Adam Davidson Wraps "How To Think About A.I." Series On Freakonomics Podcast

 The award-winning business journalist Adam Davidson has just concluded his Freakonomics Radio three-part series "How to Think About A.I."

Davidson views the series as an unofficial successor to his Peabody- and Polk-winning 2008 This American Life episode, “The Giant Pool of Money,” which explained the housing crisis in a way normal people could understand.

"I’ve spent months now talking to as many smart people as I can find about A.I., and I learned a lot,” Davidson says in the first episode. “The main thing, the big headline: Nobody knows where A.I. is heading. That’s why there’s such a crazy range of predictions. As one expert told me, there are no experts yet. We’re still figuring this out.”

Here are all three episodes, available at freakonomics.com (transcripts there too) and on all podcast providers:

Ep 1: Can A.I. Take a Joke?
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.

Ep 2: New Technologies Always Scare Us. Is A.I. Any Different?
Guest host Adam Davidson looks at what might happen to your job in a world of human-level artificial intelligence, and asks when it might be time to worry that the machines have become too powerful.

Ep 3: A.I. Is Changing Everything. Does That Include You?
For all the speculation about the future, A.I. tools can be useful right now. Adam Davidson discovers what they can help us do, how we can get the most from them — and why the things that make them helpful also make them dangerous.