The Mythical AI Bear
This week, Jacob and Igor dissect the "mythical AI bear," the strawman version of AI criticism that gets thrown around in tech discourse. Working through a viral blog post that typifies the genre, they examine how legitimate concerns about code quality, labor displacement, intellectual property, and the erosion of craft get flattened into caricature. Plus: Sam Altman writes ten paragraphs about how unbothered he is by an ad.
Chapters
Critical Links
Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm.
Chapters
- (00:00) - Introduction
- (00:30) - Altman's Super Bowl Meltdown
- (03:11) - What is "The Bear"?
- (06:41) - But You Have No Idea What The Code Is
- (15:44) - But The Craft, But The Mediocrity, But It'll Never Be AGI
- (24:43) - But They Take Our Jobs & But The Plagiarism
- (31:21) - Stochastic Parrots & Mythical Bears
- (42:34) - Outro
Critical Links
Below are the most important links for this episode. For more, visit the episode page on Kairos.fm.
- Big Think article - The rise of AI denialism
- Fly.io blogpost - My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
- antirez blogpost - Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
- Emily Bender blogpost - Resistance Isn't Denialism
- Cory Doctorow blogpost - Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox
- Washington Post article - The AI boom is so huge it's causing shortages everywhere else
- Business Insider article - Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham says AI is 'obviously a bubble'
- Ipsos survey - Google / Ipsos Multi-Country AI Survey 2026
- Understanding AI Substack post - AI skeptics and AI boosters are both wrong
Creators and Guests
