What Next: TBD | Tech, power, and the future - Does Anyone Like A.I.?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 10 May 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Everyone would probably hate A.I. less if we could just see some upside to it. But despite all the investment—into the companies, into infrastructure like data centers, so much into marketing—it’s widely known: artificial intelligence sucks.
Guest: Nilay Patel, co-founder and editor in chief of The Verge.
Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen.
Podcast production by Evan Campbell, and Patrick Fort.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | If you are a regular consumer of tech-related news, you probably know this guy. |
| 0:10.4 | Hi, I'm Neli Patel. I'm the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Verge, and host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of the Vergecast podcast. |
| 0:17.5 | I wanted to call up Nelai because he came up with a concept that blew my mind, one that I think is a |
| 0:24.2 | skeleton key for this moment in tech and the economy. It's called software brain. So I asked him, |
| 0:31.2 | what is software brain? Software brain is the name that I have given to a particular way of thinking that has been around |
| 0:40.2 | in the tech industry for a very long time, but which has become dominant in the age of AI. |
| 0:46.5 | And it's the idea that if you can just capture the world in a database and issue some structured |
| 0:53.6 | commands to that database, you can make Utopia. |
| 0:57.6 | And there are really simple ways of thinking about this. |
| 1:00.4 | I have a lot of friends who are addicted to productivity software, and they're always |
| 1:04.9 | switching from Notion to DoS to whatever, or they're hacking up their own. And if they can just get everyone |
| 1:12.5 | to use the same system that they're using, everything will be completely under control. |
| 1:17.6 | Everybody who's ever worked in any company in the world has had the person who's been like, |
| 1:23.2 | if we can just switch from Trello to Airtable, everything will get better. That is like definitionally software brain. |
| 1:34.8 | How did you start thinking about this idea? And we cover a lot of software at the verge. We cover a lot of tech products. So many tech products are fundamentally databases. Like in the |
| 1:47.3 | most simple, reductive drives everyone crazy way. Everything is just a database that you are |
| 1:53.6 | trying to issue commands to. They have a whoop band. A whoop band is like a fitness band. Fitness |
| 1:58.9 | tracker, yeah. It's very popular. |
| 2:01.9 | It is, it's just recording everything about your heart rate and your body. |
| 2:06.1 | And it, inside that database, it very confidently makes determinations about how healthy you are. |
| 2:12.2 | And that is nowhere near all of the information that it can have or should have or even needs to make those kind |
| 2:18.3 | of determinations. But you understand why it's so addictive. I have one for a reason. I think it is |
... |
Transcript will be available on the free plan in 3 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.