The people building artificial intelligence worry there’s a real chance it could doom us all. So why do they keep building anyway? Walter Isaacson, biographer extraordinaire, talks with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about why the AI innovators feel trapped in a race none of them can pause. Drawing on The Builders, a new podcast he’s launched, Isaacson explains why so many of these innovators see humility and empathy as handicaps rather than virtues, and why he worries they’re pouring their talent into autonomous agents that leave humans out of the loop. Isaacson traces today’s AI debate back to the rival visions of Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace, reveals why Elon Musk once told him his empathy was really vanity, and recalls Benjamin Franklin’s surprising lesson about faking humility. Plus: a Marie Curie story involving a secret affair and a second Nobel Prize.

What if the results of one of the most influential economics papers of the past 25 years are unreliable? The "China shock" narrative--that a surge of Chinese imports destroyed American manufacturing jobs and the communities that depended on them--became conventional wisdom in Washington and beyond. But economic historian Joseph Francis argues that the claim is much weaker than it looks. Listen as he tells EconTalk's Russ Roberts how a 2022 correction to the paper’s research design cut its estimate of lost jobs in half and erased its findings on wages and living standards. He and Russ then look at what this affair reveals about economics as a field, including the incentives that reward dramatic results, and the problems with peer review.

Sure, you can use willpower or grit to break bad habits and build new ones. But maybe the key to success is simpler: change your situation. Psychologist Angela Duckworth explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why the people and places around us shape our behavior more than we realize--and why we're hard-wired to resist that idea. Listen as they discuss the three-box framework for understanding human behavior, why creating friction to avoid temptation is itself an act of agency, and how the cultures we choose to join end up shaping who we become.