Kevin Roose

Bestselling Author, "Futureproof" | Award-Winning Technology Columnist, The New York Times

Artificial Intelligence

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Technology

Kevin Roose is an award-winning technology columnist for The New York Times and the bestselling author of three books, Futureproof, Young Money, and The Unlikely Disciple. His column, "The Shift", examines the intersection of tech, business, and culture. He is a recurring guest on The Daily and appears regularly on leading TV and radio shows. He writes and speaks frequently on topics including automation and artificial intelligence, social media, disinformation and cybersecurity, and digital wellness.

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Worried that he was not ready for a world dominated by AI, automation, and mind-morphing algorithms, Kevin decided to do what reporters do: he interviewed experts, read a ton of books and papers, and went in search of answers. The result was his book, Futureproof, a guide to surviving the technological future. Originally published in 2021, Futureproof is scheduled for an updated rerelease in late 2023 to address the more recent trends in AI and technology and how to work with them rather than against them.

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Kevin is the host of two New York Times podcasts: Hard Fork, a weekly chat show with Casey Newton about the wild frontier of technology, and Rabbit Hole, an eight-part series released in 2020 about how the internet is influencing our beliefs and behavior.

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Kevin's first job in journalism was unique: as a sophomore in college, he took a semester off and went undercover at Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s evangelical Christian school. His goal was to figure out what life was like among people who he considered his polar opposite. From his experience came his first book, The Unlikely Disciple, a memoir of a strange and enlightening semester "abroad."

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After college, Kevin joined The New York Times, followed by New York magazine, and wrote a second book: Young Money, which chronicled the lives of 8 junior Wall Street investment bankers right after the 2008 financial crisis. Before rejoining The Times in 2017, Kevin produced and co-hosted a TV documentary series about technology, called Real Future.

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At The Times, Kevin writes about technology and its effects on society. Recently, that has meant a lot of coverage of companies like Facebook and YouTube, as well as profiles of internet personalities like PewDiePie, and social phenomena like online radicalization and workplace automation.

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Topics

Shaping the Future: Societal Implications of Generative AI

Making Peace With Our New Robot Overlords

AI is here to stay. Since the arrival of tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, we’ve already seen inklings of the massive impact AI will have on the ways we work, learn, and communicate—on the way we live. But rather than cowering in fear, New York Times technology columnist and Hard Fork podcast co-host Kevin Roose asks that you get acquainted with this new technology. Invite the robots in for tea. In this talk, Kevin provides an overview of the fast-moving AI landscape, and breaks down what we humans need to do to adapt. He argues that AI is a tool that we must learn to integrate into our lives, leaning into what makes us uniquely human rather than trying to compete with AI head-on. (Spoiler: we’ll lose.) Kevin’s perspective – timely, funny, and ultimately optimistic – is a refreshing antidote to AI doom-and-gloom.

Futureproof: How to Survive the AI Revolution

There’s no use sugarcoating it: AI and automation are going to take a lot of people’s jobs. AI is already achieving better-than-human performance in fields as varied as law, medicine and media, and in the coming decade, millions of workers could find themselves getting replaced by robots. But robot replacement isn’t inevitable, and ''F.O.L.O.'' – fear of looming obsolescence – is a curable condition. In this talk, adapted from his book Futureproof: 9 Rules for Surviving in the Age of AI, Kevin argues that it’s possible for workers, organizations, and entire societies not just to survive the AI revolution, but to thrive in it. He outlines 3 types of work – surprising, social, and scarce – that are immune to automation, and argues that in order to stay ahead of the curve, people and organizations need to embrace their human qualities, and stop doing the kinds of things that robots do better anyway.

AI Ethics, From Sydney to the Singularity

Kevin’s creepy chat with ''Sydney,'' the sinister AI chatbot built into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, made headlines all over the world when it was published in a front-page New York Times story. It also sent Kevin on a mission to figure out how AI should be governed, what ethical rules it should follow, and who should decide what its boundaries should be. In this talk, Kevin addresses the many urgent ethical and moral questions that AI is already raising. How do we make chatbots safe? How can students and educators navigate a world where ChatGPT has all the answers? Is AI-generated art just forgery by another name? Should we be worried about superintelligent AI ushering in a world-destroying ''singularity''? What is the government's role in regulating AI, and who should be held responsible when things go awry? Using insights from his many years of reporting on tech ethics, Kevin offers both historical context and lucid predictions for where we’re going, as well as a grounded analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats presented by this new technology.

Hard Fork: The Future That’s Already Here

A hard fork is a programming term indicating a new start, a change in protocol, a fresh beginning. Kevin Roose’s hit podcast of the same name seeks to make sense of the ''hard forks'' coming at us every day at breakneck speed from Silicon Valley and beyond. This talk covers the hot topics and trends in the world of crypto, AI, the metaverse, and more. He will discuss the challenges and opportunities of new tech and highlight real world examples of how these innovations will impact people, companies, and society at large.

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