Welcome to The Deep Dive: in this episode we unpack a modern paradox — astonishing scientific breakthroughs like DeepMind’s AlphaFold sitting alongside alarming declines in collective discourse and rising partisan polarization. We trace historical trends (the Flynn effect and its recent plateau), explore improvements in statistical and critical literacy, and weigh the dual role of AI as both a cognitive prosthetic that can amplify human reasoning and a ‘dark twin’ that can manipulate behavior.
Featuring commentary from leading thinkers and researchers — including Steven Pinker, Nick Bostrom, John Kleinberg, Carl Friston, Philip Tetlock and others — the conversation surveys biological, computational and institutional limits to intelligence, debates superintelligence risks and benefits, and examines real-world examples from medicine to social media. Key themes include complementarity between humans and AI, algorithmic nudging and misalignment, the ‘dark forest’ of mistrust, and the practical levers for improving collective rationality.
The episode concludes with practical foresight: three plausible future scenarios (a Rational Renaissance, muddling-through, or Collapse of Reason) and a seven-step high-stakes decision checklist designed to help listeners frame problems, gather evidence, check biases, apply tools, consider system effects, plan scenarios and implement adaptive feedback — a compact toolkit for making better individual and collective choices in an AI‑inflected century.
