Artificial intelligence, we’ve been told, will destroy humankind. No, wait — it will usher in a new age of human flourishing! Guest host Adam Davidson (co-founder of "Planet Money") sorts through the big claims about A.I.'s future by exploring its past and present — and whether it has a sense of humor. (Part 1 of "How to Think About A.I.")
Hey, there.
It's Stephen Dubner.
Today on the show, a rare occurrence and a welcome occurrence.
We have got a bona fide guest host.
This is a person whose name will be familiar to many of you, Adam Davidson.
Adam, welcome.
Thank you so much, Steven.
So, Adam, for freakonomics radio listeners, you are almost certainly best known for having.
Is it co created and then hosted the NPR show and podcast Planet Money.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
I sort of had two careers.
I had a career doing more human interest, more narrative stories for this american life, and a career doing very straight business stories.
And with my buddy Alex Blumberg, who was at this american life at the time, we thought, well, what if we put them together?
What if we made peanut butter and chocolate?
Peanut butter and chocolate, yeah.
You may be the one other person on the planet who can fully identify with that thought.
And so we first did this big hour about the housing crisis called the giant pool of money.
So that led to planet money, which Alex and I ran together for about five years and then eventually left for the New York Times and then later left for the New Yorker.
Planet money, we should say, is still alive and very, very well.