If AI Might Kill Us All, Why Are We Still Building It?

Jon Favreau (0:00)

Can I read you the Axios headline from today about this?

Max Fisher (0:03)

Yeah.

Jon Favreau (0:04)

Here's the headline. Here's how AI could kill us all. And then here's the lead.

Max Fisher (0:09)

Awesome.

Jon Favreau (0:10)

Here's the lead. AI researchers shook the world Tuesday when they publicly acknowledged that there's a non-zero chance of AI killing off humanity in the next decade. And then, classic Axios, here it is. Why it matters.

Max Fisher (0:25)

Be smarter, the world is where people live. Why it matters, many swing voters live in the world.

Jon Favreau (0:37)

I'm Jon Favreau, and you just heard from this week's guest, my former Offline co-host and good buddy, Max Fisher.

I started this show nearly five years ago in the middle of the pandemic. It was October of 2021, and we were still somehow spending way too much time apart from each other at home, on our screens. I hated it. I hated the isolation, especially with the new baby in the house. I hated how much of our jobs and lives had seamlessly moved to our phones and laptops, and how so many people seemed fine with it. I hated how angry and hopeless and miserable the discourse had become on social media. And I couldn't stop thinking about how, even though the world was giving us every reason to be angry and hopeless and miserable, the way we were experiencing that world was making everything exponentially worse.

At the time, I hadn't yet been to therapy, so I did what 40-year-old men do instead and started another podcast. Offline gave me a chance to talk through the things keeping me up at night with someone who knew more than I did or saw things differently, or was wrestling with the same questions. Sometimes that alone was enough to make me feel less alone. So, I got to talk to people about what living more and more of our lives online is doing to us, to our attention and our relationships, to our kids, to the way we talked about politics and understood each other, to our health, our happiness.

One thing that's changed over time, though, is that it's become harder to draw a neat boundary around what counts as an internet story. Conversations about kids and screens have become conversations about parenting or school or what we want childhood to be like. Conversations about where people get their news and information have become conversations about who we trust and how we vote and what it takes to change our minds. And now, with AI, we have the rapid development of a new technology that may completely transform the way we work, learn, live, or just kill us all, which seems like an outcome we should figure out how to avoid.

Basically, I want to be able to have all these discussions without having to explain how each one fits the original premise of the show. And if you're a regular listener, you've probably noticed that's already been happening. So next week, we are making official what's been unofficial for a while now. Offline is opening up to a broader range of conversations about politics, tech, culture, and how we live now. What I'm most excited about with this change is having more room for my favorite part of this job. On Pod Save America, I get to talk with my friends about the news twice a week. But there are always more questions I want to ask, topics I want to go deeper on, and different arguments I'd love to hear, including and maybe especially from people I disagree with.

I fully realize how comforting and validating it can feel to hear conversations that confirm your beliefs and opinions, but I am really trying to push myself to do a little less of that. For one thing, it gets kind of boring. More importantly, though, if we want the world to change, we have to get people to think or act differently. And if we want people to think or act differently, we have to actually persuade them. That starts with understanding where they're coming from and why they believe what they believe.

I want to give arguments I might not agree with a fair hearing, challenge them, and then trust you to make up your own mind. I suspect that's more useful than either avoiding uncomfortable conversations or trading insults with a stranger for an hour, but we shall see.

Anyway, that's what the name Offline means to me now. Obviously, you'll still be listening or watching on a device, but I want the conversations to feel like the ones worth putting your phone away for. I'm a political junkie, so I want to delve into the debates over the future of the Democratic Party, why people change their political allegiances, and why authoritarian movements keep winning people over. I work in media, so I want to keep talking about how news and entertainment shape what we pay attention to, who we listen to, and how we see each other. I want to ask people who understand AI to explain it in normal English to those of us who don't spend our lives studying it. I'm also a parent who worries about my kids, and a person trying to be a little less anxious and a little more present. So questions about mental health, happiness, and living with all this change will always have a home here.