Dean Ball

speaker

404 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 9 Mar

Dean Ball’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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Plain English with Derek Thompson · "American Democracy as We Know It Might Not Survive This Technology" · 9 Mar 2026 podcast

So let's create a Derek and Ezra unit of the CIA or the NSA or something.

Well, the problem is like I got to detail an agent to that.

And that agent has like health care and has like a pension and salary and all this stuff.

So there's marginal cost to doing it.

But when the marginal cost of very, very, very sophisticated level attention –

falls to zero in the form of an artificial intelligence agent named Claude or ChatGPT or whatever.

All of a sudden, it's like, well, wait, the calculus totally changes here.

Nothing about the law changed, but the economics of expert attention changed, in essence.

And for that reason, mass surveillance and mass analysis, sophisticated analysis of what Americans are doing becomes possible.

And that is just one, that is not the only thing we have to face.

It is one example of how when the marginal cost of essentially expert attention goes to zero, all sorts of assumptions and institutions break.

Well, first of all, I think at the object level, you can debate about whether or not the Biden administration's controlling tendencies would have worked.

We can't stop China from building the surveillance regime they're going to build, right?

So that'd be one thing.

I just kind of don't think it would work, and therefore I don't think it's worth investing that much energy into.

I think the other thing that I would say, stepping back a little bit, would be I am pointing out a problem, but the solution to that problem, in my view, is probably not going to be

you know, there's a certain reactionary tendency among the contemporary left.

I felt that the Biden administration was actually a much more deeply conservative in the, like,

Uh, you know, in the sense of like, actually just like, like almost like paleo conservative trying to preserve the institutions of the mid 20th century.

Um, they felt Democrats today feel far more attached to those institutions in part because they largely control them now.

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