How To Handle AI Anxiety: A Computer Scientist and a Buddhist Teacher On Managing Uncertainty | Cal Newport & Matthew Brensilver
Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Uh welcome to the Ten Percent Happier Podcast. I'm your host, Dan Harris. I don't know about you, but I am pretty damn anxious about artificial intelligence. I have all the regular concerns, you know, will it take our jobs? Will it kill us? But beyond that I have a a kind of generalized Dread 'cause I have the sense that the world is about to change in profound and unpredictable ways and that
just kinda freaks me out. So I've been wanting to do this episode for a long time. about how to manage AI anxiety, and I have recruited two ninjas. Uh my first guest is Cal Newport, who's been on the show before. Uh he is a computer science professor at Georgetown. He's written several books, including Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. He has his own podcast called Deep Questions, where he talks about AI a lot and often debunk many of the fears around AI. So I thought he would be a really good guest. And I'm pairing him with somebody who comes at this from a very different perspective, uh Matthew Brandsilver, also a frequent flyer on this show and a highly regarded uh Dharma teacher. So Matthew and Cal, welcome back to the show. Thank you.
Thanks, Tim. I'd be curious. To hear from both of you. on two things. One, do you use AI with any regularity? And two, how worried are you about this new technology? Cal, uh I'll I'll start with you. I use it not that much in my current workflow. It maybe is an improved Google for me, but I study it extensively. So I watch people using it to all extremes all the time. And
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