Paul Osterman, MIT labor economist and author of Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment , tells Rob Tercek about the fastest-growing category of the US workforce in the age of artificial intelligence. According to Osterman, a rising number of employers prefer to hire three categories of “disposable workers” with no long-term stake in the company. Today, such workers comprise more than 35% of the entire US workforce. The employers get the benefit of flexibility, and they push the risk and uncertainty onto the workforce. This interview covers the social, political, and organization consequences of the shift. And it anticipates how the deployment of AI will intensify the trend.

Adrian Woolfson, the CEO and co-founder of the biotech company Genyro, joins the Futurists to chat about the audacious vision that animates his book On The Future of Species. Woolfson conceives of a Artificial Biological Intelligence that will unify diverse fields of genomic research into a new system that enables humans to design and create new species of life. According to Woofson, this marks an unprecedented moment on earth. For the first time ever, natural selection is no longer the only means for species to evolve. Humans can generate new life from first principles. This is true authorship of living organisms. Woolfson unpacks his grand concepts for host Robert Tercek in a lively discussion that spans synthetic biology, ethics, physics and the economics of food, medicine, health care and more.

In 2024, Bay Raitt and Rob Tercek co-founded a generative AI startup with experts in machine learning and computer graphics to build agentic tools and workflows optimized for artists. Bay is a polymath: an artist, storyteller, animator, game designer, comic book author. He plays LLMs like a virtuoso performer. In this episode, Bay shares his views on the current state of AI models, trends in vibe coding, the importance of stories with a human heartbeat, context wielding as a creative art, how AI “slop cannons” will get paved over by agentic visualizers, how to build a deeper creative relationship with Claude, how AI can help writers harmonize with the past, how to summon the ghost of Dorothy Parker, how to hypnotize an LLM like a king cobra, why AI sucks when people use artless prompts, AI psychosis, and why Voltaire judged people by their questions not their answers.