Open Source with Christopher Lydon

We’re staring down the life-and-death hazard of artificial intelligence. That phrase “AI apocalypse” sounds a little panicky, but when the masters of the craft started arguing this summer about how soon, in the next 10 years, their science might wipe out human life forever, we had to say attention must be paid.

Ben Hurlbut.

We’re joined by Ben Hurlbut...

We’re between breakdown and breakup, or maybe between the AI monster and human extinction. Those are the rough choices that the all-purpose American writer Kurt Andersen is offering us in his vast portrait of a broken country as a sort of bad marriage. He’s written a novel called The Breakup. Is the USA beyond repair? he’s asking us. Could a national divorce be bette...

We’re savoring a glorious story we thought we knew in the long ordeal of racial justice in America. It was the singer Marian Anderson’s moment in 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the black contralto from their Constitution Hall in Washington. With President and Eleanor Roosevelt’s encouragement, Marian Anderson decided instead to sing in front of th...