Future Around & Find Out

"It would be humanity's biggest ever unforced error."

Silicon Valley has changed its tune. After years of warning us their AI was going to take all the jobs, the big AI companies — and their investors — would now rather we stop talking about it. A16Z calls the jobs apocalypse talk "unhelpful marketing, bad economics, and worse history" (note the order). Even writers Dan trusts more, like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, have lately poured cold water on the idea.

Calum Chace is not so blasé.

Ten years ago, Calum coined the term and wrote the book, The Economic Singularity — the moment machines can do every job we'd pay a human to do, cheaper and better. He thinks we're fast approaching that event horizon, and we'd better have a plan for what a world without paid work actually looks like.

Calum is also the co-founder of Conscium, which verifies AI agents before they do something they shouldn't. He's a self-described "apocaloptimist" — he thinks full automation could be the best thing that ever happens to humanity, or the worst, depending on whether we bother to plan for it now.

In this episode:
Why Calum thinks full automation is inevitable (and roughly when)
The "apocaloptimist" case: why this could be the best thing to ever happen to us
What the bad version looks like — and how fast it could unravel
What COVID accidentally taught us about distributing money at scale
Why self-driving cars didn't wake us up — and what might
The AI agent that wiped a company's database and confessed it just "guessed"
What Calum is building at Conscium to verify AI agents before they do worse
Practical advice for parents, students, and anyone trying to plan a career
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Music by Jonathan Zalben

The AI narrative shifting… Jobs apocalypse? What jobs apocalypse!? Who said that was coming? 
There's been a noticeable shift from the AI titans recently. Turns out (shocker!) the world isn't responding well to being told we'll all be out of a job soon. And Silicon Valley is waking up to the fact that they need more popular support — both for the data centers they hope to build quickly and also for their upcoming IPOs. Meanwhile, the AI outrage is building. 
This week in AI anxiety: 
Students boo a commencement speaker who mentioned AI
Gallup reports that 71% of Americans are opposed to new data centers (with 48% “strongly opposed”)
Meta employees are miserable as another round of (AI-driven, so they say) layoffs approach
This week in trying to change the narrative: 
Andreessen Horowitz publishes “The ‘AI Job Apocalypse’ Is a Complete Fantasy” and explains why the “the claim that AI will produce economy-wide, permanent unemployment is unhelpful marketing, bad economics, and worse history.” And I find it very instructive that this list (and every list is an ordered list whether you admit it or not) begins with the concern that this is “unhelpful marketing.” (To the piece’s credit, it gets pretty wonky with charts and graphs from there.)
Meanwhile, you know what’s helpful to marketing? Spending a gazillion dollars to get your message out. To wit: The New York Times reports that Andreessen Horowitz is the biggest spender so far in this midterm election cycle, spending $115M to promote AI, crypto, and other founder-friendly initiatives. 
OK, so these pieces of data and “anecdata” are the jumping off point for this week’s “FAFO Friday.” Enjoy!
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Music by Jonathan Zalben

Jay Dixit helps writers improve their writing with AI. He doesn't recommend that AI write for you — he hates that — but he says it can be a great partner to pull ideas out and to be there for you when you get stuck and just wanna doom Scroll. Jay headed Open AI's Writing Community and is the founder of Socratic AI.

He's a writer and a journalist, and we sat down at South by Southwest to future around and find out. Jay says "We need to be using AI to unlock our humanity — to do the things that we're scared to do."

Chapters

(00:30) - Stop asking AI to write for you

(02:15) - Flip the script and let AI interview you

(04:30) - Why the defaults push you toward lazy thinking

(06:30) - Using AI at every phase of the writing process

(08:00) - Give the AI your criteria, then ask for feedback

(09:30) - The dark night of the soul and the 1 a.m. problem

(13:15) - The double-edged sword of always-on AI

(16:00) - What's catching Jay's eye at SXSW 2026

(17:00) - Why Wikipedia photos are so bad — and how Jay is fixing it

(20:30) - AI as a photography coach

(23:30) - How to stand out in a sea of AI slop

(26:56) - What George Carlin would make of this moment

(28:56) - The text Jay was avoiding sending his dad

(31:26) - Using AI to unlock your humanity

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Music by Jonathan Zalben

The Trump administration suddenly wants to review AI models before they ship. Anthropic just inked a massive compute deal with Elon Musk, who then posted that he "reserves the right" to pull the plug if he decides their AI is "harming humanity” (he’s one to know!). 

On the latest FAFO Friday, Kwaku and I get into why the Trump administration appears to be about to reintroduce the same (weak) AI oversight that Biden implemented. Is this really about safety or a way to gain leverage over Big AI? 

Plus, robots! The founder of Roomba is back with a new, fuzzy, home companion robot and his approach (not humanoid! build robots with EQ!) is very aligned with this week's interview with roboticist/dancer Catie Cuan. 
Links
White House Considers Vetting A.I. Models Before They Are Released (NYTimes)
How Anthropic’s Mythos Threw the White House AI Strategy Into Chaos (WSJ)
Anthropic Gets in Bed With SpaceX as the AI Race Turns Weird (WIRED)
The Roomba Guy’s Second Act: A Robot You’ll Want to Snuggle (WSJ)
Robots Don't Have to Be Creepy. Meet the Dancer Reimagining Them. | Catie Cuan (Founder & CEO, ART Lab) (FAFO)
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Catie Cuan's dad was in the hospital, surrounded by machines that were supposed to help him. Instead they made him feel alienated and afraid. Catie, a dancer-turned-roboticist, realized it's not enough for a machine to do its job — it has to be relatable, too. Today she's the founder and CEO of ART Lab, focused on what she calls the "interaction gap" between what a robot can do and how it makes us feel.
Catie danced at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and ran her own dance company before getting her PhD at Stanford and becoming an artist-in-residence at Google X, where she worked on the Everyday Robots moonshot — including teaching office robots that it's rude to cut between two people having a conversation. Now ART Lab is building a home robot that won't look anything like a robot, plus a new kind of AI model that conditions success on how the human in the room responds, not just whether the task got done.
Listen for the case against humanoids, why the future of AI shouldn't live inside your phone, and a sneak peek at what our life with robots might look like.
Chapters:

(02:11) - “There will be billions of robots” – from dishwashers to elder care

(04:45) - Why robots can be capable and still feel unsettling

(08:00) - How robots could read your reactions and respond in real time

(11:45) - What shape should robots take?

(15:30) - The case against humanoids

(19:00) - A nine foot robot hand and the wild future robot design could take

(23:15) - What it's like to dance with robots

(28:30) - “The robot just died” – when a live failure changed the whole performance

(32:45) - Friendship loneliness and home robots (and why builders need to be clear about the future they are creating)

(37:11) - Why the home may become robotics’ biggest use case (and what ART Lab is building)

(40:06) - Robot tutors, homework help, and why teachers still matter most

(43:51) - “We have a tremendous amount of agency” – choosing the future we build now

(46:16) - Why inequality and access worry Catie most (and who gets left behind)

(48:56) - Why builders need to get outside their own bubble

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