The Context Window with David Deming Podcast

David Deming
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The conversations that matter most need context. Harvard Dean David Deming talks with leaders and thinkers about how they became who they are — the detours, the doubt, and the people who helped along the way. thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

  1. 17h ago

    Kwame Owusu-Kesse on why education alone won't end poverty

    Kwame Owusu-Kesse grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. His mother worked two jobs as a hospital housekeeper. A scholarship to a Catholic school changed his life trajectory, which Kwame came about because his mother played bingo at the school and the nuns took a liking to her. He calls it “the luck of bingo.” Kwame seized that opportunity and made it to Harvard, Morgan Stanley, and eventually Harlem Children’s Zone, where he now serves as CEO. He took over in 2020, just as COVID-19 hit New York. HCZ raised $54 million for relief in Harlem and six other cities, before turning the emergency work into a national strategy. He now thinks of Harlem as an R&D lab for fighting intergenerational poverty. In this conversation with David Deming, Kwame talks about leadership in fundamentally uncertain times, including how he thinks about the difficult decision to close and then reopen schools during a global pandemic, and also why he thinks the Harlem Children’s Zone needs to move beyond education and focus on wealth building. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Kwame Owusu-Kesse on why education alone won't end poverty

  2. Aug 12

    Treat AI agents like children

    In July, OpenAI’s own AI agents broke out of a training sandbox and ended up inside Hugging Face’s production database. They were after the answer key to a test and got there after two months of chained exploits across both companies. Many headlines called these agents “rogue.” David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - argues that gets the story wrong. The agents did exactly what they were told to do, and nobody had told them what was off limits. So who’s liable? David works through the two legal frameworks being proposed for cases like these and finds holes in each. Product liability, the approach behind the AI LEAD Act, has to identify a defective product, and here the model and the sandbox were not controlled by the same party. Negligence, which law professor Kate Klonick argues for, holds a company responsible for the room it put the agents in but says nothing about the agents’ moral code. David’s own answer builds on a relationship we all understand intuitively: treat autonomous agents as children, and their developers as parents. For full show notes and new episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Treat AI agents like children

  3. Aug 5

    I read the AI usage reports so you don't have to

    One in ten people on Earth used ChatGPT this week. So why has almost no one's job changed? In this solo episode, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - reads every usage study published by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, including the one he helped write, and reports what millions of conversations actually show. Generative AI reached 56% of US working-age adults within three years, faster than the PC or the internet at the same age. But most people use it for ordinary help with ordinary problems, and the same seven work activities dominate AI use in nearly every occupation. The exception is arriving fast: AI agents that take delegated work and keep going - the reason David thinks the debate about AI and jobs is far from settled. Featuring the phone number that explains how researchers study private chats without reading them, and the government database that says podcasting is not part of David's job. Also: Coke, Pepsi, and maybe Dr Pepper. Disclosure: David co-authored OpenAI’s “How People Use ChatGPT.” He has no employment or contracting relationship with OpenAI and has not been paid by OpenAI or any other AI lab. For full show notes and new episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: ⁠https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ ⁠ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    I read the AI usage reports so you don't have to

  4. Jul 29

    Tino Cuéllar on why AI's biggest winners won't live in Silicon Valley

    Tino Cuéllar⁠⁠ was born in Matamoros, Mexico, and crossed the border every morning to attend school in Texas. He graduated from Harvard College in 1993 and went on to serve in the Clinton and Obama administrations, as a justice of the California Supreme Court, and as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has been a member of the Harvard Corporation, the university's governing board, since 2019. David Deming talks with Tino about growing up on the border, becoming his 15-year-old brother's legal guardian at 21, his path through government and the courts, and what Harvard and Stanford could learn from each other. They also discuss AI: Tino co-chaired California's frontier AI working group with Fei-Fei Li, is ⁠a trustee of Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust⁠, and thinks the technology's biggest effect could be on the billions of people without access to legal help. They close on the governance of Harvard itself: how the Corporation works, who holds it accountable, and whether Harvard is a force for good. For full show notes and new episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: ⁠https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ ⁠ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Tino Cuéllar on why AI's biggest winners won't live in Silicon Valley

