of The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism. He's also the co-host of This Machine Kills and a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham.Also mentioned in this episode:Jathan wrote about AI and the Tinkerbell Effect in Futurism.Support the show

On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, Paris Marx is joined by Jathan Sadowski to discuss the relationship between technology and capitalism, and what lessons can be taken from the Luddites to properly assess and understand these systems.Jathan Sadowski is is the author of The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism. He's also the co-host of This Machine Kills and a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

What is artificial intelligence and how are some corporate interests seeking to hand over the development of genetically engineered organisms to it?Join us as we unpack this question with Jim Thomas, an activist and researcher who challenges the common misconceptions about artificial intelligence. We delve into the historical context of the Luddites and connect their resistance to harmful industrialization with the emerging technological challenges we face today. Our discussion takes a critical angle on how AI intersects with indigenous rights, spotlighting the recent establishment of the CALI Fund at COP16 in Colombia, which aims to ensure fair compensation for the genetic information used by big tech companies.The world of synthetic biology and genetic engineering is rapidly evolving, with technologies like CRISPR and DNA printing poised to reshape agriculture and ecosystems. But what ethical and ecological concerns arise from this transformation? We explore the commodification of biodiversity and the implications of merging these advancements with AI, leading to new bioeconomies. The financialization of nature, through initiatives like biodiversity credits, raises significant questions about sustainability, colonialism and the commercialization of genomic data. As we navigate these complex issues, we emphasize the urgent need for societal oversight to safeguard the common good.This podcast is produced by Global Justice Ecology Project.Breaking Green is made possible by tax deductible donations from people like you. Please help us lift up the voices of those working to protect forests, defend human rights and expose false solutions.  Donate securely online hereOr simply text GIVE to 716-257-4187Note: This episode's image was created with openart.ai. We found the result interesting, but do we want to use it to create new organisms and hand over our collective future to artificial intelligence?

Hello! Today we brought back our polling experts Ben Recht, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Leif Weatherby, a professor of German and the founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. We set out to really talk about one question: Can we trust these polls and were they right or wrong? Then we talked a lot about how campaigns think and how our data driven society leads to a bunch of very odd and almost random decisions but also very little reflection. Luddites rejoice, this one is for you. Also, as always, we would really appreciate any help to keep the lights on. We give away this podcast for free every week and can only keep doing it with continued donations from you. It's just five dollars a month, which is about what you pay in delivery fees every time you order Chipotle from DoorDash or come up with some other five dollar purchase that fits in here. We do appreciate it and thank you so much to everyone who subscribed last week! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

Hello!Today we brought back our polling experts Ben Recht, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Leif Weatherby, a professor of German and the founding director of the Digital Theory Lab at NYU. We set out to really talk about one question: Can we trust these polls and were they right or wrong? Then we talked a lot about how campaigns think and how our data driven society leads to a bunch of very odd and almost random decisions but also very little reflection. Luddites rejoice, this one is for you.Also, as always, we would really appreciate any help to keep the lights on. We give away this podcast for free every week and can only keep doing it with continued donations from you. It's just five dollars a month, which is about what you pay in delivery fees every time you order Chipotle from DoorDash or come up with some other five dollar purchase that fits in here. We do appreciate it and thank you so much to everyone who subscribed last week! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit goodbye.substack.com/subscribe

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . Digital Humanities sounds at first blush like a contradiction of terms: the intersection of our digital, technology-centric culture, and the humanities, like arts, literature, and philosophy. Aren't those like oil and water? But my guest illustrates just how important this discipline is by illuminating both of those fields from viewpoints I found fascinating and very different from what we normally encounter. Professor Caroline Bassett is the first Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities, an interdisciplinary research center in Cambridge University. She is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College and researches digital technologies and cultural change with a focus on AI. She co-founded the Sussex Humanities Lab and at Cambridge she inaugurated the Masters of Philosophy in Digital Humanities and last month launched the new doctoral programme in Digital Humanities. In part 1 we talk about what digital humanities is, how it intersects with AI, what science and the humanities have to learn from each other, Joseph Weizenbaum and the reactions to his ELIZA chatbot, Luddites, and how passively or otherwise we accept new technology. Caroline really made me see in particular how what she calls "technocratic rationality," a way of thinking borne out of a technological culture accelerated by AI, reduces the novelty which we can experience in the world in a way we should certainly preserve. All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines. Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.          

