What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future

Thanks for joining us during the holidays. White our team is taking a break, we want to share a series with you that we think you’ll love. It’s called Diving In. 

Getting food delivered should be simple — but somehow it's gotten outrageously expensive. Economist Justin Wolfers breaks down why food delivery apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub make it nearly impossible to compare prices, and why that's no...

Through stealing your job or simply tanking the stock market—whichever comes first—the rise of artificial intelligence (companies) is a very futuristic sounding problem. It may have some very old-fashioned sounding solutions however.

Guest: Cory Doctorow, sci-fi author, journalist, blogger and author of “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.”

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People are asking artificial intelligence large language models how to do everything—even how to harm themselves and others. And while companies claim there are guardrails in place for those situations, we’ve already seen real-world instances of an LLM’s advice being used to plan a mass shooting.

Guest: Mark Follman, national affairs editor at Mother Jones and author of “Trigger Points: Inside the Mission...

Is Elon Musk’s SpaceX leading humanity to Mars? Or is that just grandiose window-dressing for an A.I. company leading several other A.I. companies to IPOs? 

Guest: Max Chafkin, reporter with Bloomberg Businessweek and cohost of the Everybody's Business podcast.

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It’s an awkward time to have a Department of Education that seems so disinterested in, uh, education. It’s leaving teachers to grapple with how to integrate artificial intelligence into the classroom—if at all. 

Guest: Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

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How the Trump administration has tried to put pressure on Disney for opinions expressed by Jimmy Kimmel and the hosts of The View—and how the Mouse is fighting back.

Guest: Anna M. Gomez, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission since September 2023.

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The promise of an “internet for niche communities” and “the empowered independent creator” has been taking a beating as the web has become less open and increasingly dominated by a few platforms and players. But does it have to be that way?

Guest: Jack Conte, CEO and cofounder of Patreon.

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Under fire for what critics say is inadequate protection of its young user base, Roblox nevertheless remains incredibly popular. Are the company’s new ballyhooed protections up for the task of keeping kids safe? Or is that asking the wrong question entirely?

Guests:

Cecilia D'Anastasio, video game reporter for Bloomberg. 

Mary Harris, host of the other What Next

Stella Harris, daughter of Mary.

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Between artificial intelligence, the Iran War, and the future of Taiwan, there’s a lot for the United States and China to hash out—not least of which being the pecking order.

Guest: Josh Chin, senior global correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

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Everyone would probably hate A.I. less if we could just see some upside to it. But despite all the investment—into the companies, into infrastructure like data centers, so much into marketing—it’s widely known: artificial intelligence sucks.

Guest: Nilay Patel, co-founder and editor in chief of The Verge. 

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The not-always-beloved-but-indisputably-useful Spirit Airlines has given up the ghost. What does this mean for the airline industry and your summer travel plans? 

Guest: Will Guisbond, senior reporter for The Air Current.

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In the early 2020s, Microsoft committed to buying 75 million tons of carbon removal—somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of the entire carbon removal market. But the company just announced it was putting that ambition on pause.. 

Guest: Robinson Meyer, founding executive editor of Heatmap News.

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This week marks the beginning of the jury trial between Elon Musk and Sam Altman. There are massive implications for the A.I. industry here, but at the end of the day, the question might just boil down to - who do people dislike more?

Guest: Gerrit De Vynck, tech reporter at the Washington Post

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The era of ads following you around the internet via cookies might be coming to an end. What’s replacing it?

Guest: Sara Fisher, Axios' media correspondent, and media analyst at CNN.

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Is artificial intelligence a blessing to all humanity, or a demon sent to lead us astray from God’s path? MAGA is choosing between two extremes.

Guest: Kiera Butler, national correspondent for Mother Jones.

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This very online administration is facing push back from Iran in their own home territory: the world of insipid memes, A.I. videos, and online mockery.

Guest: Ali Breland, staff writer for the Atlantic.

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Back in the depths of the pandemic, what was an actor to do? Ben McKenzie started looking into cryptocurrency—and his research yielded both a book and a new documentary. The works are both non-fiction, which is more than McKenzie can say for crypto.

Guest: Ben McKenzie, actor, director of the documentary Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, and co-author of Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age o...

If you had as much trouble getting along with other humans as Sam Altman does, you too might be eager to issue in the artificial intelligence revolution.

Guest: Andrew Marantz, staff writer for the New Yorker. 

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As OpenAI prepares for its IPO, the company decided to…pay millions of dollars for a tech talk show? Is this just what rich tech guys like Sam Altman are like now? 

Guest: Mike Isaac, tech reporter for the New York Times.

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