Episode
✨ The Age of AI, an update: My chat with policy analyst Dean Ball
- Published
- Mar 24, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2575
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Summary
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Anxiety is running rampant about the future of artificial intelligence and its place in society. When technology CEOs warn of an impending white-collar jobpocalypse (or jobageddon, if you prefer), it’s no wonder public pessimism is so widespread. Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast , I chat with tech policy analyst Dean Ball to help us sift through some of the uncertainty. We talk about recursive self-improvement, the role of AI in everything from medicine to defense, and what to think about the possible growing risk of AI company nationalization. (FYI: Our chat occurred just before the White House released new guidelines for AI federal legislation, about which Ball opined on X/Twitter: “The White House’s proposal for a nationwide AI law is a thoughtful document that will serve as an excellent foundation for the legislative work ahead. I would be happy to see these principles, if translated well into statute, become law.”) Ball is a senior fellow at FAI , the Foundation for American Innovation. He recently served as senior policy advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy , as well as strategic advisor for AI at the National Science Foundation . He was previously a research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a policy fellow at Fathom . He’s also the author of the excellent Hyperdimensional Substack newsletter. In This Episode * Public pessimism (1:37) * Differing narratives (4:21) * The nationalization risk (16:15) * Accountability via audit (25:55) * Productivity projection (34:18) (A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the…