In Episode 82 of the Prodigy Maker Show, Chris Lewit reflects on the current state of Spanish tennis after a recent trip to Barcelona. Is Spanish tennis declining, or is it still on top? Chris explores the evolution of Spanish training, discusses the rise of new methods, and shares insights on rising stars like Carlos Alcaraz, the influence of science, and the role of high-tech academies. Key Notes: - Is Spanish tennis on the decline? - TEC Carles Ferrer Salat and the training center in Barcelona - What Spain needs to do to evolve and change to compete better with other countries - How Spain is now known as a leading training ground for foreign players - Rising Spanish juniors - Alcaraz and his development - The negatives of traditional Spanish training - The positives of traditional Spanish methods - New Spanish methods - Science and Spanish tennis - Are Spanish coaches Luddites? - The leading high-tech Spanish academies

Activists are fighting back against generative AI and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process, says Brian Merchant in a new piece for The Atlantic.Originally aired February 14, 2024.We Meet:Tech Journalist & Author Brian MerchantCredits:This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong and Emma Cillekens, and it was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Anthony Green.

3 big ideas discussed in this episode: BIG IDEA #1: AI will disrupt all businesses. Innovators will see wins, but it will be painful for Luddites. BIG IDEA #2: Rogers adoption curve. The adoption curve will see a new distribution where innovators, early adopters and early majority will gain proportionate wins. Late adopters and laggards will be too far behind to catch up, so they will be swallowed up. BIG IDEA #3: The human element is not currently able to be automated. Companies are going to hire and retain the best communicators and leaders to achieve more productive outcomes in increasingly complex workplaces. Get the show notes for this episode here: https://AskJeremyJones.com/376 Enjoy the interview

Who and what you are, your personality, your style, your thoughts...  That's all about to change.  For one thing you are already a product on “free to use” social media.  You don't really own things you think you own (We're looking at you, Steam!)  Even your intellectual property is up for grabs now in ways you can't see coming.  Hollywood actors are selling the rights to their digital likenesses, and meanwhile, others are stealing such rights via technological loopholes.  All media exists, according to Drew, to draw you towards the advertisements…  And your deepfake could be used to do just that to others.  Some of these fakes are good enough to fool yourself even. Join Allan and Drew as they interview Sam Rad, a premier futurist and humanist, who freely admits that there is now an inherent tension between those two philosophies. The conversations about the governance, ethics, and security of all this new media and technology are woefully behind the curve. Many members of the TikTok generation has a 4-second attention span and require multiple simultaneous input streams at any given time to feel satisfied.  Is this a deliberate attack on the Western human nervous system?  Cyberattacks are certainly killing people already, why not go straight for their brains? Are the peasants coming with pitchforks and torches to destroy Frankenstein's newest monster?  How about the striking dockworkers?  The terrorists destroying 5G towers?  Do peasants with pitchforks ever win?  Ned (mistakenly called “Jason” by Allan)  Ludd and the Luddites failed in a big way to stop technology from replacing their jobs in the late 1700s (mistakenly referred to as the having happened in the Victorian era by Allan) This show is peppered with others such historical and cultural references such as the cultures and economies in Second Life, Picasso's mass production of his own paintings, Rousseau's evolving concepts of property, Mary Shelly and her Frankenstein's monster, Hegel's model of “thesis, antithesis, synthesis”, the Butlerian Jihad from the “Dune” series, and William Gibson's maxim that, “The street finds its uses for things”. We're not even coping with all of this, and now we have the AI conversation thrust upon us as well…  Your content is training data, and can be mimicked with uncanny accuracy as well. Check out Sam's book, “Radical Next” and her docuseries “Illicit Economies of the Shadowverse” to learn more about the positives and negatives of all of these trends in humanity. Good luck out there.  Stay safe.  Who you are and what you own is irretrievably altered at this point.  Cybersecurity is really just “security” now.  But hopefully all this mess will create the next cultural and creative Renaissance. Y'all be safe now...  

