Future Around & Find Out

Rajiv Pant thinks of AI as an Iron Man suit for the mind. Something you put on. That you fuse with. That takes you to greater heights — but could also make you incredibly dizzy and be very dangerous if you, the human, don't stay in control of it.

Rajiv sees successful collaboration with AI as a “synthesis.” And to that end, he’s building a series of skills and methodologies for synthesis engineering, coding, writing and project management. 

In this episode, Rajiv explains why synthesis engineering is a kind of middle ground between vibe coding and agentic engineering. It’s a method for human-AI collaboration that helps builders go faster while not falling into the trap of letting AI do the things we humans ought to own. i.e. The architecture. The judgment. The thinking and learning. 

Rajiv is an engineering and product leader with deep experience in media. He’s held senior roles at the Wall Street Journal, Hearst, and the New York Times (where he and I first met). Today he's the president of Flatiron Software. 

Rajiv has open-sourced all of his Synthesis methodologies and he and I also discuss why open source is so important as we increasingly turn to AI to sharpen our thinking. 

Can we really trust a system we don’t understand? Would Tony Stark have trusted his suit if he didn’t know how it was built? 
Chapters:

(00:00) - Iron Man suit for the mind

(02:11) - What goes wrong when you vibe code into production

(04:20) - What synthesis coding looks like hands on keyboard

(05:40) - What AI code slop looks like

(08:30) - The unexpected joy of managing a team of agents

(11:00) - Using AI as a thinking partner without outsourcing your thinking

(15:30) - How a non-programmer built a better version of his own software

(18:15) - Is your use of AI making you dumber?

(23:26) - Trusting AI when it’s a black box

(27:11) - If Tony Stark owned your suit, would you trust it?

(28:26) - What AI does to the economics of open source

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President Trump signed an executive order this week that “voluntarily” invites AI makers to share their most advanced models with the government thirty days before a wider release. Specifically, the NSA will be reviewing these models for cybersecurity threats. So what’s this executive order mean for AI regulation? How voluntary is this really? Do we want the NSA involved? And what other forms of review may come next? 

And, related: NOTUS reports that federal officials are in talks with Sam Altman and other AI leaders about the US government stock in these companies. This comes as Sen. Bernie Sanders on the left and Steve Bannon on the right are both calling for the government to own 50% of the AI companies, with the American people getting dividends. 

So, should the government be regulating AI? Should it own AI? And should it both regulate and own AI? It’s strange bedfellows all around…

Kwaku and I get into on the latest FAFO Friday. Plus, we explore the concept of “cognitive uploading,” which Google NotebookLM’s co-founder Steven Johnson divined in this week’s interview (and subsequently blogged about). As we work with AI, we need to draw lines on what we will task it with and what we won’t. And the lines are all over the place right now, which is a perfect jumping off point to future around and find out… 
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Future Around & Find Out newsletter and more: https://www.futurearound.com
Music by Jonathan Zalben

Steven Johnson dreamed of building the ultimate research assistant. Now he's doing just that at Google, where he's the co-founder and editorial director of NotebookLM.
It's one of the most interesting AI products out there. It radically changes how we learn, research, and remember — and the "notebook" itself is becoming a standard unit of knowledge across Google, rolling out in more and more places where AI needs to reference a body of sources.
In this episode, the author of _Where Good Ideas Come From_ explains how AI is making him a better researcher and writer — and why tools like NotebookLM are so powerful when you're trying to make new connections, remember what you've already found, and figure out what's missing.
There's a lot of fear right now that AI is making us dumber. That by relying on it too much, we're engaging in "cognitive offloading" and stunting our learning. That's a real risk, especially in schools.
But Steven says we should also be talking about what you can gain from AI — and the power of something he calls "cognitive uploading."
Resources:
* Google NotebookLM: https://notebooklm.google/
* Steven Johnson: https://stevenberlinjohnson.com/
Support Future Around & Find Out:
* Follow Dan on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/dblums/
* Get the free newsletter: https://www.futurearound.com
* Become a paid subscriber and help future proof FAFO! https://www.futurearound.com/upgrade

(00:00) - If you are interested in truly understanding something, this is the greatest time to be alive

(01:25) - Steven's controversial NYT piece and the cold call from Google Labs

(02:55) - Who NotebookLM's power users are

(04:40) - The notebook as a new format for knowledge

(06:20) - Featured notebooks: earnings reports, Shakespeare, and Dungeons & Dragons

(11:00) - Writing a book about the Gold Rush with NotebookLM

(13:20) - Four weeks of research in 14 minutes

(16:30) - Following serendipitous connections through the source material

(17:50) - Cognitive offloading and the illusion of understanding

(21:00) - How Steven actually writes with AI

(24:30) - Paragraph by paragraph: a new kind of writing

(26:55) - Do readers need to know AI helped write it?

(28:55) - Where good ideas come from in the age of AI

(31:56) - Searching the negative space

(33:56) - The adjacent possible: custom software for everyone

(37:01) - NotebookLM for nonprofits and small organizations

(39:06) - Tens of thousands of quotes, 25 years of forgetting

(40:56) - "It's cognitive uploading"

The Pope's encyclical on AI has a direct message for builders: every design choice reflects a vision of humanity. He's calling on developers to "disarm" AI — to resist the race for dominance and ask whether we're actually building a future worth having.
On the latest FAFO Friday, Dan and Kwaku dig into the encyclical, plus two big moves to restrict AI in schools: the American Federation of Teachers calling for drastic cuts to screens and AI chatbots, and UC Berkeley Law School banning nearly all AI use. 
Also: Wharton's Ethan Mollick on "cognitive surrender" — and why the goal isn't to avoid AI, but to be intentional about what you hand over and what you keep for yourself.
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Future Around & Find Out newsletter and more: https://www.futurearound.com
Music by Jonathan Zalben

"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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Become a paid subscriber and help future proof FAFO!
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Music by Jonathan Zalben