The Ezra Klein Show

At the center of the country’s debates over artificial intelligence is a simple but hard question: What kind of technology is this? Is A.I. a kind of “alien mind”? Are we unleashing a new species on the planet, one that will transform human society so completely that historical analogies to past technologies simply don’t hold? Or is A.I. more normal than that? Arvind Narayanan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the director of the Center for Information Technology Policy. And he’s an author, alongside his colleague Sayash Kapoor, of the extremely influential essay “A.I. as Normal Technology.” In that essay, and then in a Substack under that name, they lay out their case that A.I. is in fact something we’ve seen before — or at least, it’s close enough to past revolutionary technologies that we have a road map to deal with it. So I wanted to bring Narayanan on the show to hear that perspective.

Last week, David Robinson resigned from OpenAI. He’d been in charge of writing the safety reports for new models and came to believe that OpenAI and the broader artificial intelligence industry lack the safety culture necessary to protect the world from what they’re building. Robinson has an unusual background for an A.I. frontier lab staffer. He’s a Rhodes scholar and Yale Law graduate, he founded a civil rights nonprofit and he advised the Biden White House. He did not come up in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. And when he joined OpenAI in 2023, he says, he saw A.I. as a useful tool, not as a technology that could pose catastrophic risks. That’s changed. In Robinson’s first interview since leaving OpenAI, he tells me why. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft claiming copyright infringement. The companies have denied those claims.)

President Trump and the modern right have a theory of beauty. You see it in Trump’s gilded Oval Office, his imagined arch and his executive order requiring classical and traditional styles for certain federal buildings. This isn’t my theory of beauty, but it is a theory. And it’s a response, in part, to something that a lot of people have been feeling, and not just on the right: that the modern world is ugly, or getting uglier. I’ve seen at least a dozen articles or videos over the last few years asking, “Is the world getting uglier?” They point to the drabness of new apartment blocks, the sameness of new cars and the reign of “greige” in homes and fashion. So I’ve wanted to do an episode on this for a while. Why does the world seem to be getting uglier, or drabber? And at a moment when the right has a clear answer to this feeling, does the left have any answer at all? Debbie Millman teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and hosts the long-running podcast “Design Matters,” where she talks to…

Bill Gates thinks A.I. alarmism hasn’t gone far enough. He believes the years ahead will be marred by catastrophic cyberattacks, bio-terrorism and mass job loss unless the government acts, because he thinks the idea that the A.I. industry can just self-regulate is “insane.” I was struck in the conversation by how genuinely afraid Gates seemed to be that we are not ready for the consequences of what we are building, and how emphatic he was that so many of the people in positions of authority are in complete denial about what he thinks is about to happen. Gates is a pioneering technologist, the co-founder of Microsoft and the chair of Gates Foundation, which is set to spend down around $200 billion over the next two decades. He recently announced that trying to make A.I. a force for equality in the world, as opposed to an impetus for inequality, is a new priority of his foundation’s work.

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Every Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation about something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedelics teach us about consciousness? What does sci-fi understand about our present that we miss? Can our food system be just to humans and animals alike? Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of "The Ezra Klein Show" at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rogé Karma and Jeff Geld; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld.