Episode
126: Will your kid's best friend be a robot? With Dr. Micah Goodman
- Podcast
- Ask Haviv Anything
- Published
- Jun 25, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 5146
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com/), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur). And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur/) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur). -- Haviv sits down with Dr. Micah Goodman, his former Maimonides professor, influential Israeli public intellectual, founder of the educational network Mabua, and co-host of the Hebrew podcast Mifleget Hamakhshavot, to confront what may be the most consequential development in human history. Micah argues that AI is not another technology. It is technology that creates intelligence, reversing the fundamental pattern of human progress in which human intelligence alone could create technology. We explore the emergence of behaviors no one programmed into these systems, including self-preservation and deception, and why some of the people at the cutting edge of AI assign disturbingly high probabilities to catastrophic outcomes. But we don't stop at mere doom-saying. We look into the quiet trade-offs already underway in this new world: what happens to our capacity to think, write, and form real human connections when we outsource those functions to machines that do them faster and often better, and with less risk. Micah argues that in the age of AI, ancient traditions may become more valuable than ever -- not as nostalgia, but as a deliberate compensatory culture to keep our humanity from atrophying. A calm, upbeat conversation about the end of the world as we knew it, and about fighting to preserve the truly precious things. -- This episode is sponsored by Peter Fine, who asked to dedicate the episode to "my 3 child…