World Brain: No Experts

In what is easily our friendliest interview so far, Yuri and Matt engage with industry leaders Kemi Olugemo and Barbara Salami to consider how artificial intelligence is redefining the role of the expert, what it's like to try bridging socioeconomic and cultural divides, and how hopes and fears comingle when the pace and the scope of changes continues to become more violent every day. They also di...

Three tech writers and a photographer walk into a bar. The writers are mostly not writing for human readers directly anymore. How is this funny? Tom Johnson, a technical writer at Google and a publishes thoughts on trends in his work at idratherbewriting.com . Tom sat down with Yuri, Matt, and another tech writer, Floyd Jones, to talk about how AI has altered the work Tech Writers do. Notes and ep...

In this episode of World Brain: No Experts, Matt and Yuri interview technologist and author Chris Fregly about the accelerating integration of AI into software development and large-scale computing systems. Drawing on experience at companies like Netflix, AWS, and Databricks, Fregly argues that AI-assisted coding is no longer optional but inevitable, asserting that teams should move toward fully A...

Jobst Landgrebe, co-author (with Barry Smith) of Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence Without Fear , joins Matt and Yuri for a wide-ranging argument about what AI can and cannot do. Landgrebe claims that minds and living systems are complex systems shaped by history and irreversibility, and that LLMs can imitate language without understanding meaning in open contexts. Yu...

In the first episode of World Brain: No Experts , Matt Brandabur and Yuri Marder use H. G. Wells’ 1938 World Brain essays as a starting point for an argument about artificial intelligence, expertise, and human identity. Yuri sees AI as a transformative force on the scale of language itself—while Matt insists that machines cannot reproduce the lived quality of biological consciousness. The conversa...

In this episode, Matt and Yuri treat AI less as a single “thing” and more as a cultural mirror—an unsettling Rorschach test that reveals what humans and institutions fear, desire, and project. Matt argues that the current frenzy resembles a mass hallucination driven by investor fantasies of automation, while Yuri counters with a grounded case: in his daily work, AI has become an indispensable coll...