EP 987 Can AI Be the Answer to Social Isolation?
Google Trends reported a 2,400 percent increase in searches for “AI girlfriends” recently. Millions of people are currently in what they consider to be serious relationships with AI. Thousands have engaged in ceremonial weddings with their AI companions and stay as faithful to them as they would a human partner. Could legal marriage to AI be far off? To many of us such concepts are unusual to say the least. However, it’s hard not to see how so many in our society could take their screen addiction to another level as they seek some form of connectedness. While in sci-fi we have imagined most of our encounters with such AI beings might be as enemies, what’s to say it couldn’t also be as ‘friends’? In her new book, “The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship,” our guest, Victoria Hetherington, takes a deep dive into something many of us have a hard time contemplating.
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Most success stories start with an unimaginable backstory. Larry Bird’s journey to NBA immortality involved one of the most hardscrabble roads to success. In the fall of 1974, Bird-one of the greatest players ever to pick up a basketball-was lost and in danger of slipping away. This self-proclaimed ‘hick from French Link’ was recruited to play for Bobby Knight’s vaunted Indiana University Hoosiers’ team, but his discomfort with the fit at the University saw Bird never play a minute for the team. It all could have ended right there, but for the determination of Bob King and Bill Hodges to bring him to Indiana State University in Terre Haute, a school whose basketball team couldn’t even fill its arena. I’m old enough to recall the March 1979 NCAA Tournament finals game that pitted Larry Bird against Magic Johnson. The rest of the story involved these two men, very different in so many ways, bringing the NBA back from a perilous moment when the league was at risk of never achieving comparability with football and baseball. Keith O’Brien, author of “Heartland: A Forgotten Place, An Impossible Dream, and the Miracle of Larry Bird,” is a great storyteller and he joined us recently for a virtual book talk for my town’s library, which is now available as a podcast.
You’ve heard the phrase ‘horse sense’ which generally means the ability to make good judgments or decisions. In other words, common sense, about which we have often been told isn’t all that common. Our guest today, Patrick Dorinson, has a lot of what I described earlier, and he lays it all out in his new book, “The Common Sense Cowboy’s Guide to Life: Stories from the Old Guy at the End of the Bar.” The book is a spirited read full of life lessons, based on his years working on ranch crews, winning buckles in cow work competitions and as a campfire teller of tales both tall and small alike. In the book, he and his contributor Mathew Klickstein, lay out the common sense cowboy’s 12 rules for life. Number one on the list is “the secret to a long life is getting up every day with a purpose. Young or old, working or retired, everyone needs a purpose so find yours.” There so much more to benefit from in this podcast. He’s also got a great voice and graces the book cover with his elegant handlebar mustache. He’s the real deal.
There was a time when scientists could only read our biology, then came an advance with their ability to edit it and now it’s a moment to write a whole new chapter in evolution through synthetic biology, made possible in large part, you guessed it by artificial intelligence. Breakthroughs in AI, gene editing and synthetic biology are coming together to make this an unprecedented time in the history of life. Evolution, and its randomness, have left us with bodies that could benefit from our ability to make adjustments–like repairing faulty genes and having the ability to intervene in the complex systems that drive disease. Sounds futuristic? And a bit scary? The technology is neutral. It’s how it is applied. In benevolent hands, and with regulatory safeguards, it may make possible advances unimaginable just decades ago. Our guest, Dr. Adrian Woolfson is the author of “On the Future of the Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence.” This is probably your first time diving into this fascinating topic. Advances suggest it will become part of the scientific lexicon before you know it.
Recently, noted author Walter Isaacson devoted a whole book to what he called “The Greatest Sentence Ever Written”, you know, the one that reads ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” While the beauty of the prose in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is most often quoted, our guest historian and Professor of History, Robert Parkinson, tells us in his new book that what follows in the form of 27 grievances against the King and his enforcers, represents the real crux of the reason we declared our independence in the first place. In “Tyrants and Rogues: Understanding the Declaration of Independence,” Parkinson details the reasons we decided we must break away from England at the time. It is the first book in 120 years devoted to the meat of the Declaration of Independence. On the 250th anniversary of this world changing event, we thought we’d have him get to the heart, rather than the spirit, of the matter. He makes a bold case and by listening, you’ll have a great conversation piece for your 4th of July celebration.
