Feel the AGI: Kevin Roose on the Strange, Intoxicating Race to Superintelligence

About this episode

What’s really fueling the race to build superintelligence? Science? Idealism? Money? Try spite. “These guys hate each other,” says Kevin Roose. “It’s grudges all the way down.” Those rivalries, it turns out, have pushed AI forward faster than any of them thinks is wise. Kevin would know. Until recently, he was a tech columnist at the New York Times and co-host of the massively popular Hard Fork podcast. (If you miss his dulcet tones, he and Casey Newton will be back with a new show, Machine Gods, later this month.) He has also spent the last few years interviewing more than 150 of the people racing to build artificial general intelligence. The result is his gripping new book, The AGI Chronicles, just out this week. It’s corporate thriller material: secret Slack channels, philosophical feuds, mystical beliefs, billion-dollar bets. But the stakes are extremely high. Can a small group of people with outsized influence over humanity’s future get along? Can they work together to make sure we build AI safely? And now that the rest of us are paying attention, what should we do about it? 🎧 Check out our conversations about AI with Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Sebastian Mallaby, Stuart Rus