July featured some particularly striking conversations on my podcast with absolutely exceptional guests. ICYMI, today's episode highlights the best bits of my convos with them:
1. The mega-bestselling author of "Weapons of Math Destruction", Dr. Cathy O'Neil, makes the case that what makes an algorithm terrifying is not its complexity but other features entirely.
2. In his second appearance on the show, 80,000 Hours founder Benjamin Todd asks what happens if we do get a fully automated digital worker. We cover where solid ground is left for human careers, why the bottlenecks then move into the physical world, and how fast a robotics build-out could really go.
3. Blumberg Capital VC and five-time entrepreneur Steve Mock walks me through the patterns emerging from the stories he collects at aisavedme.org — chief among them that the people getting the most out of A.I. in healthcare are not asking it for advice, but using it to become far better-informed advocates for themselves.
4. Dr. Catherine Williams, Chief Data Officer at the nonprofit Candid, takes on a question I get asked all the time: does a deep understanding of the underlying mathematics still matter, now that large language models are getting so good at exactly the math and programming our field used to prize?
The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.