Technology Reading List: Marshall McLuhanThe Medium is the MessageThe Global VillageThe Gutenberg GalaxyUnderstanding Media Neil Postman Amusing Ourselves to Death Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to TechnologyRay KurzwellThe Age of Spirtual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human IntelligenceKirkpatrick SaleRebels Against The Future: The Luddites And Their War On The Industrial Revolution: Lessons For The Computer Age Paperback Articles Mentioned in the Episode: Mayo Clinic Article on Screen Time Digital Literacy: Stanford Research: High School Students' Digital Skills Paints Worrying Portrait Stanford Research: It Doesn't Take Long to Learn to Spot Misinformation OnlineCivic Online Reasoning LessonsJust for fun: Medieval Help Desk SketchSusan's Movie Recommendation: The Village, directed by M. Night Shyamalan (00:00) - Kids, Screentime, and Technology (00:42) - The benefits of remote meetings (03:46) - The Luddites (07:30) - Technology in preschool (09:46) - Tech in the grammar stage (19:17) - Break (20:22) - Tech in the logic stage (36:54) - Tech in the rhetoric stage (42:03) - Screen things we like! (46:22) - Outro

Guest: Brian Merchant is a journalist focusing on technology and the future of work.  He is the author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, and his latest, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.  He is also a founder of Terraform, Vice's science fiction outlet. The post The Luddites & the Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech appeared first on KPFA.

Earlier this week, I interviewed the Australian AI expert Toby Walsh about Google's new NotebookLM, a seemingly magical AI product that creates believable conversation between bots. Today, on our weekly That Was The Week tech roundup, Keith Teare and I agreed that this is going to profoundly change the way we not only produce media, but also how we imagine “trust” and “truth” in our synthetic media age. Referencing an optimistic essay by @Every CEO Dan Shipper entitled “Generalists Own the Future”, we agreed that products like NotebookLM will create what Shipper calls a “wicked environment” for generalists to create their own unique content. GPT-4o and Claude Sonnet 3.5 and the other LLMs means that we all have “10,000 Ph.D.'s available at our fingertips.” While that's exciting news for know-nothing generalists like Keith and I, it's less good news for all those narrow Ph.Ds beavering away in research libraries In the age of AI, these types of narrow specialists are the new proletariat. Luddites will, of course, encourage them to unite, telling them that they nothing to lose but their (irrelevant) specialization. But, in they want to survive in our synthetic media age, they might be better off turning in their library cards and downloading NotebookLM.Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On 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

Honestly, episode 187 isn't what it seems! Kat is talking about the casket girls (not the vampires they're rumored to be) and Kaleigh is talking about luddites (the textile workers from the industrial revolutions, not the term for people who dislike technology)!Let's Chat! Twitter: @TINAHLpodcastEmail: thisisnotahistorylecture@gmail.comRemember to rate us wherever you can!

In today's episode, I talk way too much about what it's like to live in a town that has fairly consistent electrical outages - and what I've gleaned from living so many days without electricity - a Luddites Vacation! Today we explore our attachment to technology and what I'm putting on my Analogue Menu / Blackout Box - for days when I need a serious break from technology (or just suffer from an electrical outage). My hope is that this week's episode inspires you to take a little Luddite vacation of your own and UN-PLUG! Need Advice? Got Questions? I'd love to hear from you. Email me at janelyon369@gmail.com Sign up for the Meditation Mastery waitlist Get my free 10-Minute Energy Re-set Follow me on IG: @dakiniinabikini

Welcome to the first episode of “Brewing Brilliance,” where we dive into everything IUI and Luddy. We're kicking things off with a special guest, Joanna Millunchick, the Dean of Luddy. We chat about her journey to Luddy, share some cool history about the Luddites, unpack what “One Name, One School” really means, and take a peek at what the future holds for Luddy. If you're curious about what's happening at Luddy, this is the podcast for you! Grab a cup of coffee and join us! Join Our ⁠Discord⁠!!! Become part of the team at ⁠The Spot⁠!!!!

