The Last Invention
The AI revolution has begun – the product of a seventy-year quest by scientists, mathematicians, and visionaries who set out to build machines that could think. But what began as a fringe idea has now become one of the most powerful forces of the 21st century. This is the story of that journey: its rivalries, its competing visions of utopia and apocalypse, and the race to build what may be humanity’s last invention.
Episodes
Sam Altman’s Attacker, In His Own Words
In this episode we talk with Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, the man who was recently arrested and charged with attempting to kill Sam Altman. Several months before the attack, our team contacted a young man posting on Discord under the handle "Butlerian Jihadist," who referenced “Luigi-ing tech CEOs” to our producer. He agreed to an interview and to answer questions about his background and how he
Wetwear
This episode was originally reported on our podcast Reflector. You can hear this story and many more by visiting us here
What if the next great leap in computing wasn't made of silicon — but of living human brain cells? Reporter Greg Warner takes us inside the lab of Hon Weng Chong, an Australian computer engineer who has built a biological computer: a device that houses actual human neurons in
The AI Skeptics
In this episode, we dive into the views of the people who think the AGI race is being oversold, misunderstood, or misframed. As you’ll hear, we break them down into three distinct camps: “AI Is Grift” (a tech-industry con), “Wrong Path” (LLMs can’t reach AGI without new ideas), and “AI as Normal Technology” (powerful, but adoption will be slow and institution-bound). Through interviews with Ed Zit
“Build the AI Wall” with Steve Bannon
Today, Andy interviews Steve Bannon and his War Room tech editor, Joe Allen. They make the populist right-wing case for breaking up Big Tech, forcing transparency on frontier AI labs, and blocking “AI amnesty” efforts that would preempt state oversight. Bannon frames AI as a species-level inflection point driven by what he calls “broligarch” elites pushing “techno-feudalism,” warning that the publ
Ezra Klein on the Uncertain Politics of A.I.
Ezra Klein – New York Times opinion columnist and an influential voice on the American left – joins us at a hinge moment in the A.I. revolution. As artificial intelligence accelerates, Klein examines what’s at stake politically, socially, and morally: the role that government should play in shaping this technology, the disruptions he believes matter most, and how to think clearly when the landscap
EP 8: The Accelerationists
Meet the accelerationists: a rising movement that believes expediting AI development is not only inevitable but morally necessary – humanity’s best chance at transcending its limits. What happens when the world’s most powerful technologists treat AI progress as a duty rather than a danger?
THIS EPISODE FEATURES:
Olivier Oullier, Guido de Croon, Alex Williams, Reid Hoffman, Guillaume Verdon/“Beff
EP 7: The Scouts
A decade ago, the leading minds in AI gathered to make sure this technology would benefit everyone. Today, those hopes are colliding with the reality of an AI arms race. Today, game theorist Liv Boeree and philosopher William MacAskill lay out what they see as the “narrow path” between a future of limitless potential and one of irreversible loss.
THIS EPISODE FEATURES:
Max Tegmark, Nick Bostrom,
EP 6: The AI Doomers
What happens when some of the most idealistic techno-optimists come to believe that superintelligence poses a threat to humanity's survival? Today, the best case for the worst case scenario. We sit down with Nate Soares and Connor Leahy and ask them to make their case for why we need to stop ASI, before it’s too late.
THIS EPISODE FEATURES:
Connor Leahy, Natasha Vita-More, Max More, Keach Hagey
EP 5: Contact
In the strange months after ChatGPT’s release, the world made contact with something new. A tech CEO begged to be regulated, a chatbot seemed to fall in love, and the godfathers of AI became frightened by the implications of what they’d spent their lives building.
THIS EPISODE FEATURES:
Keach Hagey, Kevin Roose, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton
LINKS:
Keach Hagey’s book The Optimist
Sam Altman
EP 4: Speedrun
Is the only way to stop a bad guy with an AGI… a good guy with an AGI? In a twist of technological irony, the very people who warned most loudly about the existential dangers of artificial superintelligence—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei among them—became the ones racing to build it first. Each believed they alone could create it safely before their competitors unleashed something dangero
EP 3: Playing the Wrong Game
What if the path to a true thinking machine was found not just in a lab… but in a game? For decades, AI’s greatest triumphs came from games: checkers, chess, Jeopardy. But no matter how many trophies it took from humans, it still couldn’t think. In this episode, we follow the contrarian scientists who refused to give up on a radical idea, one that would ultimately change how machines learn. But th
EP 2: The Signal
In 1951, Alan Turing predicted machines might one day surpass human intelligence and 'take control.' He created a test to alert us when we were getting close. But seventy years of science fiction later, the real threat feels like just another movie plot.
THIS EPISODE FEATURES:
Connor Leahy, Max Tegmark, Robin Hanson, Karen Hao, Nick Bostrom, Sam Harris, and Justin Murphy
LINKS:
Karen Hao’s boo
EP 1: Ready or Not
A tip alleging a Silicon Valley conspiracy leads to a much bigger story: the race to build artificial general intelligence — within the next few years — and the factions vying to accelerate it, to stop it, or to prepare for its arrival.
FEATURING:
Mike Brock, Kevin Roose, Geoffrey Hinton, Connor Leahy, William MacAskill, Liv Boeree, Sam Harris, and Yoshua Bengio
LINKS:
Sam Harris 2016 TED Talk
Introducing: The Last Invention
For over seventy years, technologists have dreamed of building a true “thinking machine.” An artificial intelligence so powerful it would reshape every aspect of human life. Would it unlock unimaginable abundance? Or bring about our destruction?
Today, many of the people closest to the latest A.I. breakthroughs believe that moment has arrived. Some are walking away from their jobs to sound the al
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