Kevin Roose is AGI-pilled. Why aren’t you?

This is the available feed excerpt, which may be shortened or in the publisher’s original language.

Today, I’m talking to Kevin Roose, journalist and author of the new book The AGI Chronicles, which details the recent and explosive transformation of the AI industry. Kevin was a longtime New York Times reporter and host of the popular podcast Hard Fork, but he and friend of the show Casey Newton just left the Times to start the all-new tech podcast Machine Gods, which launched last week. Kevin and I talked about launching Machine Gods and what it’s like to go from The New York Times to being an independent creator — and then of course we talked about the book, which is an excellently reported dive into the companies racing to build artificial general intelligence. I wanted to get a sense from Kevin of what it was like to report this, to try and understand these characters and this moment in time, and where it all goes next. Fair warning: This conversation takes a pretty philosophical turn at the end, but I think you’ll find it a really worthwhile back-and-forth. Okay: Kevin Roose on The AGI Chronicles, starting Machine Gods, and where AI goes from here. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Kevin Roose, you are the author of The AGI Chronicles and the cofounder and co-host of the new podcast Machine Gods. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks so much for having me. I was listening to the first episode of Machine Gods and you and Casey discussed the fact that technically you have the title of CEO. It’s true. I won the coin flip and we needed someone. When you start a company as we have, you need to list someone as the CEO, I guess, to know who to haul in front of Congress when our first scandal inevitably breaks. So that’s going to be me. It’s funny because you’re a CEO on Decoder. It means I’m going to have to ask you the Decoder questions. [Laughs] Okay. Well, I’ve been a CEO for about five minutes and most days I frankly forget I’m the CEO. Honestly, that tracks with most of the CEOs on the show. They all act like they’ve onl