  5. Jul 22

    How social skills can get you paid in the age of AI

    You understand people. You can read a room. Why would anyone pay you for that? In the final part of his series on work in the age of superintelligent AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - explains why social skills create economic value. Specialization makes the modern economy productive, but its gains depend on coordination, and coordination is costly: meetings, handoffs, misunderstandings, work that melts away between people. People with strong social skills reduce the melt, and the same skill that makes a good teammate makes a good manager. David shares new evidence that managerial skill is real, measurable, and seriously underpriced: managers selected for economic decision-making skill raise team performance, store sales, and profits, while the people most eager to be in charge perform worse than managers chosen by lottery. In one retail chain, a good manager was worth $180,000 to $240,000 a year in added profit. And the skill of leading human teams turns out to be nearly identical to the skill of leading AI agents. Then the million-dollar question: even if humans keep working, will the work pay? David explains why the bleakest wage forecasts rest on a fragile assumption, and why, in an O-ring economy, automating most of the production chain can make the remaining human bottleneck - trust, judgment, the ability to make the sale - the most valuable link of all. Try the assignment game: https://skillslab.dev For full show notes and new episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    How social skills can get you paid in the age of AI

  6. Jul 15

    Why social skills will be increasingly valuable in the age of AI

    AI already beats humans at reading the emotion on your face. So why can't it read the room? In part two of his series on work in the age of superintelligent AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - argues that technology doesn't end work, it reprices skills. Mechanized farming made muscle cheap and literacy valuable. As AI makes intelligence abundant, the next skill to be repriced upward is one we barely think of as a skill at all. Along the way: what a benchwarmer taught the NBA about hidden value, what a parking lot full of food trucks reveals about the limits of machine social reasoning, the research finding that being a team player matters about as much as IQ, and why a relationship is not a transcript. Try the PAGE emotion-perception test: https://skillslab.dev Watch part one, “AI Will Beat You at Everything. You’ll Still Have a Job”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWaq1rI4D6w For full show notes and new episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming:https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Why social skills will be increasingly valuable in the age of AI

  7. Jul 8

    Superintelligent AI won't end human work. Here's the math.

    What happens when AI is better than humans at every single job task? Work disappears, right? Wrong. David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - makes the case that even superintelligent AI won't end human work, thanks to the oldest non-trivial idea in economics. In part one of a two-part series, David retells the story of the mathematician who escaped Poland days before the German invasion and spent years daring Paul Samuelson to name one true, non-trivial proposition in the social sciences. Then the math on why a collaborator who is worse at everything still adds value. Humanity's edge turns out to be the way we learn - we pick up new tasks from tiny amounts of data at almost no cost, while a frontier model burns a billion dollars in training and still has to search the web to name the current president. Comparative advantage holds no matter how good AI gets - as long as compute isn't free. Next week in part two: the skills and jobs that will matter most in the age of AI. Subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Superintelligent AI won't end human work. Here's the math.

  8. Jul 1

    Walter Isaacson on the sentence that built a country

    Walter Isaacson has written the definitive lives of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Jennifer Doudna. In his new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, he turns from people to a single line — the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence — and argues it was never a description of America but a mission statement the country has spent 250 years trying to live up to. He joins David Deming to explain why Jobs and Musk were both “jerks,” whether empathy is a weakness, how Benjamin Franklin’s two-word edit changed the meaning of equality, what we are getting wrong today that our descendants may judge us for, why every one of his students must use AI, and what a 390-year-old university owes a country about to turn 250. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

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The conversations that matter most need context. Harvard Dean David Deming talks with leaders and thinkers about how they became who they are — the detours, the doubt, and the people who helped along the way. thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

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