Multi-hyphenate Baratunde Thurston believes group thinking, not billionaires, will take society to the promised land.
Thurston has long used his voice to explore the intersections of nature, humanity, and technology. The Emmy-nominated storyteller and producer is the host and executive producer of PBS’s TV series “America Outdoors,” and on YouTube he leads the podcast “Life with Machines.”
Most recently, he connected with the AFROTECH™ community as a speaker during AFROTECH™ Conference, Oct. 27-31, in Houston, and as a guest on the “Black Tech Green Money” podcast hosted by AFROTECH™ Brand Manager Will Lucas.
Thurston discussed the hot topic of AI and quickly nipped in the bud a growing critique of the technology: that it is responsible for taking jobs. He argues this is not true. However, the people responsible for hiring, promotion, and firing at their workplace are the ones who should be held accountable.
“AI is not self-conscious. It doesn’t make its own choices. It is operating under its directives and goals set by people,” Thurston mentioned on the “Black Tech Green Money” podcast. “And people are making decisions to not hire folks and have robots or software do those jobs instead. And those people are accountable. There’s people who created these tools. There’s people who are hiring and firing and everything in between. And so I think it’s just important to maintain the appropriate accountability. Otherwise we set up this awkward situation where people hate robots and they hate chatbots and software.
“Those entities did not choose to be here, right? Gemini didn’t ask to be made. ChatGPT didn’t ask to be made … We invoked them, a very small subset, but humans invoked them, and business leaders choose to deploy,” he added.
Thurston makes it clear that AI will impact jobs because that is the intention behind some of its top advocates. This includes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman who has said, “Human radiologists are already much worse than computer radiologists. If I had to pick a human or an AI to read my scan, I’d pick the AI,” per CNBC.
In that same breath Thurston also said entire classes of jobs will disappear.
“There’s such a funny thing happening here where the folks pushing this are warning us about the thing that they’re pushing,” Thurston explained. “It’s like if I’m standing at your house pouring gasoline all over, lighting matches and I’m like, ‘Your house has a high risk of burning down.’ I’m just like, ‘Bro, it’s you, just stop pouring the gas.’ Then you say it in such an erudite way and you say it in front of a Senate panel. So it makes you feel you get to cosplay responsibility when you’re actually playing out recklessness.”
He doesn’t have faith in these billionaires — who have an agenda to become “trillionaires” — to take society to the promised land, but he does believe in the power of collective thinking. And when he speaks about the Black community, he situates that belief within a legacy of endurance, a people who survived kidnapping, the severing of family ties, and the erasure of their names.
“We were the shortcut for America. We were the shortcut to become an economic and military and cultural powerhouse,” he mentioned. “That was us. We were the cheat code, we were the machines, we were the AI… So how do we try to find our own advantage and our own angle? I think it explains hustle culture… The idea that we would take up AI to help us survive and reduce the pain and the time and the expense of how to make it in America, that doesn’t surprise me.
“This next level required is to not just play the game better but redefine the game, change the rules altogether, be like ‘This whole game is BS,'” he added. “We need to shift to a different field and a whole different set of players that requires spaciousness, that requires a level of group creativity, that requires confidence and a major bold vision and aspiration for what’s possible. And that’s rare.”
Watch Full Episode
Check out the full conversation with Thurston on “Black Tech Green Money.”
