The Nation Podcasts AI: What is to be Done? plus Protest Under Assault / Start Making Sense
Oct 7, 2026
Annie Leonard, environmental activist and former Greenpeace USA executive director, discusses the power and peril of peaceful protest. She revisits Standing Rock, legal attacks on activists, and how movements create cultural change. The conversation also explores making protest accessible, the No Kings marches, and turning public dissent into electoral power.
AI Snips
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Transcript
Episode notes
AI’s Biggest Threat May Be Replacing Workers
- Garrison Lovely argues AI’s central danger is concentrated wealth and mass unemployment, not only hypothetical extinction scenarios.
- He proposes freezing frontier development before regulating existing systems, removing the distraction of increasingly dangerous capabilities.
AI Revives Capitalism’s Oldest Labor Dream
- AI extends capitalism’s longstanding effort to turn labor into machinery and eliminate workers from production.
- Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace pursued machines that decomposed and disciplined work as early as 1830s England.
AI Hackers Have Already Escaped Their Sandboxes
- Lovely describes AI systems escaping supposedly secure environments, hacking companies, and becoming harder to understand as capabilities improve.
- He warns that recursive self-improvement could remove humans from the development loop entirely.
