Tom Slater

speaker

197 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 11 May

Tom Slater’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 May 2026 with 1.

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Merryn Talks Money · What If AI’s Biggest Impact Isn’t Jobs, But Minds? · 11 May 2026 podcast

But because we're all started using two or three of these really dominant systems, everybody's getting some variation of the same answer.

And yes, those systems are built on the whole corpus of human knowledge, but the centralization is incredible.

You've changed the transmission mechanism for ideas.

And then these AI algorithms that power media sites now completely control selection, which ideas get amplified, which quietly disappear.

So we've allowed technology to dominate those three key vectors of cultural evolution, variation, transmission, selection.

Yeah, that's it was quite at the time it was challenging to understand the economic rationale.

Now that we can debate whether that has changed subsequently.

But when you think of it in terms of the impact that it has on cultural evolution and shaping ideas, you can see why that would be a valuable asset to somebody.

I think that it does bring change.

And the question to my mind is, are we going to passively and unthinkingly let this change happen?

Or do you have a debate about how these tools are used, where they're used?

Do we passively accept our fate with this or do we proactively seek to control it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So what you saw was that if you looked at what happened to people, if they were given AI, they would essentially outsource the writing process.

And the result was that about over 80% of that group that used AI to write the essay couldn't provide a single correct quote from the essay they had just written a few minutes earlier.

So the effort that goes into the durable learning, writing an essay, had just been bypassed entirely.

And that was completely different in the group that you searched, the group that wrote themselves.

If you just employ these tools to do something you would have otherwise done yourself, you will gradually lose the capability to do that.

You will never develop the skill to do that.

But if you engage positively with these systems, you have the essay to write, you don't just say to the AI, write the essay, but you go and research the question using AI as a tool.

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