Lately, it feels like you can’t go more than a few minutes without hearing someone talk about AI agents, and there’s a very good reason for that. Agents are doing more work, more quickly and in more places, and we’ve developed ways to help them retain knowledge from things they’ve done, and then build upon those experiences.

But what if the experience agents gain on a job changes the work product in ways we didn’t predict? How do you make sure that agent does what you want it to do? This episode, we explore the alignment problem in the age of AI agents.

We Meet: 

Andy Hall is a professor in the Political Economy Group at Stanford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Credits:

This episode of SHIFT was produced by Jennifer Strong with help from Emma Cillekens. It was mixed by Garret Lang, with original music from him and Jacob Gorski. Art by Meg Marco.