My guests today - Professor Kate Vredenburgh and VR specialist Lauren Wong - argue that there are at least two strong reasons for calming down: first, AI isn’t good enough to replace us at our jobs. Second, even if they were, it’s up to us to develop AI in a way that supports rather than replaces us. We also talk about whether AI adoption is suffering for the same reasons the metaverse was never successful: we’re failing to appreciate how to get people to justifiably buy in to the technology.
Are we dependent on social media in a way that erodes our autonomy? After all, platforms are designed to keep us hooked and to come back for more. And we don’t really know the law of the digital lands, since how the algorithms influence how we relate to each other online in unknown ways. Then again, don’t we bear a certain degree of personal responsibility for how we conduct ourselves, online or otherwise? What the right balance is and how we can encourage or require greater autonomy is our topic of discussion today. Originally aired in season two.
Much of what we find fulfilling in life isn’t the having but the doing. It’s the process of working through a problem, taking action, doing what needs to be done. But that meaning may be on the verge of being greatly diminished; so contends my guest, Sven Nyholm, Professor of Ethics of AI at lMU MUNICH. I push back in various ways: how real and/or imminent is this threat, really? And who is responsible for staving it off?
Should Anthropic Have Allowed Autonomous Weapons Systems?
05/03/2026 | 1h 9 mins.
Anthropic just got the axe from the U.S. government for refusing to allow the Department of Defense (War?) to use Claude for autonomous weapons systems and mass surveillance. For the first 15 minutes of this conversation with Michael Horowitz - professor at UPenn, Senior Fellow for Technology and Innovation at the Council on Foreign Relations, and formerly Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development and Emerging Capabilities and Director of the Emerging Capabilities Policy Office at the DoD - we talk explicitly about Anthropic vs. the U.S. government. Why Anthropic did it, why this is more about personality than policy, and more. In the remaining 45 minutes you’ll hear a replay of an episode Michael and I did back in October, in which Michael defends the functional and ethical importance of potentially using AI for autonomous weapons systems.
What does it look like for a non-technologist to lead Responsible AI practices at a Fortune 500 company? Today I talk with James Desir, Senior corporate counsel at Progressive Insurance and a key leader in their RAI efforts. We discuss how he found his way into this space, how he persuades data scientists to treat him as a thought partner instead of a blocker, and how to demonstrate the ROI of RAI to fellow executives. We also talk about the increasing complexity of AI and how a small RAI team can handle the scale of the problem.
I have to roll my eyes at the constant click bait headlines on technology and ethics. If we want to get anything done, we need to go deeper. That’s where I come in. I’m Reid Blackman, a former philosophy professor turned AI ethics advisor to government and business. If you’re looking for a podcast that has no tolerance for the superficial, try out Ethical Machines.
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