The Futurists

Independent AI researcher Mark Pesce returns to the Futurists with an update on the latest advances in open source artificial intelligence. Mark talks to co-hosts Brett King and Rob Tercek about a wide range of topics: small open-source models that run on the desktop and the smartphone; AI agents that work the “night shift”; NVIDIA’s pivot to open source AI; the disruptive threat to the leading US AI labs; the rapid rise of AI-enabled intrusions and the threat to the smartphone; personal AI filtering and assistants; AI agents to manage the smart home; faceless appliances as a precursor to liquid interfaces and the end of apps; fostering cognitive dependency and offloading cognitive work to companion apps; pacing the frontier; super intelligence; geopolitical rivalry.

In this week’s episode hosts Rob Tercek and Brett King do a deep dive into the rapidly aging energy grid in the US and how this may be the biggest flaw in the US’ desire to win the race to AGI and a future smart economy. China today produces daily more solar energy than all the power plants in the US combined, and this year alone China will deploy more solar than the US has built in the last 70 years. How can the US hope to power the data centers required for AI dominance with an administration opposed to renewables and, as yet, no new nuclear plants or transmission lines even approved for construction? With the NIMBY crowd protesting local data centers, is big tech headed for a showdown with conservative politics?

Mark Ghuneim is an American internet entrepreneur, activist, and art curator who has launched pioneering ventures in many fields including music, digital marketing, television, privacy advocacy, and fine art. Today he is co-founder of Narrative.New, which harnesses the power of AI for creative writers. Key to Mark’s career is curation, the process of making conscious choices among a wide range of alternatives. AI makes cognitive outputs cheap and abundant; that raises the value of human curation to critical importance amid a flood of fresh content. According to Mark, today the highest, rarest value is a distinctive point of view and taste.

Can a company use AI to be capable of infinite adaptability?  Brian Solis and Dave Wright believe that right approach to deploying AI in large enterprises is a two-model process, first to find efficiency and create savings, and second, to invest those savings into accelerated innovation. In their new book Infinite, Brian and Dave cite successful case studies to show AI can help business leaders accomplish things that were never previously possible.  Rob Tercek interviewed Dave and Brian to extract the key points for listeners of The Futurists podcast.

To understand the future, it’s best to begin by studying the past. Jeff Jarvis returns to the Futurists to share a lively summary of the long arc of mass media, and he unpacks several valuable lessons for our present moment. Jeff’s new book Hot Type provides a compelling account of the long struggle to mechanize typesetting, one invention at a time, including the many failures that led to other mechanical breakthroughs. The invention of the Linotype machine made print cheap, and thereafter society consumed far more printed works, paving a path for modern mass marketing and mass consumption. Rob Tercek and Jeff discuss the direct parallel between the economic impact of mass media 100 years ago and the current advent of AI and the commoditization of human cognition. Topics include Jevon’s paradox, human-mechanical hybrids, unanticipated change versus technological determinism, a dozen parallels to our contemporary media economy, the importance of advertising and the attention economy, the advent of subscription sales of literature, a new definition of literacy.