Blood in the Machine

50:02

The two words the AI industry hates more than anything

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/10/02

“Stochastic parrots,” a term coined in an influential 2021 paper written by two AI researchers and two computational linguists, essentially holds that large language models are not “intelligent” but are rather systems that output material based on what’s in their training data. Now, while LLMs and technologies described as AI today have become more sophisticated and complex over the last 5 years, the term remains a fundamentally accurate way of describing LLMs.Yet the industry hates it like the

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51:59

What’s really behind AI ‘super intelligence’

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/09/25

While billionaires and world leaders expound the dangers of all-powerful, “super intelligent” AI, the reality on the ground is that it's a tech product that’s only made possible by countless human beings, laboring for sometimes dollars a day, doing work like “cleaning” data sets so they’re usable, scanning books and literature into databases, creating usable content, and moderating the output of AI systems to weed out offensive, gruesome, and racist content. These workers are underpaid, overtaxed,

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54:03

How to kick Flock out of your town

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/09/20

In a year rife with backlash to big tech, data centers, and AI, one company still manages to stand out: Flock Safety. Over the past decade, Flock has been building out a massive network of surveillance cameras across the nation. The images those cameras record are uploaded to a central database, and can be accessed by law enforcement and federal authorities.Abuse of the system has been rampant. Police have used Flock’s Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) to stalk exes and to track women seeking

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64:23

The ‘End Times Fascists’ of AI, ft. Naomi Klein and...

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/09/13

End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor. Naomi Klein’s Newsletter, Patterns.Astra Taylor on BlueskyBlood in the Machine Newsletter: Brian’s Bluesky.Producer Ryan’s Newsletter: Ryan’s Bluesky.Articles mentioned in this episode:The Automation Charade by Astra Taylor.The politics and possibilities of ‘AI could kill us all’ by

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58:27

The real AI jobs apocalypse

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/09/04

AI executives like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have been forecasting an incipient AI jobs apocalypse for three years now. So where is it? Well it’s here, kind of. But instead of replacing tens of millions of workers, it’s mostly making them miserable.Across the US, workers are souring on AI, and they’re increasingly outspoken about it. A new report from Glassdoor documents how workers are becoming more and more negative towards —at the moment that AI CEOs have promised that the

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65:57

The revolt against Meta’s ‘pervert glasses’ is part...

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/08/28

New fronts are opening up in the opposition to big tech. The anti-data center movement is rolling, AI is unpopular as ever, and now, a widespread backlash to Meta’s new AI glasses—termed Pervert Glasses by the masses—is unfolding at breakneck pace. Silicon Valley, of course, is in denial about all of it.This week on the podcast, to help make sense of this latest revolt against a Silicon Valley project, I spoke with Chris Gilliard, an author, thinker, and surveillance scholar who’s spent many years

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62:04

Charting the rise of tech fascism

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/08/21

Going back decades, there’s been a faction in Silicon Valley whose chief interest was not coding, consumer technology or even business, but power. In some ways, the story of the last ten years of the tech industry has been the story of that faction, perhaps best embodied by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, but also represented by figures like Marc Andreessen and figures like Alex Karp, Palmer Luckey, and David Sacks, winning the power they sought. The consequences of that victory have been disastrous. Gil

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62:59

The State of the AI Bubble with Ed Zitron

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/08/14

There are fresh signs that the AI bubble is wobbling. Again.In recent weeks, a much-vaunted AI-focused hedge fund, Situational Awareness, run by Valley wunderkind Leopold Aschenbrenner lost $35 billion; nearly its entire fund. South Korea saw its largest-ever stock market collapse as investors pulled bets on AI chips and tech stocks. The circularity of the AI economy, with hyperscalers investing in AI labs and AI labs purchasing cloud compute from the hyperscalers and hyperscalers reporting big

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60:24

What is an 'Elon Musk'?

