Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of Left podcast, where we remember the past and choose to repeat it.

AI development is moving fast, so you might think there's not much value in listening to an AI episode published in 2024.

But AI, like many new technologies throughout history, is following a timeless

pattern that we cover in this throwback episode, which is that they often bring simultaneous

utopia and dystopia while also laying a progress trap, though many tends to focus on

the benefits first, while only discovering

the drawbacks later. And so to look back, but with an eye on the future, sources today include

Vox, Linus Tech Tips, TED, Global Dispatches, 538 Politics, DW News, Your Undivided Detention,

Tina Huang, The Majority Report, Democracy Now,

Jimmy McGee, Planet Critical, Ted Ed, you've all know Harari at the Frontiers Forum, and the PBS News Hour.

Back in the 1980s, Rush Limbaugh became a radio powerhouse by enthralling mainly white working class men, truck drivers, cops, and other non-college-educated blue-collar types who spent their workdays in their cars or other places where they could tune in to AM radio for hours.

AM Radio Network saw the potential profit in this

and syndicated his show to hundreds of rural and small-town AM radio stations

to pump the Lindahl show, the Limbaugh show, for hours a day.

So Rush Hudson Limbaugh, the third of the prominent and affluent Limbaugh's of Girido, Missouri,

could lean into his golden microphone and tell his audience of ditto heads, as he called them,

that real Americans like them were having their pockets picked by the welfare queens,

the brown immigrants, and the feminazis. They were the ones making white working class men's

lives worse, not the Reagan Revolution,

which ended pensions, gutted unions, and slashed away at Lyndon Johnson's great society programs.

No, no. It's the poor. So are the problem. Not the rich. He was so good as a broadcaster,

one of the best ever in the business, frankly. He even helped radicalize Clarence Thomas,

...