Mia talks with Janis Yu from CCED and Anahy, a tenant organizer at Hillside Villa, about their organizing against their landlord and the deal LA politicians, bureaucrats, and DSA council reps negotiated behind their backs to sell them out.
Listening to the ongoing debate about artificial intelligence, one could be forgiven for assuming that the technology is either a bogeyman or a savior, with little ground in between. But that’s not the stance of economist Daron Acemoglu, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, with Simon Johnson, of the new book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity. Combining a cogent historical analysis of past technological revolutions, he examines whether a groundbreaking new technology “augments” the status quo, as opposed to merely squeezing out human labor.
“[M]y favorite term is ‘creating new tasks’ because I think it really clarifies what the quote unquote augmenting needs to take the form of,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It's not just making a worker more productive in tightening the screws, but it's really creating new jobs that didn't exist.” And so, he explains to those perhaps afraid that a bot is gunning for their livelihood, “Automation is not our enemy. Excessive automation is our enemy.”
This is not to depict Acemoglu as an apologist for our new silicon taskmasters. Current trends such as the consolidation of power among technology companies, a focus on shareholder returns at the expense of all else, a blind trust in companies to somehow muddle through to societal equilibrium, and a slavish drive to automate everything immediately all leave him cold: “I feel AI is going in the wrong direction and taking us down with it.”
His conversation doesn’t end there, thankfully, and he offers some hopeful words on how we might find that modus vivendi with AI, including (but by no means only relying on) “the soft hand of the state in tipping the scales one way or another.”
Acemoglu is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the academic-cum-policymaker group of economic movers and shakers known as the Group of 30.
Besides Power and Progress, his books include the popular bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty written with James Robinson. Acemoglu has received a number of prizes, including two inaugural awards in 2004, the T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago and the Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award, as well as the Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006 and a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.
The Justice Department announced criminal charges against Hamas leaders. Two Russian ballistic missiles struck a military training facility in Ukraine. Amid a heatwave out West...Phoenix set a record for days above 110 degrees. CBS News Correspondent Matt Pieper with tonight's World News Roundup.
The greening of energy is fueled not just by air and wind but many minerals that need extraction. Standing in the way: regulations, a flower, and the Apache. Reuters energy reporter, Ernest Scheyder joins us to discuss his book The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives. Plus, a West Indian Day parade experienced deadly violence, as has often been the case ... still, the parade must go on.
Israel mourns six hostages, who were captured during the October 7th attacks by Hamas, and found by the Israeli military in Gaza, recently killed. We go to the funeral of one of the hostages, in Jerusalem.
And in Gaza, nearly all residents have been displaced multiple times by evacuation orders from the Israeli military, into so-called humanitarian safe zones. We get a glimpse of what life is like in these overcrowded areas.
Long-term stress can have many negative outcomes for parents in the U.S., so much so that the U.S. surgeon general says it’s time to start treating parental stress as a public health issue. Reset discusses some of the biggest challenges parents face today and how communities are coming together to support parents and children with Rosalia Salgado, mother of two from Hermosa and a community healer with Community Organizing and Family Issues and Teri McKean, parent and director of Crisis and Support Operations at NAMI Chicago.
For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
When Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson entered the national spotlight, she found praise and also criticism.
In her new book, Lovely One, Jackson describes how she endured her confirmation hearing, along with her multi-generational path to becoming the first Black woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court — a branch which she tells NPR remains ready to offer credible opinions on the most contentious issues facing the nation, even in the face of waning public confidence.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
When Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson entered the national spotlight, she found praise and also criticism.
In her new book, Lovely One, Jackson describes how she endured her confirmation hearing, along with her multi-generational path to becoming the first Black woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court — a branch which she tells NPR remains ready to offer credible opinions on the most contentious issues facing the nation, even in the face of waning public confidence.
For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
When did coffee get into our mouths? Who’s right when it comes to the best coffee? What’s the most ethical way to enjoy it? What about the cats that eat the beans? How will climate change affect your morning coffee? Peter Giuliano is the executive director of the Coffee Science Foundation explains folk stories behind coffee, what makes beans taste the way they do, why cold brew and nitro feel like rocket fuel, shade-grown coffee, roasting chemistry, flimflam, atmospheric pressure, dead espresso, and the best way to brew it, in his opinion. Also: why it tastes better outside – for some of us.