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/07/24

Elon Musk is not the richest man in the world merely because he’s good at selling cars or rockets at a profitable margin. That might have sufficed for richest men in the world of decades past. But Musk became the world’s first trillionaire, however briefly, for a lot of reasons, and being good at moving a particular product is not chief among them. Musk sells a vision. Musk harnesses the state to implement his corporate goals, to secure his companies’ foundations beyond the vicissitudes of common

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54:23

Xbox workers speak out about layoffs, AI, and how big...

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/07/17

On July 6th, Microsoft announced that it was laying off 4,800 workers, largely from its Xbox gaming division. It’s now sadly routine in the tech industry; thousands of jobs gone in an instant, with little more than a corporate memo and some platitudes about AI. To better understand what actually happens behind the scenes in a big tech layoff event, and to understand the particular crisis faced by the gaming industry, this week I sat down with three Microsoft workers for a special edition of Blood in

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44:25

The Luddites take New York

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/07/10

The year has been marked by the rise of open, widespread, and increasingly spirited backlash to AI, data centers, and big tech. As such, the stage was well set for the Summer of Ludd, a series of protests, performances, talks, and meetups in New York City organized around the idea that we need to get people into the streets and break Silicon Valley’s grip over our lives. There were mock trials of big tech, plays staged detailing the Luddites’ true origin story, marches, and teach-ins. By just about

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54:15

How and why to de-Google your life

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/07/03

While Google seems dead set on making their users hate their product, the courts in Europe are taking issue with their anti-competitive business practices. Meanwhile, the Summer of Ludd kicks off in New York and a new dating survey finds: It’s sexy to be a luddite. Plus, my good friend and fellow tech journalist Paris Marx joins us to discuss the final boss of Google's enshittification: Search going full AI mode. Paris has long advocated for getting off US tech, and he’ll share some of his best tips

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46:42

The AI industry is pouring hundreds of millions into...

Blood in the Machine ·

2026/06/26

The tech lobby spent $27 million on a single Congressional election in New York. OpenAI-backed Leading the Future spent $8 million on ads attacking Alex Bores, who vowed to rein in AI, in an effort to fire a warning shot—did it work? What does this mean for democracy? Meanwhile, a Michigan town takes on a nuclear AI data center, and a bipartisan effort to legislate against AI theft of artist’s work hits the Senate. Plus, I speak with technologist and journalist Molly White about her new project:

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67:43

How to dis-enshittify the world, with Cory Doctorow

Blood in the Machine ·

2025/11/10

Does Cory Doctorow even need an introduction at this point? If you spend any amount of time at all online, then you’ve encountered his work, his ideas, his words. But the ultra-prolific science fiction writer, digital rights activist, and coiner of the “Enshittification” verbiage that’s become universal shorthand for the degradation of the internet (and, to an extent, everything else), has been especially ubiquitous lately. His book-length treatment of the Enshittification thesis was just published

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66:01

Understanding the tech oligarchy and its gilded rage...

Blood in the Machine ·

2025/10/31

Happy Halloween all. I got into the spirit by catching up with the horror flicks I’d been sleeping on (28 Years Later was surprisingly good) and, more importantly, chatting with the great tech journalist Jacob Silverman, author of GILDED RAGE: ELON MUSK AND THE RADICALIZATION OF SILICON VALLEY, a book about some very scary people who hold immense sway over our politics and our lives. Before we get into that, for anyone interested, I wanted to bump my list of best-ever ‘luddite horror’ films I wrote

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57:05

Dismantling the Empire of AI with Karen Hao

Blood in the Machine ·

2025/05/20

Years before OpenAI became a household name, Karen Hao was one of the very first journalists to gain access to the company. What she saw when she did unsettled her. Despite a name that signaled transparency, executives were elusive, the culture secretive. Despite publicly heralding a mission to build AGI, or artificial general intelligence, company leadership couldn’t really say what that meant, or how they defined AGI at all. The seeds of a startup soon to be riven by infighting, rushing to be

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