Artificial Intelligence and You

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

What is AI doing and going to do to job opportunities? What does it mean to have enough, and who has too little, and what’s fair? One answer to that is to look at inequality; how different are the financial circumstances of one set of people compared to another?

Here to help us understand that is Jeremy Ney, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and author of an upcoming book about opportunity and inequality in America. He writes the American Inequality newsletter and was previously a macroeconomic policymaker at the Federal Reserve. His work on regional divides and economic mobility has appeared in TIME Magazine, Business Insider, BBC, NPR, PBS, and on the TED stage.

We talk about how AI affects inequality in job availability, particularly recent college grads, and Jeremy has crunched a lot of current data about that. Is the answer to become a plumber or electrician? Where is the wealth dividend from automation going? We talk about the difference between low-wage and low-skill work, the Gini Coefficient, socioeconomic mobility, the cost of higher education vs the college wage premium and how schools and AI might democratize that dilemma.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

I am talking with Rob May, Co-Founder and CEO of NeuroMetric AI, optimizing inference for multi-model AI systems, and returning to the show after 5 years. We're making sense of how rapid advances in AI—especially the shift from training to real-world inference—are reshaping work, business strategy, and the roles of humans. They accelerate productivity while increasing cognitive demands and redefining where human judgment still matters.

A serial entrepreneur, Rob has founded and scaled multiple successful companies including Backupify, Talla, Dianthus, and BrandGuard. He’s also an active angel investor with over 100 portfolio companies and brings firsthand insight into the evolution of AI entrepreneurship. His expertise lies at the intersection of AI research, applied inference, and startup strategy. He is also the co-host of the AI in NYC Show, where he discusses the latest breakthroughs in AI infrastructure and reasoning with top founders, investors, and researchers.

We conclude the interview by talking about AI processing on local devices, natural limits to automation, the shift in competitive advantage from execution to creativity, and restructuring of the economy and the workforce. 

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

Rapid advances in AI—especially the shift from training to real-world inference—are reshaping work, business strategy, and the roles of humans. They accelerate productivity while increasing cognitive demands and redefining where human judgment still matters. Here to help us get a handle on that and returning to the show after five years is Rob May, Co-Founder and CEO of NeuroMetric AI, a pioneering company optimizing inference for multi-model AI systems. A serial entrepreneur, Rob has founded and scaled multiple successful companies including Backupify, Talla, Dianthus, and BrandGuard. He’s also an active angel investor with over 100 portfolio companies and brings firsthand insight into the evolution of AI entrepreneurship. His expertise lies at the intersection of AI research, applied inference, and startup strategy. He is also the co-host of the AI in NYC Show, where he discusses the latest breakthroughs in AI infrastructure and reasoning with top founders, investors, and researchers.

We talk about how the bottleneck in business is shifting from labor to cognition, the paradoxical way AI is increasing workloads and cognitive strain, the rise of inference as the core AI economy, and how infrastructure constraints are pushing towards a more distributed AI ecosystem.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

AI abounds with paradoxes.  I have been talking about those with Virginia Dignum, professor of responsible artificial intelligence at Umeå (OOMEO) university, about her new book, The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future, just released, with links in the show notes and transcript. Virginia is an internationally recognized expert in AI ethics and policy who has led initiatives for the European Commission, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, UNESCO, and UNICEF, among others, and is the author of the 2019 book Responsible Artificial Intelligence.

We conclude the interview by talking about some paradoxes in detail, like Moravec’s Paradox, questions about using AI in legal decisions, AI literacy, and the recent battle between Anthropic and the US Department of Defense, and OpenClaw.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ .

AI runs not just broadly across human interest, but deeply. And at every level it seems to create paradoxes. How can it be useful without power; how can it be safe with power. We want it to take over jobs, but still leave us with meaning and purpose. We deny it the possibility of becoming sentient, but how can we trust something that lacks compassion? My guest today has written a whole book on these paradoxes. Calling from Sweden is Virginia Dignum, professor of responsible artificial intelligence at Umeå University, and the author of the 2019 book Responsible Artificial Intelligence. She’s an internationally recognized expert in AI ethics and policy who has led initiatives for the European Commission, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, UNESCO, and UNICEF, among others. And we are talking about her new book, The AI Paradox: How to Make Sense of a Complex Future.

We talk about the issues of ethical choices and power that AI raises, where the difference between humans and LLMs matters, Viriginia’s path to the work she’s doing and her book, and our trend to techno-solutionism and what it means for us.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines!

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.