Uploaded January 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Alex Hanna and Emily Bender, co-authors of the book The AI Con, join Robert Wright to discuss and debate AI—including whether LLMs are more than “stochastic parrots” (a term Emily coined), AI's present and future impact on society, and more.

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0:00 Teaser
0:59 Alex and Emily’s book, The AI Con
5:05 Beyond the AI booster-doomer spectrum
10:27 What—and who—is AI actually useful for?
19:54 The AI productivity question(s)
30:48 Emily: AI won’t take your job, it’ll just make it shi**ier
39:50 Stochastic parrots, Chinese rooms, and semantics
46:04 Are LLMs really black boxes?
56:33 Do AIs “understand” things?
59:49 Debating using AIs as experts
1:08:15 How “neural” are neural nets, really?

Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True), Alex Hanna (The AI Con, Distributed AI Research Institute) and Emily Bender (The AI Con, director of the Computational Linguistics Laboratory). Recorded January 20, 2026.

Twitter: twitter.com/NonzeroPods