Zershaaneh Qureshi
speaker
853 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 17 Sep
Zershaaneh Qureshi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
It's just a bunch of tech bros who are doing some kind of mixture of posturing,
edgy humor, irony, that kind of thing.
And I wonder if through this conversation, we are paying too much attention to what's essentially just like an aesthetic choice that they're making rather than like a real set of beliefs.
What do you make of that?
So if you're trying to understand what the future of AI is going to look like and how AI is going to shape the future, the most natural thing, at least from my perspective, to do would be to kind of focus directly on thinking about the technology itself or maybe on surrounding policy issues.
But you do something kind of different.
So you take this anthropological approach where you're focusing on the cultures and beliefs of the people who are building these technologies.
What does that lens capture that other lenses might miss?
Yeah, for people who are still skeptical at this point, it would be helpful, I think, if you could give some historical examples or indeed recent examples where the values or culture or idiosyncratic beliefs of people building a technology have actually tangibly impacted how that technology has, as you say, how it's been built, how it's been deployed, how it's affected the world.
Something I was really interested to read on your Substack is how the word Duma has sort of become like the lowest status label that you can wear in Silicon Valley.
And that just like, that really surprised me just because
You know, AI company leaders are very much acknowledging the plausibility of doom scenarios.
And in fact, that kind of sense of doominess is so pervasive that, you know, people on the outside think it's a form of marketing.
They're like, they're not serious.
They're just like, it's just hype, you know?
And I'm kind of wondering how you think, you know, this idea of doomer as an insult meshes into that picture.
I think what I want to understand more is like, what's the...
practical consequences actually are of, you know, having safety concerns being associated, at least in these kind of VC startup-y circles and, you know, which is a like big part of culture in the area, sort of being seen by these people as like kind of embarrassing, call those status.
Yeah, like how does that actually affect what's going on in the labs?
I think what I'm interested in here is that, I mean, at 80,000 hours, right, we see a lot of people who are very attracted to careers in like the Bay Area, at AI companies and the general kind of like AI ecosystem, specifically because they like really genuinely want to positively influence the trajectory of AI development.
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