I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Con Show.

So this is a bit of something different, a bit of an experiment. I got two parts to my

work here at the times. I do the podcast and I do my columns. And the podcast is really

where I explore what other people think, the columns is where I work out what I think.

But sometimes I want to cross the streams a little bit more than I do because there's

a tendency for people to think that whatever podcast I did last on the topic is what

my actual view is. We're going to be covering AI a lot. You might have seen GPT-4 just

came out. That's a big deal. What it can do is a really big deal. We're going to have

a big conversation around that on Tuesday. But I just wrote a column trying to work through

my own thinking on AI and why it's come to dominate so much my thinking. And I thought

about read it here to give people a bit of context for the coverage we're doing and

where I'm coming from as I do it.

So in 2018, Sundar Prasad, the chief executive of Google, and I would say he's not one of

the tech executives, no one for constant overstatement. He said and I quote, AI is probably

the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more

profound than electricity or fire to hell of a quote. And I was back in 2018 when these

systems were a lot weaker than they are now. Try to live. I've been trying to live for

a few minutes in the possibility that what he's saying is true. People talk about human

cognitive biases all the time, but there's no more profound human bias than the expectation

that tomorrow is going to be like today. It's so powerful because it is almost always

correct. Tomorrow probably will be like today and next year probably will be like this

year. But try to cast your gaze 10 or 20 years out. One thing that's been unnerving me,

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