In an unprecedented compilation, half of the faculty at Harvard Law School contributed essays, short and readable, about the work America has to do to build on the dreams and aspirations of our Founders as set out in our seminal documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Both of them commit our nation to shared governance, shared rights and shared accountability under the law for ‘one people’, as diverse as we were then and even more so today. Joining us on this podcast is Guy-Uriel E. Charles, the Charles J.Ogletree, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard. He, along with Alexandra Natapoff, the Lee S. Kriendler Professor of Law, at the same venerated institution, edited a first of a kind book, “America Unfinished: An Essay Collection from Harvard Law School Faculty.” Some of America’s most brilliant legal minds weigh in on the moment and give their reasoned consideration to issues like the many failures of the Article 1 branch, the Congress, where war powers reside in the Constitution, the pros and cons of our decentralized electoral system and the role of the judiciary–especially the Supreme Court—in keeping the constitutional order functioning. It is an important book and a great conversation.
President Trump’s most prized word is ‘tariffs’ and on Liberation Day he extolled their virtues and told us that this would usher in a new era of reshoring and renewal of the manufacturing sector. He has also touted $18 trillion dollars in manufacturing investments here in the United States, but according to our guest that has yet to result in shovels in the ground. After a year of on again, off again tariffs and testy interplay with allies on many of the levies, is it having the desired effect of creating new investment and employment in the manufacturing sector? Our guest, Paul Lavoie is the vice president for Innovation, Corporate Partnerships and Career Success at the University of New Haven in Connecticut. As the State of Connecticut’s former chief manufacturing officer, he was named one of top 5 Chief Manufacturing Officers in the world. He answers a range of questions about the current manufacturing policy in the United States and offers his six steps to bend the curve back toward growth in that sector of our economy.
Underpinning the growing use of AI is the need for state-of-the-art data centers. These data centers host a large number of file servers and networking equipment that can store, process, and analyze text, images, code, and other information sources. While data centers have been around throughout the computer, internet and cloud eras none so big and controversial as these. One proposed in the state of Utah is larger than Manhattan. Really! The objection to these data centers has formed in red and blue states. The concerns relate to the impact on water supplies needed to cool them, particularly in the Southwest, the spikes in electricity costs, the noise emitted and the giveaways that communities and states have bestowed upon them even if the economic impact on the local workforce is not very impactful. Large tech companies are feeling the backlash and trying to develop community impact packages that deliver more to the sites where they are being built. More than 4,000 are already in operation and 3,000 more are being planned or under construction. To discuss this issue of growing importance is Darrell West, of Brookings, co-author of the book, “Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence.”
Professor Dani Rodrik, of Harvard University, and the author of “Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World: A New Economics for the Middle Class, the Global Poor, and Our Climate”, joins us today to discuss the three, five-alarm issues facing the globe: fighting climate change, saving democracy, and eradicating poverty. Assuming that there is generally global consensus that these issues are paramount, he believes that the outdated policies that focus on one of these issues alone worsens the trade-offs between each of them. He is calling for a bold new vision of globalization, one in which we accelerate the green transition to achieve a sustainable planet, shore up the middle class in order to restore democracy’s foundations, and hasten economic revitalization in the developing world to put an end to poverty. It’s a sweeping agenda. Are the leaders atop the major nations of the world up for the challenge? We’ll discuss this topic today.
If you’re like many people, their mood is sour about their station in life and that of our nation. It is a malaise, of sorts. You can tell that Americans are struggling to determine who they are, their role in the world and what life is all about. These are high order issues that people are struggling to address. They are going to therapy, meditating, buying books and wellness products and yet often the answers are elusive. Our guest, University of Chicago professor, J. Eric Oliver, has taught a legendary course–The Intelligible Self–that students describe as life-changing. He has encapsulated his thoughts in this new book, “How to Know Your Self: The Art and Science of Discovering Who You Really Are.” He draws on insights from neuroscience, psychology, physics and ancient philosophy to explore the mystery of the self. Interspersed in this conversation and the book are practical insights into the process of living better. Let’s take a deep dive into a topic we all struggle with.