Your audience leaves knowing what to do with AI, and who gets to decide what it does.

The talk

Life With Machines: AI, Power, and the Future We Actually Want

AI isn't doing anything. People are. People decided to build it, to train it on other people's work, and to place it between you and your job application, your doctor, your mortgage. So the useful question in the room is not what AI can do. It's who decides what it does, who profits, and who never got asked.

Baratunde Thurston has been living with machines since the early 1980s, as the son of a computer-programming mother. He has spent decades since creating with technology and criticizing it, from The Onion to The Daily Show to the Webby-winning Life With Machines. He is in this with the audience, not above them. He uses these tools daily, he is honest about where that gets uncomfortable, and he built an AI co-producer named BLAIR and put its name in the credits, partly to make a point about who deserves credit, partly because it would be embarrassing if a podcast you've never heard of accidentally created Skynet.

The framework audiences keep asking for is this: capability is not agency. Capability is what the tools can do. Agency requires power, and power requires choice, control, and community. Anyone can write a better prompt. The harder and more interesting work is setting the terms on which these systems enter our work, our institutions, and our democracy.

Audiences leave clearer, funnier, and more powerful, with a practical sense of what they actually get to decide. Because Baratunde doesn't want to be kept in the loop. He wants to define the circle. And he'd like some company.