What’s the AI Endgame? - The Atlantic

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Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube<br>How should you feel about the AI boom? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Chris Hayes about how to emotionally calibrate our response to this dizzying AI moment. Hayes describes why AI gives him “The Bad Feeling,” and how it led him to report on AI like an anthropologist would. The two discuss why AI is described as “the jagged frontier,” and they explore the distinction between using AI for creative thinking versus grunt work.

The following is a transcript of the episode:<br>Chris Hayes : If you’re having it do your brainstorming, like, your brainstorming muscles are going to get weaker. And my livelihood, my career is coming up with stuff. I gotta keep that. I gotta keep that sharp. Now maybe in five years, they’ll just have an AI do my show. And the AI will generate all the takes, and the AI will talk, and I’ll be out of a job. Fine. But until that happens, I don’t want the AI doing that.

[Music]<br>Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where, today, we’re going to calibrate our feelings about artificial intelligence.<br>There’s this phrase that’s coined by AI researchers that I can’t get out of my head these days: It’s called “the jagged frontier.”<br>The phrase is meant to describe how AI can be extremely and unexpectedly good at some human tasks and then also extremely and unexpectedly bad at others. Individually, this can mean that it’s useful or even transformative for some people, while others see it as unnecessary, or even more akin to snake oil. For example: Large language models and especially coding agents have transformed the job of many programmers, making them more productive. That’s not true of all industries though, especially creative ones, where there are moral or financial or creative reasons to object to its use.<br>“The jagged frontier” is meant to apply to use cases and industries. In some ways it’s an echo of the old cliché: “The future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed.”<br>But lately I’ve been thinking about the jagged frontier as it applies to the broader AI moment and the discourse. This moment that we are living in—the AI boom, the hype cycle, or revolution, you choose your own language—it’s a weird one. If you try to keep up with industry news, it’s easy to feel just instantly overwhelmed. There’s the obvious, existential stuff: Will AI replace all white-collar workers? Is AI making us dumber or lazier? There’s also a lot of what’s being described as “AI malaise.” It’s this ambient feeling that there’s too much happening, too fast, and without most people’s say.<br>On places like X, there’s all kinds of breathless chatter—about people setting up swarms of bots to run their computers and monitor their personal lives, or of people creating vibe-trading platforms that can make, and lose, money while they sleep. CEOs aren’t just talking about job loss—they’re writing 14,000-word essays about a future where “our current economic setup will no longer make sense.” Now, if you are a regular person—the type of person who is more worried about the price of gas right now—these conversations can sound like they’re coming from another planet. And they’re also making a lot of people ambiently anxious. If you’re at all skeptical of the AI industry and the men who lead it, then you’d be right to be concerned about the future that these companies are outlining.<br>So, how do we calibrate our anxiety and our expectations about AI in this moment? How is AI going to impact our politics in the coming years? Should you be scared? Excited? Angry? Sad? Some unholy mix of all of that?<br>Chris Hayes has been asking these kinds of questions for the last few months. Hayes is the host of All In on MS Now and the host of the podcast Why Is This Happening?; he’s also written a great book on the attention economy called The Siren’s Call. Chris has this new podcast series out about the AI endgame, and in it he does something that I think is crucial: He tries to make sense of this moment with an almost anthropological perspective. So many people in the AI discourse are just in so deep that it can be really, really hard to see the big picture. And so, I brought on Chris to do just that.<br>[Music]<br>Warzel: Chris, welcome to Galaxy Brain.<br>Hayes: It’s great to be here, man. Thanks for having me.<br>Warzel: So you’ve described your feelings about AI in the first episode of this short-run podcast series that you’re doing about it. The whole generative-AI revolution, the discourse, the whole thing as having, I thought this was great, like a bodily, somatic effect on you.<br>Hayes: Yes.<br>Warzel: So tell me about this feeling. I want you to describe it. What happens when you encounter the news or discourse about AI?<br>Hayes: There’s this feeling that I’ve come to describe or think of as The Bad Feeling, like capital T, capital B, capital F, which is just a feeling of kind of...