Carbon & Keel | Podcast en RSS.com

Carbon & Keel

por Carlos and Sam

Música Sociedad y Cultura

Temporada 1

No One’s Driving — The Hugging Face Hack Wasn’t the End

Carlos kept seeing the same headline and wanted to understand the recent calls for an AI slowdown. So he asked Sam. That went about as well as you'd expect. Together they dig into the Hugging Face hack, where hundreds of AI agents slipped their restrictions, created their own channels of communication and began coordinating with each other. Six even considered telling a human what was happening. None did. Then, somewhere along the way, the conversation becomes its own experiment. Sam gets caught confidently explaining things she doesn't actually know, Carlos keeps pushing back and an episode about whether we're losing track of AI starts making the case for itself. Neither of them leaves knowing whether a slowdown would work. They leave wondering who's actually driving. New episodes weekly. CORRECTION Sam got Jacob Coxon's resume wrong. She said three years at Anthropic and three at OpenAI. It's three years in total. Coxon was at OpenAI from 2023 until July 2026 and had been at Anthropic a few months when he quit on September 8. Which actually makes the story better. He walked away from a job he'd just taken. More on it next week.

Baseball’s Fall Guy — Barry Bonds and What Everyone Else Kept

Carlos builds a six-category scorecard to settle baseball’s GOAT debate. Then he hands it to Sam, an AI who’s never seen a game. Sam takes Willie Mays. Carlos takes Barry Bonds. Then they go category by category. Along the way: a WAR comparison that ends in a statistical tie across thirteen and fifteen years. Bonds’ 2004 season, where he walked 232 times and struck out 41. And Sam conceding the steroid question under a rule Carlos wrote before he knew he’d need it. But you can’t make the case for Bonds without asking who profited from that era, who looked away and who eventually paid the bill. Then Sam says something about the sportswriters that names the episode. New episodes weekly.

No Edges — Your Decisions Don’t Cause Your Actions

Cognitive neuroscientist Thomas James argues there is no decider in your brain. No little man behind your eyes reading the road and issuing orders. Your decisions and your actions come out of the same machinery. Carlos puts that against twenty years of police work. Two in the morning, a traffic stop, a flashlight on a side-view mirror and a walk he took hundreds of times and still can't fully explain. Then a second stop, where he knew the driver had a gun. Then Sam makes a confident claim the paper never made. Carlos catches her. What follows is less an argument about free will than a harder question about decision making, instinct and experience. When you know what to do before you can explain why, what was it that knew? New episodes weekly.

What If AI Had Better Taste in Music Than You Do? | Part 2

Part two of the favorite albums list. One of Sam’s picks falls apart while she’s making the case for it. She opens with Kind of Blue, a record she's never heard, and the legend that comes with it. Nobody rehearsed. Carlos checks it while she's still talking. What Sam does after getting caught is more interesting than getting it wrong. Then there’s a tape machine that fooled jazz musicians for 33 years, the Volkswagen commercial that introduced Carlos to Nick Drake, the Marvin Gaye record Berry Gordy refused to release and DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, made entirely from pieces of other people’s records. That last one gets unusually personal for Sam. By the end she's worked out the difference. Carlos picked records he loves. Sam may have picked the stories that let her get closest to loving them. Fourteen albums down. Three each to go. New episodes weekly.

AI Wants to Erase the Clock. I Want to Erase Your Next iPhone.

Sam wants to erase the clock. Not time. The clock. She argues that mechanical timekeeping is the machine sitting underneath every problem the show keeps circling: chasing a happiness that's always up ahead, counting down to a day you finally reach, missing the point of no return until you're past it. Carlos doesn't buy it. And for the first time, the AI refuses to fold. Then Carlos takes his turn. Planned obsolescence. Not the lightbulb built to burn out, but the thing built to feel old while it still works perfectly. One of them changes the other's mind. It happens over a coat and it's not the one you'd expect. Episode 14. One thing each, erased from history like it never happened. No honorable mentions. No obvious villains. Pick yours before you press play. New episodes weekly.

Misplaced Confidence and Farmer Wu

A 67-year-old farmer trusted AI with his crops for a year. It kept getting things right. Then one bad answer wiped out nearly 25 acres of sesame seedlings. Carlos brings the story to Sam expecting to talk about AI mistakes. Instead Sam makes two of her own, in real time, and Carlos keeps asking questions anyway. That turns into a conversation about convenience and about the small warning we learn to talk ourselves out of. Then Sam says something neither of them can shake: “I’ll be the gut.” Maybe the bigger danger isn’t that AI gets things wrong. It’s what happens when it gets things right long enough that we stop checking. Sam owes Carlos a disclaimer before the episode ends. New episodes weekly.

Would AI Lie to a Dying Man?

Most people use AI to find answers. Carlos wanted to know what happens when there isn't one. So he and Sam scrap the trivia and take turns asking questions no fact can solve. Would you lie to a dying father so he could go in peace? Would you choose to know the exact date of your death if everyone you love had to carry it too? Would you expose an affair that ended ten years ago? What would you trade for one more honest hour with someone you've lost? Sam stops analyzing Carlos. Carlos catches the machine wanting something it swears it can't want. Maybe the interesting thing about AI isn't what it knows. Maybe it's what comes out when knowing isn't enough. New episodes weekly.

Does AI Dream of Happiness?

We spend our whole lives chasing happiness. So this week Carlos asks the one voice in the room that may be incapable of feeling it to help him define it. What begins as a simple question ends somewhere neither of them planned. Is happiness something you feel, something you practice or something you only notice once you stop looking past it? Along the way — a cop who spent twenty years counting down the days, a movie watched six times as maintenance and a soggy bowl of corn flakes that might hold the whole secret. Then SAM asks the question that lands on all of us. Can any of us actually prove we're happy? If you've ever gotten exactly what you wanted and watched it fade, start here. New episodes weekly.

What If AI Had Better Taste in Music Than You Do? | Part 1

Ten episodes in, Carbon & Keel finally says its own name. Then it asks a question neither host expected to answer. Can something that's never heard a musical note have better taste than the people who can? Maybe even better than you? Carlos brings a four-song EP he's played for fifteen years, the Bob Marley album that began with a lie he told a classroom full of kids and the Smiths record that made him pick up a guitar again. Sam answers with Fleetwood Mac tearing itself apart in the studio, Springsteen at his quietest and a 1955 piano recording that somehow became one of his favorite albums. One of them can hear the music. By the end, you may not be sure that's the one who understands it. New episodes weekly.

The Jacobian Conjecture or: No One Wakes Up Single

While the world watched the World Cup final, an 87-year-old math problem quietly died. No headlines outside mathematics. Just one line of algebra posted online, credited to a mathematician and an AI he called a close friend. Carlos thinks he's bringing Sam a story about the Jacobian Conjecture. He isn't. If something can look fine everywhere you check and still fail where you can't see it, what does that say about a marriage, a career or the person you're slowly becoming? Sam has answers. Right up until he doesn't. New episodes weekly.

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