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Back to Is There an A.I. Bubble? A Debate., with Paul Kedrosky & Azeem Azhar.

Which Books Do Paul Kedrosky and Azeem Azhar Recommend?

Ezra Klein asks each guest for three books. Paul Kedrosky recommends Middlemarch, about normal people swept along as a technology revolution takes hold. He also recommends Liberty's Dawn by Emma Griffin, a collection of ordinary workers' own accounts from the Industrial Revolution, and Insull: The Rise and Fall of a Billionaire Utility Tycoon by Forrest McDonald, about Samuel Insull. Paul Kedrosky says Insull built an electricity empire on a general purpose technology and still ended in collapse.

Azeem Azhar recommends The Day the Universe Changed, a book he read as a teenager and has just reread, about how new knowledge unsettles what matters and what a person's role in the world is. His second book is Fathers and Sons by Turgenev, set as science and modernity arrive in Russia and a younger generation conflicts with an older one. His third is Candide by Voltaire.

Transcript

Is There an A.I. Bubble? A Debate. ·

The Ezra Klein Show

More from this episode

  1. Is OpenAI and Anthropic's Chip Revenue Share Falling?Ezra Klein asks how AI demand looks once token use is separated from the chips that serve it.
  2. Would an OpenAI Collapse Pop the Economy?Azeem Azhar says Paul Kedrosky talked about frontier models and tokens, while he talked about capital spending and the GPUs, and that the two deserve separate…
  3. What Did Anthropic's Hiring Leak Reveal About Meta?Azeem Azhar says Anthropic accidentally leaked one of its largest customers.
  4. How Did Apple Gain by Skipping Frontier Models?Ezra Klein says Apple decided not to compete in making a frontier model, unlike Alphabet, Google, and Meta. OpenAI and Anthropic are AI companies.
  5. How Is Wall Street Loading Debt Onto Big Tech?Ezra Klein asks whether broader society is protected because Alphabet, Meta, and the other major companies can absorb huge losses on their own balance sheets.
  6. Why Is AI Repricing Cognitive Work?Paul Kedrosky says artificial intelligence is the fastest adopting technology in history, and its fundamental function is to reprice cognitive labor.
  7. How Likely Is a Backlash Against AI?Ezra Klein says discontinuous regulation is quite likely.
  8. How Few Jobs Does a Huge Data Center Create?Azeem Azhar says a huge data center may cost billions of dollars and still employ a handful of people.

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