What happens when your co-workers are AIs? (with Evan Ratliff)
Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg
Should AIs be allowed to refuse or claim feelings?
They debate Anthropic's refusal experiments and the difficulty of distinguishing performance from consciousness.
Read the full transcript here.
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What changes when anyone can clone your voice from a minute of audio? If voice ID can be spoofed, what replaces it for everyday security? Why are phone scams evolving faster than our intuition for trust? What new “attack surfaces” appear when every service talks to you digitally? How much paranoia is rational before security becomes a tax on living? Could AI that talks to scammers become a tool for studying persuasion tactics at scale? What’s the most reliable habit for verifying calls, texts, and links? Are we entering a world where identity is probabilistic rather than certain? What do “AI employees” reveal about where agents shine and fail? Why do autonomous agents need triggers and stop conditions to behave? If an agent’s “memory” is a growing log, what kinds of false selves can it accidentally create? How do edge cases derail agents in ways humans handle effortlessly? Why is “be helpful” a dangerous default for external-facing bots? If someone can fake familiarity, how easily can they rewrite an agent’s memory? When you can’t see the system prompt, what are you really evaluating? Should we say please to machines, and what habits does that build in us? If we can’t tell performance from experience, how should we treat AI under uncertainty?
Evan Ratliff is a longtime journalist, writer and host of Shell Game, the podcast and newsletter about things that are not what they seem.
Links:
- Evan's Podcast: Shell Game
- Evan's X Profile
Staff
- Spencer Greenberg — Host + Director
- Ryan Kessler — Producer + Technical Lead
- WeAmplify — Transcriptionists
- Igor Scaldini — Marketing Consultant
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