How Should We Approach A.I. in 2026?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 December 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The writers Charles Duhigg, Cal Newport, and Anna Wiener join Tyler Foggatt for a conversation about artificial intelligence and the promises, myths, and anxieties surrounding it. The discussion was recorded before a live audience at The New Yorker Festival this fall. They explore the gap between Silicon Valley’s sweeping claims and what generative A.I. can actually do today, how people are using the technology for work, creativity, and emotional support, and why the tech’s most immediate political consequences may be the hardest to grapple with.
This week’s reading:
- “Trump Dishonors the Kennedy Center,” by David Remnick
- “The Biggest Threat to the 2026 Economy Is Still Donald Trump,” by John Cassidy
- “The Right Wing Rises in Latin America,” by Jon Lee Anderson
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- “Americans Won’t Ban Kids from Social Media. What Can We Do Instead?,” by Jay Caspian Kang
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the political scene from The New Yorker. |
| 0:08.0 | I'm Tyler Foggett. |
| 0:10.0 | 2025 was the year that artificial intelligence pushed its way into our politics and into all of our lives, whether we liked it or not. |
| 0:18.0 | Today we're bringing you a conversation that I had with the writers Charles Duhigg, Cal Newport, and Anna Weiner at the New Yorker Festival in the fall. We looked at the |
| 0:25.9 | current state of AI, the kind of world being created by it, and how all of us might adapt or |
| 0:30.7 | recalibrate to the technology. I hope you enjoy the conversation. |
| 0:47.3 | So I guess I thought we'd start by talking about the two competing narratives about technology and AI that we often hear about. |
| 0:53.3 | So you got the first narrative, which is that, and this is the narrative that's being sold to us by the tech giants. And that's these tools will make us better. They will make our lives easier, more efficient. AI will |
| 0:59.4 | eliminate our busy work, and it'll lead to incredible discoveries in science and medicine. |
| 1:05.2 | And then there's the other narrative, which is that these tools are ruining us. |
| 1:14.2 | AI is going to replace us and our jobs entirely. It might even kill all of us if it decides to be evil. You know, social media, meanwhile, and smartphone dependency are |
| 1:20.1 | destroying our attention spans and our ability to think for ourselves. We were told that these tools |
| 1:25.0 | would connect us and instead they're leading to a fractured, |
| 1:27.9 | helpless, sad society. So my question for you guys is, which of these narratives feels more |
| 1:34.5 | correct right now? Or do you think it's like a mix of the two? Do you want to start, Charles? |
| 1:39.9 | Sure. So I think the thing that's really interesting is we've fallen into this pattern where we |
| 1:46.3 | talk about this as a binary outcome, right? There's this instinct to see this as good or bad. |
| 1:53.1 | And if you think about most of the technology that's influenced our lives, this is pretty typical |
| 1:57.3 | historically, that when a technology comes into being, we tend to look |
| 2:01.2 | at it in a binary way, but then the application of it is incredibly non-binary, right? |
| 2:06.6 | It's much more in between. |
| 2:07.8 | It's much more of a normal distribution. |
... |
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