Yuri re-casts a more lively intro
Welcome to World Brain: No Experts
In 1938, as the world teetered on the brink of total war, the novelist HG Wells published a collection of essays entitled World Brain, arguing that if provided with a global encyclopedia delivered through a miraculous new technology called microfilm, humanity would soon exist in a permanent state of peace.
Taking Wells’s essay collection as a departure point, this podcast offers a hyperbolic, poetic, inexpert narrative between two old friends and their guests, all grappling with the screaming arrival of AI, the most rapidly emergent technology of all time.
What has been awakened? Rough beast? Benevolent angel? Boring super-appliance?
When trying to make any predictions, could we be less wrong about AI than those considered to be experts?
Why “No Experts”? Is it possible that there really are any experts on this subject?
Could a few relatively smart outsiders be less wrong about AI - what it is, what changes it’s going to make to our lives - than the glory-drunk founders and their whorish enablers, or the terrifying doomsayers?
Could we be any less wrong, for that matter, than Wells, and his tragically naive proposal for a permanent state of world peace?
Finally, can an unstructured discussion between humans meaningfully enrich our understanding of the boundaries between us and what has been created?