Today we think of Luddites as people who don't know how to use technology or are maybe even afraid of it. That's pretty far from what the original Luddites were all about. They were the first workers to fight for fair treatment. They were not successful.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Support us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/historyissexy Who were the Luddites? Were they really "anti-technology", or were they about something entirely different? Was the problem capitalism all along?

In this episode of Future Commerce Rewind, our summer series where we compare today's news against episodes from the archives, we are revisiting Episode 341 with friend of the pod and cultural theorist, Matt Klein, to discuss the findings from his annual META Trends Report. Today, we're not just talking about trends and data. We're talking about a deep human need that's driving patterns and how businesses can begin to sense those patterns and tap into and address the core desires and anxiety of people, and that's what it's all about.“Going Airplane Mode”Key takeaways:- A key takeaway from analyzing over one hundred trend reports spanning several years: many of the reported trends remain unchanged year after year after year.- Language used to describe disruptive changes often relies on established nomenclature instead of introducing new terminology.- There is an opportunity to hack trend reports by strategically seeding ideas and language that can shape future trends.- The ranking of meta-trends in reports can differ between what is frequently mentioned and what exists in cultural data, creating a discrepancy and an opportunity for manipulation.- Understanding the deeper human needs beneath trend manifestations is key for organizations to find success in addressing cultural shifts.{00:04:50} - “It's quite cliche, but it's a call to action for a little bit of bravery of not what's already being reported and said and what's comfortable, but what do we want to see, what does not yet exist, and how do we put our neck out there and really speak about the things that are uncomfortable, fringy, edgy, and strange because after all that is where change emanates from.” - Matt{00:12:57} - “The problem is the scant few people that are actually doing this type of work and research and will put the quantifiable and qualitative mind to analyzing trends is a small group of people that are all highly self-referential because they're all analyzing the same cohort of data because they're all kind of tapped into the same algorithm.” - Phillip{00:19:47} - “The meta trends act as trailheads for understanding all else within culture. When you acknowledge what's trying to be desired here… you understand beneath the surface what people actually need, that's where organizations find success.” - Matt{00:26:59} - “There's certainly importance and maybe I'm saying that because there's a livelihood or a career anchored or tethered to it, but I would say there are some implications and serious business consequences that come from this, but it is also fun. It is entertaining to be talking about these things and to be dissecting and analyzing.” - Matt{00:30:39} - “It's all from fear. No one wants to be disrupted. No one wants to be the disruptor either. That goes back to this idea of bravery, being the first to say something or sticking their neck out or reporting on the thing that no one else has reported. So you operate from a sense of, "Well, we wanna be the first to be second."' - Matt{00:39:42} - “Every business is unique, everyone has their different challenges, everyone has their different audiences, and those audiences or those products interpret each of the meta trends uniquely. So what this really is is the starting point, not the answer key.” - MattAssociated Links:Learn more about Matt KleinRead the 2024 Meta Trends ReportCheck out Future Commerce+ for exclusive content and save on merch and printThe MUSES Journal is here! Grab your copy of our latest annual journal today at musesjournal.comHave you checked out our YouTube channel yet?Subscribe to Insiders and The Senses to read more about what we are witnessing in the commerce worldListen to our other episodes of Future CommerceHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on futurecommerce.com, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Who has the power? Workers or bosses? It changes through the ages, though it's usually the bosses. Today, we look at two key moments when the power of labor shifted, for better and worse, and we ask why then? What does history have to say about labor power right now? We travel to Sicily, Italy in the year 1347, where the bubonic plague is about to strike. The horror known as the Black Death will remake European society in countless ways, but we'll focus on one silver lining: how economic conditions shifted for workers. Then we head about 500 years into the future, to an English factory at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, where textile workers take up arms against the machines taking their jobs and show how rapidly labor supply and demand can change. This is the famed tale of the Luddites, now a byword for knee jerk anti-technology, but the true story has nuance and a desperate but rational violent rebellion. This series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina. Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Has this pod saved America…from phone addiction?! We got Jon Lovett to take a rather extreme version of the Offline challenge in Fiji, AND America's top doctor and friend of the pod Vivek Murthy is now calling for a Surgeon General's warning label on social media platforms. Max and Jon bask in their success, then mourn the dismantling of the Stanford Internet Observatory, the nation's leading mis- and disinformation research organization. Then, Max sits down with longtime tech journalist Brian Merchant to talk about whether AI development is slowing down, why workers should organize against the technology, and what good AI use cases and centaurs have in common.

