Yo, Rob Harvilla from 60 Solns that explain the 90s here to inform you that we are back

with 30 more songs because the 90s were super long and had a ton of rad music.

Please join us every Wednesday for more 60 songs that explain the 90s only on Spotify.

Today I have something really special for you, a long, funny, scary, challenging and informative

conversation with one of my favorite writers about one of the world's most important topics.

The guest is author Steven Johnson, writer of the adjacent possible newsletter and the

best-selling author of many books, including most recently extra life on the science of

living longer.

And our subject is artificial intelligence.

I think it's possible that 50 years from now, when we look back at the early 2020s,

at the pandemic and the political chaos and the economic rollercoaster and the culture

war, we'll say that the most important development from this period wasn't the pandemic or the

political chaos or the economic rollercoaster or the culture war.

We'll say it was this vertical hour we're experiencing at the frontier of artificial intelligence.

So why do I think that?

Well, last year, the organization OpenAI unveiled a technology called GPT-3.

This is a language technology that has essentially ingested zillions of words, articles,

Wikipedia pages, and learned how to communicate like some kind of human genius.

If you ask GPT-3 to explain the history of the First Amendment or how to max out your 401k,

the technology will spit out an astonishingly human-like statement explaining either.

If you ask GPT-3 to finish an essay that you've started by giving it the first paragraph

of that essay and basically saying, keep going, and right in the style that that paragraph

...