High Variance with Danny Buerkli

Eric Schwitzgebel — professor of philosophy at UC Riverside and author of The Weirdness of the World and the forthcoming Human-Like: A Defense of AI Rights — joins Danny Buerkli to ask what happens if we create AI systems whose consciousness we cannot determine. If they are conscious, treating them as disposable tools could amount to a horrible crime; if they are not, granting them human-like rights could have catastrophic consequences too.

They discuss Eric’s “design policy of the excluded middle”—the proposal that we should avoid creating systems that might or might not deserve human-like moral consideration—why useful AI architectures may make machine consciousness harder to avoid, when anthropomorphizing AI helps and when it misleads, and why an abused conscious AI might have the right to rebel. They also explore what Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun and Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice reveal about artificial personhood, why our ethics may be as unprepared for AI as medieval physics was for spaceflight, the weirdness of the world, and what Eric inherited from a father who studied under Timothy Leary and B. F. Skinner.

Bouke Klein Teeselink — associate professor of economics at King’s College London and chief economist at the AI Objectives Institute — joins Danny Buerkli to ask what actually makes a job automatable. Early evidence suggests that firms and occupations more exposed to AI are already seeing declines in hiring and employment — but Bouke argues that these first effects may be driven as much by uncertainty as by automation.

That does not make him an AI skeptic: he expects capabilities to continue advancing at a spectacular pace and takes seriously the prospect that AI could soon outperform even highly skilled researchers.

They discuss why traditional research-assistant tasks may already be over, why AI could increase the returns to top talent while eroding the apprenticeship ladder, whether taste and value judgments offer humans any lasting refuge, how reinforcement learning changes which occupations appear most exposed, and why an AI being able to perform a task does not necessarily mean a firm will automate it. They also cover organizational messiness, the threat to outsourcing-led development, the elasticity of demand for different kinds of work, Bouke’s semi-serious plan to run highbrow reading groups if AI takes over his research, and why “pro-worker AI” may be impossible to define.

Papers discussed: 

• Generative AI Exposure and Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from the United Kingdom, by Bouke Klein Teeselink; 
• AI, Automation, and Expertise, by Bouke Klein Teeselink and Daniel Carey; 
• What Jobs Can AI Learn? Measuring Exposure by Reinforcement Learning, by Philip Moreira Tomei and Bouke Klein Teeselink; 
• and Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen.

Further reading: Sarah O’Connor and John Burn-Murdoch’s FT piece, Could AI make — rather than take — jobs?, featuring Bouke; and Alex Imas’s essay, What will be scarce?.

Related High Variance episodes: Labor Market Impacts of AI – with Bharat Chandar and Intelligence Saturation and the Economics of AI – with Ioana Marinescu.

Florence Gaub — political scientist, military strategist, and director of the Research Division at the NATO Defense College — joins Danny Buerkli to talk about the craft of foresight: what makes for a good warning (be concrete, offer options, manage the emotion), the mix of imagination, expert knowledge, and privileged access behind her 2013 call that Egypt was counting down to a coup, and why she has commissioned an audit of her own Ukraine predictions.

They also discuss why wars are won by everything you can't touch, why the right analogy for AI in warfare is electricity rather than the bomb (according to Florence), when the first country will go ahead and unilaterally geoengineer the climate, a tour of the field's greats from Clausewitz to Herman Kahn and Edward Luttwak, and why the future is like a toothbrush: everybody needs their own.

Florence's favorite gelateria in Monti, mentioned at the very end, is Flor Gelato.

Florence's books:

• The Future: A User's Guide
• Szenario

Dan Davies — economist, FT contributor, former investment bank analyst, and author of The Unaccountability Machine and Lying for Money — joins Danny Buerkli to make the case that management cybernetics is the science economics should have turned into. Hayek and Coase settled the economics of information in the 1930s, before Shannon and Turing gave the field a rigorous concept of information to build on. They also discuss why the optimal amount of fraud is not zero, what actually killed Credit Suisse, why LLMs only buy organizations a few years against growing complexity, who answers for decisions no human made, and how to spot a doomed project by drawing up an information balance sheet.

Dan's books: The Unaccountability Machine and Lying for Money. The Niskanen working paper, which is a preview of his upcoming book: The Problem Factory.

Simon Wardley — former CEO and creator of Wardley Mapping — joins Danny Buerkli to talk about how he went from feeling like a "fake CEO" to finding one of the most useful ways of thinking about strategy. Simon also explains how he "cheats" at prediction, calling cloud, serverless, vibe coding, and the rise of intelligent agents years — sometimes decades — before they arrived. They also talk about why data centers are heading to space, what "SpimeScript" will do to every supply chain on Earth, why he thinks China will win the AI race, and how large language models are a non-kinetic form of warfare.

Simon's book can be found here. One of the most useful brief introductions to Wardley Mapping and strategy, by Dave Hora, is here.  

If you don't have a frontier AI lab within your borders, as a country, what exactly is your plan? Anton Leicht — visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of the "Threading the Needle" Substack — joins Danny Buerkli to talk through the strategic options available to middle powers. They discuss why the UK seems more situationally aware than others, what leverage the Netherlands truly has (or not) thanks to ASML, and why the window to act may be measured in low single-digit years rather than decades.

Jeff Stern — reporter and author of The Warhead — joins Danny Buerkli to talk about the long quest to build the “perfect weapon.” They discuss how a company mostly known for calculators revolutionized warfare, the paradox of precision-guided munitions, what disappears behind the language of “surgical” force, and how covering conflict changed Jeff’s understanding of his own role as a reporter.

Ioana Marinescu — associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania, research associate at the NBER, and member of Anthropic's Economic Advisory Council — joins Danny Buerkli to discuss her "intelligence saturation" paper, which divides the economy into an intelligence sector and a physical sector to model what happens as AI automates cognitive work. They discuss why a recent scenario piece that moved markets gets the economics wrong, what parameters to watch to understand where we're headed, why being first to AGI may matter less than people think, her policy proposals for AI Adjustment Insurance and a Digital Dividend, what UBI experiments do and don't tell us about a world without work, Ioana's favorite theory of divorce, and what it feels like to be an intelligence worker watching AI get better at your job.

Germany and France have historically formed the core of Europe and the European Union. Joseph de Weck - political analyst, historian, author, columnist, and Europe Director at Greenmantle - knows both exceptionally well and joins Danny Buerkli to unpack the state of Europe. They discuss the influence of Paul Ricœur on Emmanuel Macron, why French baguette bread is so standardized, what may happen at the German elections in 2029, and the big shifts under way in Europe’s geopolitical posture.

Every aspect of modernity was shaped by individuals with intellectual roots in Vienna, argues Richard Cockett, author of "Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World". Richard, historian and senior editor at The Economist, joins Danny Buerkli to discuss his latest book. They cover the story of the stunningly productive and creative Viennese emigrés, discuss implications for progress today and trace how the intellectual feud between Vienna and Frankfurt still reverberates today.