The Luddites, who smashed machines in the 19th century, in an organized effort to resist automation, are often portrayed as uneducated opponents of technology. But according to Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant, “The Luddites were incredibly educated as to the harms of technology. They were very skilled technologists. So they understood exactly how new developments in machinery would affect the workplace, their industry, and their identities.” In this episode, Kelly talks with Brian about the history and legacy of the Luddite movement, and what workers who are being oppressed by the tech titans of our time can learn from the era of machine-breakers. Music: Son Monarcas & David Celeste You can find a transcript and show notes (including links to resources) here: truthout.org/audio/let-this-conversation-with-mariame-kaba-radicalize-you/ If you would like to support the show, you can donate here: bit.ly/TODonate If you would like to receive Truthout's newsletter, please sign up: bit.ly/TOnewsletter

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 or email Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com Transcript BestOfTheLeft.com/Support (Members Get Bonus Clips and Shows + No Ads!) Join our Discord community! SHOW NOTES Ch. 1: The New Luddites - SHIFT - Air Date 2-14-24 Activists are fighting back against generative AI and reclaiming a misunderstood label in the process, says Brian Merchant in a new piece for The Atlantic. Ch. 2: Being a Luddite Is Good, Actually ft. Jathan Sadowski - Left Reckoning - Air Date 5-29-21 Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) of the This Machine Kills (@machinekillspod) podcast repairs our sabotaged understanding of the legacy of the Luddites. Ch. 3: Why this top AI guru thinks we might be in extinction-level trouble | The InnerView - TRT World - Air Date 1-22-24 Lauded for his groundbreaking work in reverse-engineering OpenAI's large language model, GPT-2, AI expert Connor Leahy tells Imran Garda why he is now sounding the alarm.   SEE FULL SHOW NOTES FINAL COMMENTS Ch. 12: Final comments on the fork in the road and a look at our options References: Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I. A Scottish Jewish joke - Things Fall Apart - Air Date 1-25-22 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 at Twitter.com/BestOfTheLeft Like at Facebook.com/BestOfTheLeft Contact me directly at Jay@BestOfTheLeft.com

Sony just made the biggest purchase in music history, Michael Jackson's music collection for $1.2B — Because they separated the art from the artist.The Super Bowl winner wasn't Kansas City, it was Dunkin' Donuts — Because Super Bowl commercials aren't 30 seconds long, they're 30 days.And over the weekend, one of Google's self-driving Waymo robotaxis was set on fire — And that reminds us of the same incident… in England… 200 years ago (spoiler: It's the Luddites).$SONY $PARA $GOOGSubscribe to our newsletter: tboypod.com/newsletterWant merch, a shoutout, or got TheBestFactYet? Go to: www.tboypod.comFollow The Best One Yet on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok: @tboypodAnd now watch us on YoutubeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.