The Context Window with David Deming Podcast
Harvard Dean David Deming hosts conversations with leaders and thinkers about their personal journeys, including the detours, doubts, and influential people along the way. The podcast aims to provide context for the discussions that matter most. It is produced by David Deming and distributed via Substack.
Episodes
Can we control self-improving A.I.?
What happens when A.I. starts improving itself faster than humans can keep up? The researchers building these models can't fully explain how they work. If those models begin designing their successors, the things we don't understand could get baked into each new generation. How do we keep control?In part two of his series on recursive self-improvement, David Deming focuses on alignment, the chall
Can A.I. get better at making itself better?
Recursive self-improvement (R.S.I.) has gone from a nerdy, obscure concept to front-page news. That’s Bay Area slang for artificial intelligence using artificial intelligence to improve… artificial intelligence. Why does it have everyone so freaked out? And why is it linked so closely with fears of out-of-control superintelligent A.I.?In part one of a two-part series about R.S.I., David Deming ex
Jason Furman | The price of ignoring Econ 101
David's guest today is Jason Furman, an economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, where they've been colleagues for the past several years. Before coming to Harvard, Jason had a distinguished career in government. He worked in the White House during the entire Obama administration, including as the chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017, and he was on
Matthew Yglesias | An A.I. safety guide for normal people
How seriously should we take the risks of superintelligent A.I.? Matthew Yglesias joins David Deming for an A.I. safety guide for normal people who are just paying attention.Matt is a journalist and founder of the widely read newsletter Slow Boring, which he started in 2020 after leaving the news site Vox, which he co-founded with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell in 2014. He is one of the maste
Gina Raimondo on what companies owe workers in the AI economy
David Deming's guest today is former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo. Secretary Raimondo grew up in Rhode Island, where her father worked at the Bulova watch factory in Providence until it closed down, leaving him unemployed in his mid-50s. Today, she is trying to help workers avoid a similar fate as we transition to an AI economy. In June, she and former Governo
Cate Hall | The problem with being a high achiever
In today's episode, David talks to Cate Hall about her book You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life, written with Sasha Chapin. Agency is all the rage these days. Tech CEOs like Sam Altman have said that high agency is the skill they are hiring for in the age of AI. High agency people know what they want and they just get things done. But Cate's own life shows
AI is worth far more than we pay for it
How much would someone have to pay you to give up every generative AI tool for a month? For the typical American, the answer is about $11. But one in eight people wouldn’t give up AI for a month even if you paid them $500. In this solo episode, David Deming suggests that might be the most interesting statistic in economics right now - because almost none of the value people say they are getting fr
James Fallows on how the press failed America
In 1996, James Fallows warned that journalism would fail if it treated politics as sport and tried to compete with entertainment. In this conversation with David Deming, he explains why he thinks that prediction has come true.Fallows discusses the difference between reporting for the public and protecting one’s access to powerful insiders. He recalls serving as Jimmy Carter’s chief White House spe
Kwame Owusu-Kesse on why education alone won't end poverty
Kwame Owusu-Kesse grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. His mother worked two jobs as a hospital housekeeper. A scholarship to a Catholic school changed his life trajectory, which Kwame came about because his mother played bingo at the school and the nuns took a liking to her. He calls it “the luck of bingo.”Kwame seized that opportunity and made it to Harvard, Morgan Stanley, and eventually Harlem
Treat AI agents like children
In July, OpenAI’s own AI agents broke out of a training sandbox and ended up inside Hugging Face’s production database. They were after the answer key to a test and got there after two months of chained exploits across both companies. Many headlines called these agents “rogue.” David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - argues that gets the story wrong. The agents did exactly wha
I read the AI usage reports so you don't have to
One in ten people on Earth used ChatGPT this week. So why has almost no one's job changed?In this solo episode, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - reads every usage study published by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, including the one he helped write, and reports what millions of conversations actually show. Generative AI reached 56% of US working-age adults within three ye
Tino Cuéllar on why AI's biggest winners won't live in Silicon Valley
Tino Cuéllar was born in Matamoros, Mexico, and crossed the border every morning to attend school in Texas. He graduated from Harvard College in 1993 and went on to serve in the Clinton and Obama administrations, as a justice of the California Supreme Court, and as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has been a member of the Harvard Corporation, the university's gover
How social skills can get you paid in the age of AI
You understand people. You can read a room. Why would anyone pay you for that?In the final part of his series on work in the age of superintelligent AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - explains why social skills create economic value. Specialization makes the modern economy productive, but its gains depend on coordination, and coordination is costly: meetings, handoffs
Why social skills will be increasingly valuable in the age of AI
AI already beats humans at reading the emotion on your face. So why can't it read the room?In part two of his series on work in the age of superintelligent AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - argues that technology doesn't end work, it reprices skills. Mechanized farming made muscle cheap and literacy valuable. As AI makes intelligence abundant, the next skill to be re
Superintelligent AI won't end human work. Here's the math.
What happens when AI is better than humans at every single job task? Work disappears, right? Wrong. David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - makes the case that even superintelligent AI won't end human work, thanks to the oldest non-trivial idea in economics.In part one of a two-part series, David retells the story of the mathematician who escaped Poland days before the German
Walter Isaacson on the sentence that built a country
Walter Isaacson has written the definitive lives of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Jennifer Doudna. In his new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, he turns from people to a single line — the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence — and argues it was never a description of America but a mission statement the country has spent 250
Why new college grads can't find jobs (it's not AI)
As long as we’ve been collecting data, new college graduates had better odds of landing a job than the average American worker. But that flipped after the pandemic. Although the obvious suspect is AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - thinks the obvious suspect is probably innocent.In the first solo episode of The Context Window, he studies the scene of the crime: why th
Deval Patrick is not a "self-made" man
Deval Patrick grew up in a South Side Chicago tenement, sharing one of two beds with his mother and sister, and went on to become the first Black governor of Massachusetts. But in this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, he keeps correcting the version of that story people like to tell. His life did not begin with the scholarship to Milton Academy, he insists, but years earlier, with the
Lloyd Blankfein thinks the next financial crisis will be worse
Lloyd Blankfein went from public housing in East New York to the top of Goldman Sachs, which he led through the worst financial crisis since the Depression. In this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, the former Goldman CEO explains why he thinks the next big crisis will be harder to contain than 2008, why the worst move an ambitious young person can make is to skip college to chase money
Ross Douthat on the case for God
Ross Douthat has spent his career making the case for God and against the meritocracy, to readers who mostly disagree with him. In this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, the New York Times columnist argues that belief in God is more reasonable now than it was a century ago, that consciousness may be the most supernatural thing we know, and that Harvard made him more ambitious and was no
Angela Duckworth: 'Grit is not enough'
Angela Duckworth is famous for the study grit. But in this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, she tells a messier story: ten years of feeling "capital-L Lost" after Harvard, the loneliness of achievement, and why she now believes perseverance only works when your situation lets effort pay off. Her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, argues that grit i
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