imperfect offerings
Imperfect offerings podcast
AI realism
0:00
-1:04:32

AI realism

Is it really easier to imagine the end of the world than alternatives to AI?
undefined
The Gartner hype cycle or technology adoption curve CC Wikipedia

Audrey Watters returns to the pod for a chat about ‘AI realism’, and how we are all trudging up the long, weary slope of the AI adoption curve whether we believe in the promises or not. What will we find when we reach the ‘plateau of productivity’? Less work and more smarts so we can spend our infinite leisure time in cultural pursuits? Or a slightly more datafied version of the workplace we started from? Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of AI hype? Are young people vibing with it? And what is ‘vibe coding’?

Get all the answers - well, some of the answers and a lot more questions - in this week’s podcast. And look out for more themed conversations with Audrey, including an episode on AI’s bad boys and why we love to hate ’em. Coming soon, if DOGE doesn’t get to us first.

Links

Mark Fisher’s concept of Capitalist Realism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism

Rob Horning’s piece on ‘vibe coding’:

Internal exile
It mostly works
The term “vibe coding” has been around for only a week or so, but it already has a Wikipedia page. Credit for its coinage is assigned there to one of OpenAI’s co-founders, Andrej Karpathy, who defined it in an X post…
Read more

Referenced from Audrey’s Second Breakfast newsletter: https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/ai-against-democracy/

The ‘water we’re swimming in’ as an analogy for ideology is attributed to a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/sep/20/fiction

Discussion about this episode