Episode Summary

People often say that history repeats itself—so often, in fact, that the phrase has become a cliché. Yet when it comes to technology, that sentiment holds a lot of truth. We don’t just reinvent the tools of our ancestors; we also recycle the same debates, challenges, and controversies that have surrounded earlier innovations, often without realizing it.

That is especially true with today’s artificial intelligence technologies. While AI may feel like a bold leap into the future, its foundations rest on decades-old ideas, and the controversies it stirs up—about ethics, economics, and control—echo the same fundamental arguments that once surrounded everything from the introduction of calculators in schools to the chaotic rise of the early internet.

Technology and the social debates it provokes are as old as humanity itself. And as technological development continues to accelerate, these conversations will only become more urgent. In this episode, I discuss all this with Dave Karpf, a political scientist and associate professor at George Washington University where he specializes in technology’s political history.

The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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—Discussing the famous ‘Californian ideology’ essay 30 years after the fact with its co-author

—Grok’s ‘Mecha Hitler’ meltdown and MAGA’s broken epistemology

—The strange nexus of Christian fundamentalism and techno-salvationism

—The political history of Bitcoin is not what you may think

—Why Elon Musk and other technology investors have become so politically extreme

Audio Chapters

00:00 —Introduction

12:21 —'Satisficing,' mediocrity, and large language models

17:42 —Corporations used interns to kill jobs before they used AI

23:46 —AI as a technology isn't a problem, it's how it's used

26:58 —Escaping bad epistemology is the 'first singularity' for humanity

33:24 —Societal elites ignored reactionism and now are shocked that it's monstrous

38:46 —View of the world's complexity as the ultimate dividing line of politics

41:54 —'Crypto is libertarian, AI is communist'

47:56 —Is the U.S. left ignoring technology to the peril of democracy?

50:48 —How to use AI responsibly as a regular person

55:59 —Student AI use in assignments is a response to larger problems

57:57 —The center-to-left needs to stop obsessing over policy fantasies

Audio Transcript

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Kamala Harris and the glass cliff

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