399: Vasant Dhar, NYU Stern Professor, on the New Divide: Superhuman With AI or Dependent on It?

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Vasant Dhar teaches data science at NYU's Stern School of Business and has spent more than 45 years at the frontier of artificial intelligence. He brought machine learning to Wall Street in the 1990s and founded SCT Capital Management, one of the first machine learning based hedge funds.

He hosts the Brave New World podcast, downloaded more than a million times, where he has interviewed Nobel laureates, technologists, and global thinkers on the implications of AI. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Wired, and MIT Technology Review. His latest book, Thinking with Machines, traces AI from its origins to the present.

For more than forty years, Vasant has built systems that sat right on the edge of human trust. People had to decide whether to rely on them or walk away.

In this episode, he makes a stark claim: AI will not just change how we work; it will sort us into two groups. One uses it to extend their judgment. The other slowly hands that judgment over. The gap comes down to habits you are forming today, not some distant future.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why trusting AI comes down to just two variables, and the simple test Vasant has applied since his Harvard Business Review piece a decade ago • The bifurcation Vasant believes AI is about to create, splitting humanity into two groups, and which side you do not want to be on • What tennis great Roger Federer's win rate reveals about succeeding with algorithms, and the counterintuitive math behind every winning edge • Why the edge returns to humans the moment everyone runs the same algorithms, and what only people can do in situations no system has seen • The one word in the title Thinking with Machines that Vasant says matters most, and what it asks of how we work alongside AI • The areas of life where Vasant argues we may need to restrict AI entirely, and the legal framework we already have to govern it

Explore the Conversation 00:00 Intro & AI Fun Fact: Trustworthy AI from Principles to Practice 04:13 Meet Vasant Dhar: From the Internist System to Machine Learning on Wall Street 07:10 The Origins of Thinking with Machines: The Biggest Surprise in 45 Years of AI 09:33 Written for Everyone: AI's Accelerating Pace and the Call to Get Engaged 11:23 When to Trust an Algorithm: The Green Zone and the Human Edge 20:24 The Bifurcation of Humanity: Superhuman Amplification or Cognitive Decline 24:52 The Four Eras of Machine Intelligence: From Specification to General Intelligence 29:22 The Ethics of AI Agency: Where Machines Need Limits and Obligations 34:14 Who Governs AI: Tort Law, Liability, and Emerging Legal Precedent 37:44 AI in 2036: Multisensory Machines and the Integration of the Senses 40:33 Teaching Machines to Smell: AI, Olfaction, and Disease Detection 43:35 Where to Find Thinking with Machines and Connect with Vasant Dhar

Resources:

Subscribe to the AI & The Future of Work NewsletterConnect with Vasant on LinkedInAI fun fact articleOn the decision sprint process with Atif Rafiq, CEO & Bestselling Author