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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Anne Applebaum, who is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She is a historian of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. She also hosts The Atlantic's podcast Autocracy in America with Peter Pomerantsev. For the past decade she has written about the dismantling of liberal democracy, and about the people inside democracies who help them.

Anne started her career in 1988 as The Economist's correspondent in Warsaw and covered the collapse of communism. She went on to be deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist at The Washington Post. Her book Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, and Iron Curtain, Red Famine and Twilight of Democracy followed. In 2024 she won the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. She is now a Polish citizen and is married to Poland's foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski.

Her latest book is Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. It argues that today's autocracies don't share an ideology. Communist China, theocratic Iran, nationalist Russia and a handful of others instead cooperate like the separate companies of one big corporation. They trade drones, weapons, markets and propaganda, and they hide stolen money in an offshore system that Western bankers, lawyers and accountants built.

We talk about:

• Is having no constraints the only thing autocrats share?
• Swapping Putin for Trump: where the comparison breaks down
• The offshore economy we built, and could take apart
• Crypto, Nigel Farage and who is paying whom
• Evan Mawarire, a flag, and how a smear campaign works
• "Am I sure this is true?" Fact-checkers and knowing who to trust
• Ceuta, and why the images win even after the facts change
• Democracy is not water from a tap

Let’s begin!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!

Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is Carissa Véliz, who is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI and Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford University. She works on privacy, digital ethics and the ethics of AI, and her new book argues that AI has become the new Oracle of Delphi.

That book is Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future. It is a history of prediction as much as a book about AI — tracing the line from ancient oracles to credit scores, bail algorithms and tech CEOs, and arguing that a prediction is never a neutral forecast but an instrument of power. As she points out in the conversation, for all the thousands of books on how to forecast, nobody had yet written one on the ethics of it.

Carissa is also the author of Privacy Is Power, an Economist book of the year translated into seven languages, and The Ethics of Privacy and Surveillance. She is also the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics. She has advised the UK and Spanish governments, sits on the board of the Proton Foundation alongside Tim Berners-Lee, and is a member of UNESCO's Women4Ethical AI expert group.

We talk about:

• Is AI the new Oracle of Delphi?
• When a CEO predicts, is it a forecast or an order?
• Obeying in advance
• A prediction can never be a fact
• The turkey’s disappointment at Thanksgiving
• Does polling corrupt democracy?
• Why a self-fulfilling prophecy is the perfect crime
• A blow dryer, a sensor, and what's wrong with prediction markets
• Is AI doing the creative work while we do the boring jobs?

Let's not prophesise!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet

Questions, suggestions, or feedback? Send us a message!

Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest this week is James Manyika, who is Senior Vice President of Research, Labs, Technology and Society at Google and Alphabet. He joined Google in 2022 in a newly created role reporting to Sundar Pichai, and has spent the years since arguing that AI's largest contribution may turn out to be to science itself.

His latest essay in the new volume of Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is devoted to AI and scientific discovery which features Demis Hassabis, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio, Eric Topol and others. He also co-chaired the United Nations Secretary-General's High-Level Advisory Body on AI, served as vice chair of the US National AI Advisory Committee, and co-wrote No Ordinary Disruption.

James was born and raised in Zimbabwe and read electrical engineering at the University of Zimbabwe before going to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he took a doctorate in AI and robotics and became a fellow of Balliol College. He was a visiting scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then spent twenty-five years at McKinsey, thirteen of them as chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute.

We talk about:

• AlphaFold and a fifty-year grand challenge
• Did it understand how proteins fold, or just learn the grammar?
• Is hallucination a bug or a feature?
• Move 37 and the bitter lesson
• Turing on why an infallible machine is a boring one
• Is this the first time we have had a cognitive competitor?
• The impossible problem of alignment
• AI as an invention for making inventions
• Missed use, and who actually benefits from a breakthrough

Let's discover!

Web: www.whereshallwemeet.xyz
Twitter: @whrshallwemeet
Instagram: @whrshallwemeet