The History of Household Technology

Peoples & Things | 9 January 2023 | 1h 14m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Ruth Schwartz Cowan about her book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave. Examines the history of how Americans industrialized their homes over the past two hundred years and how supposedly labour-saving technologies led women to do increased housework. Reflects on what it was like to work as a professor as a woman and mother in the 1970s and how families have changed their relationship to technology and housework in the forty years since the book was published.

 

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Marc Andreessen – AI, Crypto, Regrets, Vulnerabilities, & Managerial Revolution

The Lunar Society | 1 February 2023 | 1h 19m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Marc Andreessen discussing how AI will revolutionize software; whether NFTs are useless, & whether he should be funding flying cars instead; a16z’s biggest vulnerabilities; the future of fusion, education, Twitter, venture, managerialism, & big tech.

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What Does ChatGPT Really Know?

Many Minds | 25 January 2023 | 0h 55m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Murray Shanahan about his paper Talking about Large Language Models. Argues that it’s not appropriate to talk about large language models in anthropomorphic terms. Discusses the rapid rise of large language models and the basics of how they work; how a model that simply does “next-word prediction” can be engineered into a savvy chatbot like ChatGPT; why ChatGPT lacks genuine “knowledge” and “understanding”; and what it might take for these models to eventually possess richer, more human-like capacities.

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Artificial Intelligence and the Economy of the Future

The New Bazaar | 20 December 2022 | 1h 08m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Avi Goldfarb about his book Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Joshua Gans. Discusses why AI is best understood as a “prediction technology”; examples of AI already in use; which parts of the economy could be transformed by AI, and how; historical analogies to previous eras of widespread technological disruption; how AI will change the way people and companies make decisions; why this change will shift institutions away from blunt rules and towards individual discretion; who will gain and who will lose in the labour market from the adoption of AI; and what the use of AI might teach us about what it means to be human.

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YouTube’s Uneasy World Domination – With Mark Bergen

Big Technology Podcast | 31 August 2022 | 1h 08m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Mark Bergen about his book Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination. Discusses YouTube’s history, with insights on YouTube’s battle with TikTok, its algorithmic programming, its appeal (and peril) for kids, and whether old media can cover YouTube (and its fellow digital challengers) without bias.

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Mark Zachary Taylor on The Politics of Innovation

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc | 16 October 2022 | 0h 50m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Mark Zachary Taylor about his book The Politics of Innovation: Why Some Countries Are Better Than Others at Science and Technology. Discusses why some countries are better than others at science and technology, the uneven distribution of innovation globally, how and why we got to this place, the role of government investments, and the connection between physics and politics.

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Lewis Dartnell on Getting Humanity to Bounce Back Faster in a Post-Apocalyptic World

80,000 Hours Podcast with Rob Wiblin | 3 June 2022 | 1h 05m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Lewis Dartnell about his book The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm. Discusses the biggest impediments to bouncing back, the reality of humans trying to actually do this, the most valuable pro-resilience adjustments we can make today, how to recover without much coal or oil, how to feed the Earth in disasters, and the most exciting recent findings in astrobiology.

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Carl Benedikt Frey: The Technology Trap – Learning from the History of Automation

Social Europe Podcast | 20 June 2019 | 0h 45m | Listen Later | iTunes | Spotify
Interview with Carl Benedikt Frey about his book The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation. Discusses how history can be divided into periods when technology destroys jobs and periods where it creates jobs; considers whether today’s wave of new technology is different from previous historic periods; identifies the key characteristics that make our times unique; and what policy-makers should do to shape how technology impacts our lives.

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