Demolishing the Global Town Square

Anthropic founder Dario Amodei wants AI to be regulated. Will anyone listen? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich dive into Amodei’s recent (lengthy) essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” which argues for social responsibility both from within and around the AI industry. Amode ...  Show more

Is Moltbook—aka “Reddit for Robots”—merely a novelty, or does it contain bigger ideas about the future of tech? On this week’s podcast, Paul and Rich start by discussing the autonomous agents of OpenClaw before they move on to Moltbook, the social network where said agents can ha ...  Show more

The “smart city,” presented as the ideal, efficient, and effective for meting out services, has capture the imaginations of policymakers, scholars, and urban-dweller. But what are the possible drawbacks of living in an environment that is constantly collecting data? What importan ...  Show more

You’ve heard us talk before on this podcast about the pitfalls of trying to moderate a “global public square.” Our guest today, Eli Pariser, co-director of Civic Signals, co-founder of Avaaz, and author of "The Filter Bubble," has been thinking for years about how to create more ...  Show more

The term “smart city” might bring to mind images from The Jetsons, maybe flying cars and robots serving humans. And while that’s possible, cities are getting smarter right now in very practical and useful ways. Building a smart city is about its citizens and how their l ...

In the Middle Ages, agricultural advancements enriched the nobility and the Church, which used the wealth generated to build themselves magnificent houses and cathedrals, while the peasants went hungry. The early years of England’s industrial revolution brought stagnant incomes f ...  Show more